This article is about rites of oblivion in Shakespearian history plays and Elizabethan culture. The conjunction of ritual and forgetting might well seem paradoxical at first sight. After all, ritual is both formally and functionally associated with memory: rehearsing highly conventionalized topoi, gestures and acts, ritual is built on repetition and recognition. It works effectively only as a formalized act that recalls a social frame of reference which asserts the validity of the ritual and in turn is asserted by it. By the same token, cultural memory depends on rites of commemoration that ‘invite, rehearse or enforce social modes of recollection’. The words ‘re-collection’ and ‘re-member’ point to both the repetitive form and the social function of ritual: turning individual members of society into an imagined community, it serves to establish continuity and collective identity. Given this mutually constitutive relation between ritual and memory, can there also be rites of oblivion? If so, what form would such ritual forgetting take, and what would be its social function? What cultural work does oblivion perform? Is there, in short, an ars oblivionalis just as there is an ars memorativa?

In a seminal essay of 1988, Umberto Eco addresses this last question and negates it categorically. From his semiological perspective, forgetting is the reverse of memory and, by extension, of the use of signs as ‘a means of making present, never absent’. He deduces from this that neither the acts of oblivion nor their effects can ever be represented, that forgetting is a priori excluded from the cultural economy of signs and meanings. Likewise, whereas he sees remembrance as a constitutive force of culture and society, Eco dismisses forgetting as a destructive force of nature beyond human control and intentionality. I would like to suggest here that memory and oblivion are in fact complementary rather than mutually exclusive forces and that forgetting can indeed be purposeful and deliberate. Based on this premise, I will explore how the relation between mnemonic rites and oblivion is represented on the early modern stage.

In 1995, BBC television broadcast what it called Shakespeare's Henry IV in a radical abridgement and conflation of Part One and Part Two. Directed by RSC associate John Caird, this was the BBC's most lavish and ambitious Shakespeare production since the conclusion of its marathon filming of all the plays ten years earlier (1978–85), and for a new generation of television viewers it set a standard for performing Shakespeare's history plays. Caird focused his production on what he imagined to be prince Henry's long-standing relationship with Hotspur: the two are glimpsed together as children witnessing the deposition of Richard II, and their growing rivalry climaxes at the Battle of Shrewsbury, when the prince defeats his former friend, winning his ‘proud titles’ from him and with them, the king's paternal approval.

Caird thus uses Part One to provide a structure for the whole, and most of the material in Part Two is jettisoned, both the historical (the flight of Northumberland to Scotland, the thwarting of the Archbishop's rebellion at Gaultree) and the non-historical (most of the scenes at Justice Shallow's farm, and much of Falstaff's comic banter with his tavern cronies). Instead, Caird ingeniously grafts speeches and snippets of scenes from Part Two onto Part One to reinforce themes or to create ironic counterpoints. example, Hotspur’s farewell to Lady Percy is preceded by Falstaff ’s farewell to Doll Tearsheet (an exchange that now occurs prior to Falstaff ’s march to Shrewsbury), the king’s chastising his son in Part One is intercut with the Lord Chief Justice’s interrogation of Falstaff in Part Two, and the king’s soliloquy on the unease of kingship from Part Two is spoken immediately prior to the Gadshill robbery, as a kind of meditation on political theft, while other lines spoken by the king later in that scene (‘O God, that one might read the book of fate, / And see the revolution of the times’) are interpolated as ominous glosses on the play-extempore in which Hal and Falstaff each assume the role of king.

Nearly thirty years after the emergence of new historicism and cultural materialism in Shakespeare studies, we have had ample time to make and lose the acquaintance of a figure who quietly underwrote these literary-historical labours: Shakespeare the Historian. In a book of that name published in 1996, Paola Pugliatti imagined a Shakespeare who showed an active interest in not only the past and historical events unfolding around him, but also emerging forms of historiography. But this Shakespeare, a theorist as well as a chronicler of the past, has not found a permanent place in the scholarly, much less the popular, imagination. Certainly, the failure of Shakespeare the Historian to make his mark in literary studies has something to do with new historicist methodology, in which social energies ‘circulate’ and there can be a ‘Textuality of History’ without the explicit intervention of a reading-writing subject – that is, an Author. Another factor might be the resurgence, among writers ranging from William Kerrigan to Harold Bloom, of Shakespeare as an avatar for a Romantic or modern sensibility. The rise and fall of Shakespeare the Historian cannot be attributed solely to the vagaries of critical orientation, however. The history of Shakespearian biography has its own story to tell about Shakespeare's interests and intellectual habits. In this essay, I consider how the figure of Shakespeare the Historian gradually takes shape in a dialectic among critical, biographical and editorial discourse, suggesting that the phenomenon offers an evocative case of what Kenneth Burke would call ‘impure motives’ – a working out of different agendas, not necessarily even fully formed, that coalesces loosely into a consensus story about Shakespeare as a particular kind of cultural icon. At the same time, the fading of Shakespeare the Historian as an authoritative figure in recent times suggests how entrenched biographical traditions can be. This excursion into meta-biography will, I hope, suggest not only why the concept of Shakespeare as a historian is so difficult to sustain, but also how the figure might be re-imagined for a different Shakespearian historiography.

On 23 October 1970, Televisión Española broadcast what had been publicized as one of its important televised theatre productions: Hamlet, directed by Claudio Guerin, and starring Emilio Gutiérrez Caba. Spanish spectators were still living under General Franco's right-wing authoritarian regime, which since the end of the three-year civil war in 1939 had infused the country's cultural life with its fascist-inspired National Catholicism and its repression of dissidence. In such a historical context, a production of Hamlet – a play with an ‘obvious applicability to political practice in dictatorships’ – is bound to raise questions about its relationship with the political tensions of the time: was it appropriated by the dominant ideology (as when in Soviet-type regimes Hamlet was presented as a ‘fighter for social justice, almost a forerunner of socialism’)? did it remain apolitical (also a sort of submission to the authorities’ imperatives), or did it show the prince as a symbol of the intellectual's endurance or political resistance against a totalitarian state (as also common in the Soviet bloc)? How political this 1970 televised Hamlet was has not yet been explored in full. In this essay, I will seek to redress this situation by studying external and internal evidence for its political uses and effects. Comparing them with how political meanings are generated in other Hamlet productions, I will argue that, though not a heavily politicized version, Guerin's Hamlet did have a politically critical charge moulded in its artistic features and responding to its historical circumstances.

Almost one-third of Shakespeare's production as a dramatist consists of plays whose themes are clearly historical. His apparently keen interest in history has often been explained by the fact that he was influenced by the main ideological trends of his time (Tudor political theory, humanist civic history, Machiavellianism, Tacitism, Republicanism) or indeed that he was particularly sensitive to political events around him (Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and/or contemporary continental history). However, strangely, the fact that Shakespeare turned to history in the early 1590s (and returned to it regularly for a decade or so) is rarely set in the context of the significant changes taking place on the ‘market of history’ during the same period, when the manner in which history was produced and consumed – and eventually conceived – was shifting.

It is not perhaps entirely fortuitous that the chronicle, which had been (since the late middle ages) the dominant historical genre of printed history, was in decline by the late 1580s, at a time when the production of histories on the Elizabethan stages was especially prolific and successful. In the 1590s the chronicle was commercially on the wane, even if, paradoxically, its cultural influence on other genres remained strong, as we shall see. The peak years for the publication of chronicles had been between 1550 and 1579, but the number of reprints and of new editions fell sharply in the next decade and then dwindled gradually until 1640 when the figures picked up very slightly. The Elizabethan chronicle was costly to produce and, while the interest in it had been great, the market for such works was pretty much glutted by 1600. The 1577 copy of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (STC 13568) retailed at 26s bound and 20s unbound.

Scholars continue to be increasingly aware of the extent to which Shakespeare habitually drew upon earlier drama for the verbal details, staging effects, dramatic situations, thematic ideas and even plot elements of his own plays. The playwright's use of prior dramas seems to have been especially pervasive among the chronicle histories. Much of this assimilation was undoubtedly unconscious, at least in the case of verbal echoes, since Shakespeare seems to have known many of the plays from practical experience in the theatre, although he probably consulted playbooks and even published dramas as well. It is well known, for example, that The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (c.1586) lies behind 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V, and many scholars believe that The True Tragedy of Richard III (1590–1) was a source for Shakespeare's play on the same subject. Despite MacDonald Jackson's strong argument that Woodstock (1592–3?) postdates Richard II (1595), many scholars still contend that Shakespeare echoed the anonymous play for his dramatization of Richard's fall; Marlowe's Edward II (1591–2) is also an undoubted source for numerous passages in the same play. And as I have recently argued, The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1589–93?) served the dramatist not only as a source for his most cataclysmic tragedy but also for the verbal texture of both Richard III and Richard II. Shakespeare seems to have imitated Kyd’s Spanish Tragedyfor at least one phrase referring to Richard II (‘that sweet lovely rose’) in 1 Henry IV (1.3.175).

Shylock as Muslim, as the victim of young neo-Nazis, as global player on the international financial market – these are just some impressions from recent productions of The Merchant of Venice on the German stage. At first glance, these examples may not be very surprising. Modernized interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, including references to topical cultural or political debates, are the rule rather than the exception in German theatres. However, The Merchant of Venice is not just any Shakespearian play but occupies a special place in the German cultural imagination. The conflict between Venetian society and the Jew, Shylock's cruel revenge and his final punishment evoke uncanny associations with German history. So there appears to be a general consensus that German directors should avoid any suspicion of anti-Semitism. More importantly, as one reviewer of a 2008 production remarked, they should by no means show an ‘evil’ Shylock. And time and again, directors and critics have discussed the question as to whether a German audience is prepared to put up with a play that might incite or reinforce anti-Semitic prejudices.

My article will probe into this conflictual stage history of The Merchant of Venice in postwar Germany but, rather than giving a more or less comprehensive overview of recent answers to the challenges posed by the play, I will focus on the relationship between theatre and memory in a number of major German Merchants since 1945, which will include some contemporary productions. Following the suggestion of (East) German director and dramatist Heiner Müller, quoted in the epigraph above, I will argue that German postwar productions and adaptations of The Merchant of Venice can be understood as mnemonic practices in which – consciously or unconsciously – German culture faces its problematic history and redefines itself.

Henry VIII is remarkable for its unusually full stage directions: the fullest of any play in the Shakespeare canon. It is well known that many of these stage directions follow Holinshed's Chronicles virtually word for word, but those who have noted this point have not gone on to remark on what it suggests about the interest of early modern historians in issues of space: namely that they devote almost as much attention to spatial layout and the way space is occupied as a dramatist might. In this respect not only do Holinshed and his revisers follow the practice of earlier sixteenth-century historians, whom they are often incorporating word for word, but all these historians taken together place tremendous importance on outlining spatial practice in often minute detail. This tells us something about early modern priorities. When Mary Queen of Scots was tried for treason in 1586, for example, one of the greatest problems exercising Lord Burghley in the weeks leading up to the trial was how to lay out the hall for the trial of an anointed monarch. So concerned was he that he sketched out a possible layout in his own hand, placing Mary centrally but below the judges. And so important were the messages conveyed by the organization of the space that the positioning of Mary's chair had changed by the time of the trial itself. Beale’s official drawing of the trial shows her chair further up but left of centre, a more demeaning position than Burghley’s sketch first proposes. Central at the top of the hall in both drawings was the empty chair of estate representing the absent presence of Elizabeth I; and Mary’s first remark upon entering the hall for the first day of the trial was, according to one record: ‘I am a Queen by right of birth, and my place should be there, under this canopy.’

Most of the productions listed are by professional companies, but some amateur productions are included. The information is taken from Touchstone (www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk), a Shakespeare resource maintained by the Shakespeare Institute Library. Touchstone includes a monthly list of current and forthcoming UK Shakespeare productions from listings information. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

Theatre Set-up. UK tour June–August.

www.ts-u.co.uk

Director: Wendy McFee

AS YOU LIKE IT

C Company. Bridewell Theatre, London, 22 January–8 February.

www.stbridefoundation.org/bridewelltheatre

Director: Aileen Gonsalves

Part of the Lunchbox Theatre series – 45-minute adaptations for lunchtime.

Watford Palace Theatre. Watford Palace, Watford, 4–26 April.

www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk

Director: Brigid Lamour

Guildford Shakespeare Company. Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, 17–26 July.

www.guildford-shakespeare-company.co.uk

Director: Sean Aita

Cambridge Shakespeare Festival. Robinson College Gardens, 18 August–6 September.

www.cambridgeshakespeare.com

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Forum Theatre Company. Courtyard Theatre, Hoxton, London, 12 February–2 March.

www.thecourtyard.org.uk

Hall Green Little Theatre, 25 February–1 March.

www.hglt.org.uk

All-female version

Guildford Shakespeare Company. Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, 19 June–5 July.

www.guildford-shakespeare-company.co.uk

Director: Joanna Read

Cambridge Shakespeare Festival. Robinson College Gardens, 28 July–16 August.

www.cambridgeshakespeare.com

Warhorse Theatreworks. Cockpit Theatre, London, 3–27 September.

www.warhorsetheatreworks.com

Adaptation

The Comedy of Errors – An Identity Affair

Full Tilt Theatre Company. University Theatre, Bath Spa University, Bath, 20–24 May and tour.

www.fulltilt-theatre.com

Adaptor: Gunduz Kalic

Beach holiday resort setting with audience members assigned new identities.

War memorials have long been regarded as the most visible form of Great War commemoration practices. Whether through public memorial or private grave, the First World War has been fixed in collective memory for its numerous dead. The word ‘remembrance’ is inextricably associated, at least in the collective imagination of many European and Commonwealth countries and the US, with the poppy and 11 November. Commemorating the First World War is often equated with remembering the dead. As public sites of mourning, Sir Edward Lutyens's Monument to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval and his Cenotaph in Whitehall contrast with the private space of the soldier's regular slab, on which very little room is left for a personalized inscription. The private space of commemoration is reduced to a line or two – while the public rite of enforcing the same gravestone for all soldiers enacts a communal practice of remembrance. War memorials, as Jay Winter has argued, can be read as sites of both memory and mourning, places where collective grief and individualized remembrance are materially located. Whether public, as the Somme memorial at Thiepval, or private, as soldiers’ graves, war memorials and war cemeteries together give form to a material culture of Great War commemoration which is literally linked to a fixed, permanent, singular location.

It has not been sufficiently stressed that the materiality of Great War commemoration and its remembrance rites stretches beyond sculpture, architecture, gardens of remembrance and the iconological programmes of communal or private funereal art and that war memorials for the dead of the Great War began to appear in the form of printed matter long before the end of the war itself. Unlike architecture, sculpture or gardens, books are movable objects, not anchored to a fixed, permanent ‘site’ or unique locus.

More than any other playwright of the period, Shakespeare dramatized English history and in so doing experimented with different ways of representing the past. Within as well as between the tetralogies of pre-Tudor history, spanning at least a decade of composition, there are quite evident differences in style and form. The Henry VI plays, largely dependent on the chronicle of Hall and those compiled by Holinshed, have been appositely labelled ‘heroical histories’: an epithet which is equally applicable to the Agincourt scenes of Henry V and the ‘patriotic triumphalism’ of the play's Chorus. Richard II, with its Marlovian tragic influence, and specifically that of Edward II, is written almost entirely in verse, and the only popular voices in the play are the royal gardeners, who comment on, but do not influence, the action of the play. In contrast, 1 and 2 Henry IV mark a radical departure in the composition of the history play. The advertisements on the title-pages of the quartos remind readers of what they would have seen on the stage, namely the dramatic interplay of the heroic, the dynastic and the comic encapsulated in allusions to the Battle of Shrewsbury, the coronation of Henry V and the ‘humorous conceits’ or ‘humours’ of Falstaff. Similarly, the title-page of the 1600 quarto of Henry V advertises the Battle of Agincourt and the conceits of Ancient Pistol. In the co-existence of the comic and the serious there is a recuperation of pre-Marlovian drama or that of Marlowe himself before the publisher Richard Jones had expunged the indecorous comedy which he had deemed unfit for the weighty tragedy of the two parts of Tamburlaine.

Shakespeare's domestic life has been the subject of much recent scholarly and creative interest. At least three new plays have appeared in the last decade with his wife Anne Hathaway at the centre, and Germaine Greer's biography (Shakespeare's Wife, 2007) has similarly generated intense discussion. Anne Hathaway wrote nothing that survives (if she was in fact literate), few material details remain about the realities of her life and no representations exist of what she looked like. Yet, just as Shakespeare has been used for a variety of social, cultural and political causes, so too has his wife been appropriated, perhaps more easily because she lacks a body of creative work with which adapters must grapple and there are few stable points of reference for her. To some degree, anyone writing about Anne Hathaway (whether biographer, scholar, novelist, etc.) must invent material to fill in the gaps of her life story, and some of the most recent examples have constructed her in relation to contemporary life.

Married to one of the most famous men in history and firmly entrenched in the world of domesticity through the preservation (and global proliferation) of her famous cottage, the afterlife of Anne Hathaway is ideal for articulating the relationship between husband and wife, and between domestic responsibility and the workplace, in scholarly and imaginative works alike.

Imagine Narcissus had found his reflection in an object that was animate rather than inanimate. Imagine him with the same ‘fixed staring eyes’, the same ‘wretched rage’, the same vanity, destructiveness and self-pity, yet finding himself in the eyes of another person instead of a pool of water. Imagine him then not as a mortal man but an immortal goddess. Do so, and you have the basic idea of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, a minor Ovidian epic that tells one love-story not found even in Ovid – a story of love itself in love with love itself.

The story of Narcissus is without doubt an important source text for this poem. Venus compares Adonis to Narcissus more than once for failing to respond to her sexual advances. Many critics accept her judgement of the boy as narcissistic. Colin Burrow calls Adonis one of Shakespeare's ‘great’ narcissists. Coppélia Kahn calls the poem a ‘dramatization of narcissism’, in which the boy's attempt to ‘protect himself against the threat of love actually results in his self-destruction’. Jonathan Bate speaks of Adonis's ‘self-consuming absorption’, while Kenneth Muir finds in his death a kind of moral – that ‘beauty which refuses love is doomed to destruction and decay’. Other critics accept his narcissism with some qualification. Heather Dubrow, for example, sees Venus herself as ‘self-centered’ in a number of ways, yet for the most part agrees to the validity of the goddess’s charge, suspecting ‘subterranean motives’ of the boy for his resistance. Anthony Mortimer similarly thinks that Adonis will know no ‘other’, but appreciates certain reasons why he might not want to know Venus in particular.

Readers of this article may well regard it as old-fashioned and disappointing. It has no subtle and ingenious connections to make between Shakespeare and Machiavelli, indeed the opposite. No indisputable borrowing from Machiavelli has so far been discovered in Shakespeare – certainly nothing remotely resembling the clear and detailed use of Florio's translation of Montaigne in The Tempest – and I believe that scholars have been too ready to invoke Machiavelli's influence on seriously inadequate grounds.

Until about the middle of the twentieth century Machiavelli was not a particularly important presence in scholarly discussions of Shakespeare. He hardly figures, for example, in the standard accounts of Shakespeare's sources by Kenneth Muir and Geoffrey Bullough. In Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), a book once regarded as authoritative, but now mentioned only to be patronizingly dismissed, E. M. W. Tillyard asserted that Machiavelli ignored what for the Elizabethans was a central issue in discussion of politics:

Tillyard was of course aware that Machiavelli was read and quoted in the period, but for him ‘the age, while making much use of certain details of his writing, either ignored or refused to face what the man fundamentally stood for’. He ended on a dismissive note:

Revisionist accounts of early modern subjectivity almost invariably begin with Hamlet's accusation. Elizabeth Hanson's fine book Discovering the Subject opens with the phrase as a paradigmatic statement, in which Hamlet assumes the position of the modern subject, endowed with an inner mystery, and resistant to its penetration and discovery. In this model the subject contains something elusively called 'mystery'; the space of mystery is the interior of the subject's body, here symbolized by the heart; and other people are desperate to get access to that mystery, if necessary by tearing the heart out of the subject's body. Since this was physically accomplished in contemporary rituals of execution for crimes involving treason, especially at this time religious treason, the phrase seems to gesture towards the torture chamber, the scaffold and the whole dangerous recusant world of Catholic England and 'Secret Shakespeare'. Removing the heart from the chest was never a practical way of acquiring information, but here the torturer and the executioner merge into one, and the symbolic and literal are hard to prise apart. Torture was often a prelude to judicial killing, and methods of execution were refined to prolong physical torment. The removal of organs at execution could be seen as a grotesque literalization of the torturer's invasive inquiries, as suggested in King Lear: 'To know our enemies' minds, we rip their hearts.'

INTRODUCTION

This article is cued by Andrew Hartley's provocative discussion of the logical impossibility of performance criticism; he writes that

It is also, akin to my previous writing on, and wrestling with, the indeterminacy of meanings generated by theatre production, structured in order to facilitate these multiple perspectives. Thus, somewhat perversely perhaps, I have fixed upon the model of interactive sports coverage, whereby the viewer can, by virtue of the remote control red button, appreciate the spectacle from a number of alternative perspectives. On the football (soccer) pitch these include: regular viewing angle; bird's eye view; goal-to-goal; 'player-cam'; highlights reel; 'fanzone'. For the purposes of this close reading of (a section of) performance, King Lear (3.7, the blinding of Gloucester) at the reconstructed Globe in London (2008), the perspectives upon, or from, which I originally wanted to focus were: the yard - 'front and centre'; upper gallery; the Lord's rooms; production archives; focus on a specific player; groundlings - a focus on the audience; facial expressions; delivery of text - pauses, inflection, emphases. I have incorporated the majority of these perspectives: they, in turn, are followed by alternative readings of the play and production as a whole which are informed by the various perspectives of the (closely read) blinding scene.

The early modern dramatic paratext is a rich and varied repository of tributes to patrons and readers, where dramatists negotiated or parodied their attitudes towards dramatic publication and their reliance on the medium of print as a source of income and literary reputation. However, the lack of signed dedications or addresses to the reader in the early editions of Shakespeare's plays has deflected critical and editorial attention from early modern dramatic paratexts and from the significance of other paratextual features in Shakespeare, including title-pages, head titles, running titles and act and scene divisions. This article shows that a close analysis of some of these features and a contrastive analysis of Shakespearian and non-Shakespearian early modern playbooks lend fresh insight into what we mean by 'Shakespeare' and 'text' and how the texts of Shakespeare's plays are edited and re-presented to the modern reader.

Critical and editorial neglect of paratextual features in the early editions of Shakespeare's plays is also due to the enduring legacy of the New Bibliography. One crucial aspect of this legacy is the common tendency to identify the printer’s copy rather than the printed text as the ultimate source of textual authority. As a result, all those features that were added to the printer’s copy as the dramatic manuscript was transmitted into print and transformed into a reading text tend to be overlooked. The paradox of course is that no dramatic manuscripts used as printer’s copy to set up early modern playbooks have survived. Scholars interested in Shakespeare and performance often criticize the ‘tyranny of print’. Ironically, the study of Shakespeare in print has also been deeply affected by the ‘tyranny of the lost manuscript’. This understanding of the printed text as a misrepresentation of the printer’s copy, combined with the absence of any address or dedication signed by Shakespeare, has in turn led to a near-universal misconception of the paratext as marginal, dispensable, occasional, fundamentally different and ultimately detachable from the text.

That Shakespeare’s plays were published in his lifetime to a degree almost unparalleled in the works of other dramatists may or may not reflect their construction, at least in part, for reading rather than performance; doubtless this debate will long continue. But one implication of the publication statistics, as revealed and analysed by Lukas Erne, is irrefutable: there was a large and continuing market for these volumes, implying an eagerness to consume the plays through reading. The recent work of Andrew Murphy has made clear the continuing force and extent of this eagerness and its satisfaction through publication, doing much to adjust the focus of literary history to encompass popular as well as scholarly editions. By definition, the former have had wider circularity. In the 1770s, John Bell claimed sales of 3,000 copies simply for the first number of his serial Shakespeare, shortly after Samuel Johnson’s two editions of 1765 had sold about half that number. Nearly a century later, Charles Knight boasted sales of 700,000 for the various serial forms of his complete edition, extending the figure to one million when a later printing, selling for two shillings, was included. Both the Bell and the Knight are, of course, illustrated editions, forming part of the tradition beginning with Rowe – whose editions with pictorial frontispieces appeared when the Folios were the only other editions, and were neither easily nor cheaply available for most readers.