Abstract
In 1656, Humphrey Moseley published a volume of Abraham Cowley’s Poems, a 98-sheet folio—short, compared to the Sidney or Jonson folios—that collected most of Cowley’s previously published poetry, adding his incomplete Royalist epic Davideis. In “The Preface,” Cowley offers something of a creation narrative for the folio, recalling how he returned from France to England to find that a poem called “The Iron Age” had been “published under my name, during the time of my absence.”1 This irked Cowley, who feared that this false attribution of these “ill Verses” would negatively affect his reputation. He further expresses his offence at “the publication of some things of mine without my consent or knowledge, and those so mangled and imperfect, that I could neither with honor acknowledge, not with honesty quite disavow them” (B3r). To some degree, Cowley challenges the optimistic claims of Thomas Speght’s Chaucer about print’s capacity to correct error and offer texts more accurate than those circulating in manuscript. However, Cowley traces the problem of unauthorized and inaccurate printing to the commercial book trade, rather than to the technology of print. As part of his complaint, Cowley attacks publishers’ motivations for publishing the works of authors in large volumes, with folio editions in mind:
I began to reflect upon the fortune of almost all Writers, and especially Poets, whose Works (commonly printed after their deaths) we finde stuffed out, either with counterfeit pieces, like false Money put in to fill up the Bag, though it adde nothing to the sum; or with such, which through of their own Coyn, they would have called in themselves, for the baseness of the Allay: whether this proceed from the indiscretion of their Friends, who think a vast heap of Stones or Rubbish a better Monument, then a little Tomb of Marble, or by the unworthy avarice of some Stationers, who are content to diminish the value of the Author, so they may encrease the price of the Book; and like Vintners with sophisticate mixtures, spoil the whole vessel of wine, to make it yield more profit.
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Notes
I use Lair et al.’s definition of “branding” as “a programmatic approach to the selling of a product, service, organization, cause, or person that is fashioned as a proactive response to the emerging desires of a target audience or market” (Daniel J. Lair, Katie Sullivan, and George Cheney, “Marketization and the Recasting of the Professional Self,” Management Communication Quarterly, 18 [2005], 309).
Gary Taylor, “Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare 1623,” From Performance to Print in Early Modern England, eds. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 65.
Shakespeare, Loues Labors Lost, The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile. Second Edition, ed. Charlton Hinman, rev. Peter W. M. Blayney (New York: Norton, 1996), TLN 485–7. Unless otherwise noted citations from CHT refer to this edition.
Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington, DC: Folger Library Publications, 1991), 1.
Newes from the New World from Ben Jonson, eds. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon: 1925–1952), VII.515 .
Roger Chartier makes a similar observation: “The 1616 volume of his Workes, in which Jonson in a veritable master stroke published in the folio format those of his works that he deemed worthy of such as honor, attests to the credit he attached to print. Ten years later, The Staple of News expressed his discomfort with the authority that print bestowed on rumors bruited about by the gazettes and his anxiety in the face of the popular passions that London booksellers stirred up in pursuit of handsome profits for themselves” (Inscription and Erasure. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007], 59.)
Samuel Daniel, Musophilus 447–9, in Selected Poetry and a Defense of Rhyme, eds. Geoffrey G. Hiller and Peter L. Groves (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998).
Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Anthony Parr (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), rpt. 1999.
For Daniel’s patent, see Joseph Loewenstein, “Printing and ‘The Multitudinous Presse’: The Contentious Texts of Jonson’s Masques,” Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, eds. Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1991).
Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the Apparatus of 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 33.
The most important bibliographical analysis of the folio remains Charlton Hinman’s remarkable The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, which was not initially designed to better understand the practices of the London book trade, but as “an investigation of the proofreading of the First Folio” that would provide “full and precise information about the fortunes of Shakespeare’s plays in the printing house” for a proper old-spelling edition of Shakespeare’s work. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963, I.6–7). That Hinman’s work continues to be revised is testimony to its significance. Other influential bibliographical and textual accounts of the folio include Roland B. McKerrow, Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford, 1939), which argues that “we must pay especial attention to the readings of the First Folio” even when a potentially more authoritative edition exists (70); this view still prevails in some editions of the folio that are intended to be used as prompt-books, notably the recent Applause First Folio Editions.
More comprehensive studies include W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955);
Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the Shakespeare First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953);
Wells, Taylor et al, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987, rpt. New York: Norton 1997), pages 36–51.
Kastan, Shakespeare, 78. On Shakespeare and the literary marketplace, see also Emma Smith, “To Buy or Not to Buy”: Hamlet and Consumer Culture’, Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011), 188–208.
William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 145–6. St. Clair argues that the cost of the folio would have prevented it from being read by a great variety of readers. Because of this necessarily limited audience, Hemming and Condell’s appeal for readers to buy the book is like to be read ironically. However, as St. Clair himself notes, the folio may have been sold in sections, which may have made it more affordable.
See also Francis X. Connor, “Shakespeare’s Theatrical Folio,” Philological Quarterly 91 (2012), 228–31, which argues that CHT is designed to conform to Shakespeare’s own idea of the theatrical book as incomplete without performance.
Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 49.
Hugh Craig, “Shakespeare In Print,” Heat 4 (2002): 54–55.
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1993), 288.
Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 25–6.
For a helpful summary of critical narratives centered on authorship, playwriting, and the marketplace, see Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (London: Ashgate, 2006), 28–33.
Lesser, “Playbooks,” The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture , vol. 1, ed. Joad Raymond (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), 527.
Alexandra Halasz, “Pamphlet Surplus: John Taylor and Subscription Publication.” Print, Manuscript, Performance, eds. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2000), 93.
Quoted from David Norbrook and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds. The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509–1659 (New York: Penguin, 1992), 441.
Frederick Waage, “John Taylor (1577–1654) and Jacobean Popular Culture.” Journal of Popular Culture 7 (1973), 592.
Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water — Poet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 1, 4.
Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 30.
Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance, London: Ashgate, 2006, 62.
John Lyly, Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and His England, ed. Leah Scragg (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 30.
On Moseley’s importance as a Royalist literary publisher, see Paulina Kewes, “‘Give me the sociable Pocket-books’: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections.” Publishing History 38 (1995): 5–21;
John Barnard, “London Publishing, 1640–1660: Crisis, Continuity, and Innovation,” Book History 4 (2001), 1–16.
See especially “Playwrighting” in A New History of Early English Drama, eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, and Textual Intercourse (Cambridge, 1997), esp. 152–5. Like the Jonson and Shakespeare folios Comedies and Tragedies has been subject to numerous bibliographical studies, notably by R. C. Bald Bibliographic Studies in the Beaumont & Fletcher Folio of 1647. Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 1938);
John Gerritsen, “The Printing of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647,” The Library 5th Series (1949), 233–64; and Robert K. Turner “The Folio of 1647.” The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon: Voume I. Fredson Bowers, general editor (Cambridge, 1966), pp. xxvii–xxxv; “The Printers and the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647: Section 1 (Thomas Warren’s).” Studies in Bibliography 27 (1974), 137–56; “The Printers and the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, Section 2.” Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967), 35–59. Numerous articles have attempted to identify the number and identities of each of the folio’s printers. Gerritsen identifies the printers as Thomas Warren, Robert White, Susan Islip, Ruth Raworth, Edward Griffin, and at least one unidentified printer (234–5).
Moseley’s publishing career demonstrates an insightful conception of how the authorial name operates within the printed literary marketplace. In his 1646 edition of Sir John Sucking’s Fragmenta Aurea, he notes that “While Sucklins name is in the forehead of this Booke, these Poems can want no preparation” (The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. Thomas Clayton [Oxford: Clarendon, 1971], 3. With Sucklin[g]’s name on the title page, the poems, Moseley argues, are complete; the authorial attribution alone attest to there authority as esteemed literary works. Similarly, he reiterates the commercial potential of the authorial name in his 1657 octavo of Thomas Middleton plays, in which he writes that he “was not a little confident but that his name would prove as great an Inducement for thee to Read, as me to Print them” (qtd. John Curtis Reed, “Humphrey Moseley, Publisher,” Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceeedings and Papers: Voulme II, Part II. Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 1928, 99). Here, Moseley puts himself in the customer’s position to suggest that Middleton’s name alone would induce someone to read the book.
Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: 1997), 282.
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© 2014 Francis X. Connor
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Connor, F.X. (2014). “Whatever you do, buy”: Literary Folios and the Marketplace in Shakespeare, Taylor, and Beaumont and Fletcher. In: Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England. History of Text Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438362_5
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