To celebrate the
holiday season, this week’s featured book is no less than the crown jewel in my
collection: a first edition of Francis Beaumont
and John
Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies,
published in London by Humphrey Robinson and Humphrey Moseley in 1647. So much
has been written
about this book that I won’t go into too much detail.
The Beaumont and
Fletcher folio, as it is known, is the third of the three great, transformative
folio collections of early modern dramatists (after Jonson’s of 1616 and
Shakespeare’s of 1623) that marked the transition of plays from the status of
ephemera to the status of literature and the transition of dramatists from mere
entertainers to recognized “authors”. Beaumont and Fletcher’s posthumous
collection was assembled by actors in the King’s Men, who had originally
performed the plays (Fletcher, who had trained as a playwright by collaborating
with Shakespeare as the bard prepared to retire, eventually took over as the
principal playwright for the leading English theater troupe). 
The book appeared
in 1647 – five years after the English Civil War resulted in the closing of all
the playhouses – and so its publication is generally thought to be as much
about the actors trying to make some quick cash as about celebrating the
literary reputation of the late dramatists (Fletcher had died in 1625; Beaumont
in 1616). Several other plays by Fletcher – widely viewed as one of the
pioneers of English tragicomic drama – had appeared in print previously, to
great success, and so the publishers of the 1647 made it a selling point on their
title-page to emphasize that these works were “Never printed before” and were
now “published by the authors’ original copies” (a claim that scholars now view
as not entirely true).
Like most large
publications from the period, the Beaumont and Fletcher folio enjoys a richly
complex printing history. It is estimated that eight or more different printing
shops (and so at least as many different compositors) contributed to the
printing of the lengthy preliminaries, with each shop employing slightly
different practices in terms of setting type, casting off copy, ordering work,
and so forth, as well as different sets of type, printer’s devices, and
ornamentation (which appears often throughout the book). The result is that
none of the surviving Beaumont and Fletcher folios (several hundred out of the
original 2,500 copy print-run) precisely resembles any other. A single style of
type was used for all the plays, but these too were likely divided up between
printing houses in order to increase the speed of production and so the paper
stock changes slightly at places in the volume. Another result of this division
of labor is that the signatures on the gatherings – to say nothing of the
pagination numbers – are hopelessly mixed up. I will spare you the collational
formula, suffice it to say the book comprises 223 gatherings. It’s worth noting
here that one of the printers involved with the Beaumont and Fletcher folio was
a woman, Susan Islip; the book trade was one of the few industries in the
period in which a widow could inherit and keep
the business after her husband’s death.
The 35 plays and
1 masque that are included are mostly by Fletcher (though it’s missing at least
20, and includes at least 2 that belong to other dramatists), along with a
number that were collaboratively written by Fletcher and Philip Massinger
(ironically, despite the title, only 2 are Beaumont-Fletcher collaborations;
none are by Beaumont alone). In addition to these, the folio includes a lengthy
set of preliminaries that includes two prefaces to the reader (one by
playwright James Shirley and one by Moseley, dated February 14, 164[7]), the
actors’ dedication to Philip, Earl of Pembroke, and 37 commendatory verses and
memorial verses on Fletcher and Beaumont from gentlemen, poets, and other
writers, such as professional dramatists Ben Jonson and Richard Brome and
amateur dramatists Sir Aston Cockayne and Jasper Mayne. Even the stationer,
Moseley, contributed a verse. 
The plays themselves are set in double columns
with ample marginal spaces and straight rules dividing the columns and used to
separate headers for act and scene breaks. Elaborate ornamentation decorates
the start of each play above the title (it seems that almost every
ornamentation is different, but I couldn’t say for certain). The type is
generally roman for speeches and italic for speech prefixes and stage directions,
though in some cases the stage directions are also in roman.
My copy is
complete, except for the final work – The
Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn – and the frontispiece
portrait of Fletcher; because this highly coveted engraving by W. Marshall
is missing, the actual market value of my copy – despite the fact that it
contains all the plays and is in excellent condition otherwise – is markedly
low (which is also how, of course, I came to be able to afford it). Some pages
have been repaired by a professional conservationist and only a few (mainly in
the preliminaries) have lost substantial amounts of text because of this damage.
One of these, unfortunately, is the peculiar “Postscript”
at the end of the commendatory verses in which Moseley mentions a few things he
forgot to write into his preface (that the work of printing the verses was
divided among several printers, that Beaumont and Fletcher rarely wrote the
prologues and epilogues to their own plays, and similar bibliographic details).
The verso of the damaged page is the “Catalogue”, or table of contents, and so
that too is missing a large portion of text.
The binding is
exquisite late eighteenth century gilded green leather that is still, but for a
few chips and bumps and some pulling at the top of the spine, in good
condition. The page edges have been gilded all around and the book overall
measures a substantial 22cm wide x 32cm tall x 6.5cm deep. While there is no
substantive marginalia, my copy has clearly seen use by several readers, as
evidenced by slight markings throughout (pencil lines and crosses in the margin
and underlining, some faint inked crosses in the margins, and so forth). Inside
the front cover is the bookplate of Fairfax of Cameron, a Scottish peerage
since 1627; the Fairfax family owned property in Virginia and Maryland into the
twentieth century, so perhaps that is how this particular copy of this
beautiful, historically important, literary treasure came to be in the New
World and, ultimately, in Tarquin Tar’s Bookcase.
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