A New Edition of an Old Manuscript Play

The Malone Society was founded in 1906 with a mission to make rare and unique materials essential to the study of English Renaissance drama more accessible to scholars and the public. Its history is one of prestigious and superlative scholarly research. Every year for the past century the Society publishes anywhere from one to six editions of manuscript or obscure printed plays, theatrical records, and other relevant documents. In order to ensure the material is as useful as possible for scholarly purposes, these editions always avoid heavy editorial intrusions: a brief (anywhere from one page to twenty or so) textual introduction is followed by a record of collations of extant copies and then the text itself, either as a diplomatic reprint (for manuscript plays and for printed plays up until the past few decades) or as a photographic facsimile (for most printed plays published by the Society in the past few decades). The books’ familiar tan cloth binding, plain and unadorned but for black lettered titles on the spine, should be immediately familiar to anyone in my field; they are a staple and necessity for studying English dramatic literature and theatre history.

This week’s book is the Malone Society’s centennial edition for the years 2007-2008. It is volume 172 in the Malone Society Reprints series and presents a full-color, 1:1-scale photographic reproduction of the elegant scribal-copy manuscript of John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed (1611) held by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC (MS J.b.3). The edition was attentively prepared by Meg Powers Livingston and checked for accuracy by two of the Society’s most prestigious elder scholars, G. Richard Proudfoot and Henry R. Woudhuysen. The book was published for the Malone Society by Manchester University Press and printed by Alden HenDi of Oxfordshire.

Fletcher’s play is a sequel to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, but in it the tables are turned: following the death of his first wife, Katherine, Petruchio marries Maria, who “tames” her brat of a husband by -- Lysistrata-like -- leading the women of the play in withholding sex from their husbands until the men change their ways. It was likely written in 1611, but it underwent quite a bit of revision and changes due to censorship; in 1633, after first having performance of the play blocked by the Master of the Revels (the government official responsible for censoring and licensing all public plays) because of perceived indecencies in it, the King’s Men were finally allowed to stage it and The Taming of the Shrew together before King Charles and the queen at St. James’s Palace. According to the Master of the Revels, Shrew was “liked”; Tamer was “well liked”.

The play was quite popular on the Jacobean and Caroline stage and was also frequently performed on the Restoration stage as well, often in repertory with Taming of the Shrew (in 1667, in fact, John Lacy revised Shakespeare’s play to make it a better fit with Fletcher’s). After a prolonged absence from the stage, it was most recently performed (again, in repertory with Shrew) by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2004.

Livingston dates the manuscript of the play to anytime between 1611 and 1623. It differs from the 1647 folio in several ways, including in textual changes that were no doubt due to the 1633 revisions demanded by the Master of the Revels. The hand is an elegant, clear, and rather large italic, making it much easier to read than most early modern play manuscripts (which are usually scribbled in English secretary hand). Care has been taken with this copy and the scribe (probably a professional) has dutifully corrected mistakes as he worked. Later hands have also made some annotations and changes as well. The dignity and beauty of the work suggests that the fair copy was made as a presentation gift for someone of importance. Livingston demonstrates that the cuts and wording in the stage directions point to a playhouse manuscript as the scribe’s copy-text (that is, the scribe copied his work from a manuscript that had been actually used for performance).

The contents of the Malone Society edition begin with Livingston’s introduction (p. v-xxviii), which includes: information on the manuscript’s modern provenance (v-vi), the play’s authorship (vi-vii) and date (vii-viii), the manuscript’s physical characteristics (viii-x) and its corrections and annotations (x-xiii), a comparison to the printed folio versions of the play in 1647 and 1679 (xiii-xx), dating of the manuscript itself (xx-xxi), and a statement of editorial conventions and acknowledgements (xxi). Following the introduction are several appendices: a list of corrections made by the original scribe of the manuscript (xxiii), a list of differences between the manuscript and the 1647 folio that can be attributed to censorship imposed on the play’s oaths, ribaldry, and profanity by Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, in 1633 (xxiv-xxv), and a table cross-referencing the through-line numbering system of the edition to the page numbers and signatures of the 1647 folio and the act/scene/line marks of Fredson Bowers’s modernized edition of 1966.

Each page of the facsimile provides the full-color image of the manuscript page in the center, with through-line numbers marked every ten lines printed in the inner margin and the folio pagination centered in the bottom margin. The manuscript is a total of 52 folio leaves (103 pages; the verso of the final leaf is blank, but Livingston includes it in the reproduction anyway; one leaf, no. 22, is interleaved and pasted in, perhaps to replace a gross error in the transcription [left]) measuring 19.7cm x 29.5cm. The paper in the book is a very high-quality glossy stock; the pages measure 26.5cm x 35.5cm. The binding is the usual Malone Society tan buckram publisher’s cloth, with the title of the play in black letters on the spine.

As a member of the Malone Society, I receive the annual publications directly from the publisher. Inserted into my copy is a letter from the then-newly installed U.S. Secretary-Treasurer for the Society, Professor Eric Rasmussen of the University of Nevada, Reno. The letter briefly introduces the volume and indicates Rasmussen’s pleasure that distributing the volume to the U.S. members is his “first act as incoming U.S. Secretary-Treasurer”.

The edition has been received very enthusiastically by scholars in the field. The following notice is from the Malone Society website:

[The edition has been] enthusiastically reviewed in the TLS by Laurie Maguire, who noted that 'The reader can enjoy flicking back and forth from Powers's descriptions and analysis to the high-quality pictorial evidence' and predicted that the continuing adaptability of the Society in the digital age 'points towards several more Society centenaries'. William Proctor Williams has also praised this volume (‘a magnificent facsimile') and the work of the Society: ‘So where does the Malone Society stand in the age of the pixel? … I submit that no matter how good the resolution is on your computer screen, … the Malone Society Reprint is a superior and more scholarly useful item than the digital form. … I trust that some reviewer a hundred years from now will get the same pleasure from reviewing the Society's bicentennial volume as I had reviewing The Woman's Prize ' (Notes and Queries , 57 (2010), 136-8).

The enthusiasm for high-quality photographic editions of manuscript plays is not an understatement. With the wide-spread use of digital resources such as Early English Books Online and Literature Online it has become relatively easy for scholars around the world to access and work with rare printed materials from the early modern period. To work with manuscripts however -- which are, by definition, unique -- it has always been necessary to either travel to the library holding the document (almost always in the UK, though the Folger and the Huntington in California have some) or rely on a diplomatic transcript (nearly always from the Malone Society). Photographic reproductions of manuscripts from the period have suffered from camera technologies insufficiently subtle and sophisticated to capture the nuances of color, tone, impression, texture, etc. that embed important material evidence into the physical object of the text. High-resolution digital photography is beginning to make those problems obsolete, and the ability to zoom and navigate those images on a computer screen should revolutionize the study of early manuscripts: not only does it democratize scholarship by making those unique materials accessible to thousands, if not millions, of users, but it also helps ensure the preservation and longevity of the materials themselves by reducing the need for users to actually handle the document.

Williams’s suggestion that Malone Society reprints, in book form, will always be “superior and more scholarly useful” than digital facsimiles seems purely optative -- conservative thinking from a scholar very firmly (and professionally) entrenched in print culture. Certainly there is a need for full-color, scale reproductions of manuscript plays in print; there is a permanence to the book-form of the edition that digital technologies -- so often changing and going out of date -- have yet to successfully replicate. But as the next generation of scholars begins to populate academia -- a generation of scholars who are intensely digital natives -- the use of digital media to advance the centuries’ old mission of critical inquiry and analysis will evolve and improve. The goals of the scholarship will change little; the tools that make the realization of those goals possible, however, will change radically.

More Shakespearean Pseudoscholarship

This past summer I wrote about a book by Mark Twain that attempted to use some highly dubious and subjective evidence to argue that the plays of Shakespeare were in fact written by Francis Bacon. This week’s book offers another take on the same argument -- just as spurious as Twain’s, but from a (loosely) textual studies perspective.

The book is a slim but tall folio by Frank A. Kendall, a man about whom I can find little information except that he was briefly President of the National Amateur Press Association in 1913 (he died that year and his wife, Jennie M. Kendall, was appointed to complete his term). This is apparently his only book. The title is William Shakespeare and His Three Friends: Ben, Anthonie, and Francis, published by W. A. Butterfield of Boston in 1911 and printed by George L. Clapp of South Framingham, MA. No subsequent editions appeared, though it is available as a print-on-demand title from some modern POD firms.

Taking the first page of the 1598 quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost as his main starting point, Kendall engages in an extensive, slightly obsessive, highly erratic examination of what he claims to be the hidden “acrostics” encoded into the play. Using a truly speculative methodology first outlined by William Stone Booth in his Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon (Houghton, Miffling, Co., 1909), Kendall claims that it is possible to identify various permutations of the Latin phrase “Antonious Baconus et Ben Ionsus et Franciscus Baconus scripserunt” hidden in the text of the page.

He traces out sixty-one randomly drawn patterns linking initial letters of words on the page to spell out messages related to this claim (that Anthony Bacon, Francis Bacon, and Ben Jonson collaborated to write the play). Kendall never attempts to explain the logic of his choice of geometric patterns (except for the general “rule” that acrostics can only use the first letter of a word) nor does he justify how he settles upon what words to include in each pattern (except for the repeated phrase “We are struck by the word ______” -- whatever that might mean.

The contents of the book run as follows: two blank leaves, the half-title, the full title-page with copyright on verso, epigraph, and the contents of the book (pp. [7]-56). There are a few illustrative plates of the first page from the quarto and facsimiles of contemporary passages by Herbert. Perhaps most clever in the construction of the book is the inclusion of a fold-out illustrative plate on the penultimate leaf (the final leaf is blank); this illustration is a facsimile of the page from Love’s Labour’s Lost, allowing the reader to keep the facsimile before him or her while still being able to turn the pages of the book, making use of it to follow along with Kendall’s torturous argument.

The pages measure 19.5cm x 28cm and are of a nice stock with 2.5cm horizontal chain-lines and a watermark reading “Berkshire Text” above an eagle straddling the letter “A”. Interestingly, this was the watermark of the western Massachusetts firm American Writing Paper Company (Holyoke, MA), not far from where the book resides today. It’s bound in light brown papered boards with a brown buckram spine. My copy is damaged in a few ways, including water damage on the back board and what seems to be a very large bit taken out of the top outside corner.

This copy is signed by the author (“Compliments of Frank A Kendall”) and bears an owner’s inscription as well (“Gift of Joseph D. Leland”). Leland may have been the same man who was architect of Hilton Village, an English-village-style planned neighborhood in Newport News, Virginia from 1917-1921. On March 25, 1921, Leland apparently donated this copy to the library of the western Massachusetts town of Hancock: pasted inside the front cover are the “By-Laws of Hancock Town Library”, along with a penned addition of the book’s call number (822.33.7; also appearing in white ink on the lower part of the spine), the date it was donated, and the accession number (7462).

Pasted inside the back cover is a circulation card envelope. The card is still inserted and it reveals that Kendall’s work of pseudoscholarship was, perhaps not surprisingly, never checked out by any patron.

Something for Nothing

During a recent trip to New Jersey to visit my brother and sister-in-law, I had the opportunity to visit some shops in the beautiful town of Princeton. “This is an Ivy League town,” my brother warned me, “so be prepared for massively inflated prices. They prey on people who have too much money and not enough sense.” Sure enough, one of the antique stores we went into seemed to have priced its eighteenth century books (mostly Americana) by simply tagging an extra “0” on to the actual dollar value of each book. But another, tiny bookstore located down in the basement of a storefront, was a different story. The range in the stock was rather narrow (perhaps a result of the small space), but the prices were reasonable. In fact, in terms of this week’s featured book, extremely reasonable.

This week’s book is a fragile, well-worn paperback of Edwin Booth’s Prompt-Book of Hamlet, as edited by the contentious Gloucester, MA-native author, poet, journalist, and drama critic William Mercutio Winter (1836-1917; shown here in 1916) (contentious because of his constant attacks on the realist movement within the modern theatre, a style that he saw as “rank, deadly pessimism... a disease, injurious alike to the stage and to the public”). As I’ve mentioned previously, these acting editions of modern productions of Shakespeare plays are useful for recuperating how previous generations have interpreted Shakespeare -- though they’re essentially useless as objects of textual study or for understanding their original early modern theatrical context.

Booth (1833-1893; an early photo of him in the role of Hamlet...sitting in the same kind of chair Winter posed in!) -- older brother of the more infamous actor John Wilkes Booth -- came from trans-Atlantic theatre royalty and was one of the most celebrated actors of the nineteenth century American stage; his performance in many leading Shakespearean roles helped crumble the British presumption that non-English actors could not grapple with the great playwright’s subtleties of language and nuances of character. In particular, his portrayal of Hamlet was lauded throughout his career, taking him to stages across the U.S. and U.K. -- according to most accounts, he played the role of the Danish prince more often than any previous actor on record. The relationship between Booth and Winter was professional (the latter wrote reviews of the former’s productions, but also penned a biographical article on him for Harper’s in June 1881 and, upon the actor’s death, published a book-length biography, The Life and Art of Edwin Booth for MacMillan and Company in 1893). More relevant for my purpose, however, was the series called The Prompt-Book, which Winter edited for the firms of Lee & Shepard (41 Franklin Street, Boston, and, at this time, still struggling to recover from bankruptcy following a calamitous fire in 1875 and the Panic of ‘73) and Charles T. Dillingham (678 Broadway, New York, formerly of Lee & Shepard). This series presented, in “uniform volumes”, performance texts of Booth’s most popular productions, including Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, and “Katharine and Petruchio” (Taming of the Shrew).

My copy is of the third edition of the Hamlet prompt-book; all three editions appeared in 1878, though -- unlike the previous two -- this one was published by the New York firm of Francis Hart & Company (63-65 Murray Street, better known as the publisher of Scribner’s Monthly). Subsequent editions followed from Penn Publishing (Philadelphia) in 1896 and 1909. Presumably Booth derived some kind of income from Winter’s editions; he certainly needed it, since in 1874 his custom-built theatre at 23rd Street and 6th Avenue was shuttered and his fortune essentially vanished with it (Booth recovered and continued playing to great success until his death; his last appearance in the role of the young prince Hamlet was in 1891...at the age of 58). The copy is bound in paper covers with a cloth spine; the spine has faux stitching where it joins to the front and back covers, probably to imitate the look of the typical theatrical prompt-book of the day (the binding is actually held together with a series of metal staples). The front cover bears the title, along with a crest showing a raven on a branch; the back cover bears the Medusa-head logo of Francis Hart & Company. The pages are of a dull stock, though heavy enough to be written upon with ink and not show bleed-through; they measure 12cm x 17.25cm.

The text of the play itself only appears on the recto of pages -- a practice that essentially doubles the size (and hence paper and composition cost) of the book; the facing verso was perhaps left blank to allow space for amateur thespians to make their own notes for productions. The pagination starts on the title page and runs [1]-136. An unnumbered leaf before the title page is blank on the recto and bears a list of the other titles in the series on the verso; at the back there are three blanks (the pastedown on the back cover is coming up on my copy, making it seem as if there is a fourth blank leaf). The gatherings are in quires of eight, though I would hesitate to actually call the book an octavo. The condition of my copy is fairly poor; the interior state is acceptable, but the front cover is quite loose and most of the cloth spine is disintegrated. The only markings are some basic arithmetic, in a pencilled late nineteenth-century hand, on the verso of the second blank leaf at the back and a faint inked inscription on the recto of the first blank:

A. J. Hendrickson

From Ellis Archer

I’ve found a few matches to these names, but, regrettably, nothing with the two together and certainly nothing that absolutely confirms who these people might have been.

Besides the play itself, the edition includes a a number of epigraphic quotes about the play from various sources, a dramatis personae list and setting description, and a brief preface (pp. 3-5; dated “New-York, Feb. 7th, 1878) in which Winter explains some key points about the play (particularly the rich ambiguity surrounding Hamlet’s “madness”), about Booth’s cuts (he itemizes the major excisions and says a few things about why the passages were taken out -- usually being for purposes of clarity), and about the edition itself. At the back of the book, Winter includes an appendix of brief essays on the play for “theatrical students”. These include one by Winter on “The Character of Hamlet” (pp.127-8), another by him on “Facts about Hamlet”, mostly concerned with dating and its original theatrical context (pp. 128-30), a selection from Collier’s Shakespeare Library, Vol. I, providing an extract on “The Original Story of Hamlet” (pp. 130-2), a selection from Guizot on “The Madness of Hamlet” (p. 133), comments from Edward Dowden on the structure, “Incidents and Scheme of Hamlet” (pp. 133-4), two selections -- one from Coleridge and one from Ulrici -- on “The Key-Note of Hamlet” (that is, the most important qualities of his character; pp. 134-5), and finally another essay by Winter on “Time, Age and Persons of Hamlet (pp. 135-6; Winter notes that Hamlet is 30 years old -- which is debatable -- and at the time this book appeared Booth himself, still playing the role, was 45).

In terms of the text itself, one of the qualities for which Booth was celebrated was, unlike most contemporaneous performers, he largely stuck to the text of the play as it appeared in the early editions of the seventeenth century. This should be qualified, of course, by noting that he did so in comparison to his contemporaries -- many of whom made severe and grossly radical, unwarranted changes to the texts.

Booth’s text for Hamlet is not without its alterations: large portions are cut (about 1,000 lines by Winter’s count) for a number of reasons (“[they] might prove tedious in the representation.... [they] momentarily arrest the action of the piece....[they] are but the descriptive repetition of action that has already been shown...[they] do but amplify and reiterate ideas that have previously been made sufficiently clear for the practical purposes of the stage”). A few lines and passages have been shifted about or transposed and sometimes words have been slightly altered (“but never to the perversion of the meaning”, Winter somewhat idealistically observes). More subjectively, “[c]oarse phrases have been cast aside, or softened, wherever they occur” -- which sounds dangerously close to the infamous brutalizations of Dr. Bowdler and others. Perhaps the most substantive changes to the text appear, not surprisingly, in the way of stage directions -- this is, after all, a “prompt-book”. Booth’s directions are quite full and detailed, indicating precisely both the settings for the scenes and, down to their position on the stage, the movements and business of the characters. It would be quite a simple task for an enterprising director to re-create the Edwin Booth Hamlet from Winter’s edition of it (though one recurring direction, "Picture", appearing at the end of every act, might need to be puzzled out). If only one of the early seventeenth-century texts were so helpful in re-creating how Shakespeare’s production of Hamlet was staged!

To conclude this week’s post, I’d like to return to my trip to Princeton, to the underground bookstore where I acquired this piece of nineteenth-century American theatre history. The experience offered up one more reason I enjoy shopping in used book stores rather than new book stores. In new book stores, the price that is stamped on the book is the price that you have to pay -- even if you think it is an inaccurate reflection of the book’s value (which seems to be true more often than not). In used book stores, the price is almost always negotiable -- fine points such as the seller’s sense of the buyer’s interest in or commitment to the book, the seller’s compassion, the length of time it has been sitting on the seller’s shelf taking up space (one reason I like to return to some stores repeatedly) or, of course, the condition of the copy, can greatly shift the price because they do actually shift the book’s value (I’ve written previously on the three points that make up a used book’s value: importance, scarcity, and condition).

There was no price penciled inside the front of this copy of Booth’s Hamlet, so I presented it to the owner of the store and inquired as to what he thought was fair for it. He looked at it -- eyeing the extremely loose front cover and deteriorated spine -- looked at me and shrugged, “You can just take it. We can’t sell something in that condition.” I’m not sure who would absolutely demand that a copy of this obscure and somewhat unimportant book be in ideal condition, but for my own desires I recognized it as something that I wanted in the Bookcase -- despite its sadly drooping cover.

On the way out of the store -- as we walked past the antiques shop with the hyperbolic prices -- I thought of what my brother had originally warned me about shopping in Princeton. There's almost always a difference between the monetary value of a book and what it's worth -- in a non-cash sense. You don’t need lots of money to be a satisfied book-collector; all you need, really, is sense. Especially a sense of what is valuable to you.

A Salmagundi of English Anecdotes

Knowing of my interest in tracking down the provenance of certain volumes in my collection, a fellow book-collector has invited me to discover what I can about a special copy of this week’s book. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m interested in issues of bibliographic proximity -- whether that term applies to anthologies or collected editions (the proximity of texts to each other) or to book collections (the proximity of particular books to each other). Apparently this week’s book shared some close proximity with a collection of four of the rarest and most valuable (monetarily and textually) books in English literary history -- provoking me to reflect on the vast network of the “book web”, or the interconnectedness of the many volumes sitting on our shelves that at one time or another in their lives shared space with a volume now possibly miles or even continents away.

The title is A Book for a Rainy Day: Or, Recollections of the Events of the Last Sixty-Six Years by John Thomas Smith (1766-1833; shown here). The first edition, published by Richard Bentley of New Burlington Street in London, appeared in 1845 and was quickly followed by a second edition in the same year; ironically, the first edition is far more common than the limited second edition. This copy is of the second edition. The printer for both was Schulze & Company of 13 Poland Street in London. Bentley and Schulze are perhaps best known for being the publisher-printer team behind the first book publication of Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Subsequent editions followed in 1861, 1900, and 1905 (edited by Wilfred Whitten). In 1846, the book was adapted into Charles Mackay’s two-volume An Antiquarian Ramble in the Streets of London, with Anecdotes of Their More Celebrated Residents.

Smith -- a character on the London social scene for much of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century -- had been since 1816 the “keeper” of the British Museum’s prints and drawings collection, was an accomplished artist (mostly of portraits) and the author of several other works, most notably a study of London street life and crime titled Vagabondia and a biography of the sculptor Nollekens and His Times -- a book that was, according to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. 14, “unmatched for malicious candour and vivid detail”.

As for his Book for a Rainy Day, the Cambridge History describes it as “one of the most entertaining and most trustworthy memorials of [Smith’s] period. Published twelve years after his death, it forms a valuable corrective to the flashy fictions of Egan and his life.” The book takes the form of a highly detailed, largely autobiographical diary of London society over the course of Smith’s life, ranging from theatre news to political scandal to high society gossip to literary anecdotes to the latest fashions to international news and even weather reports. Of the author himself, the Cambridge History reports that he “had a keen curiosity about things and people past and present, a retentive memory and a gift for gossip.”

The goal of the book seems to be one of eclectic variety organized around the years of the author’s life. As Smith puts it in his preface:

Some may object to my vanity, in expecting the reader of the following pages to be pleased with so heterogeneous a dish. It is, I own, what ought to be called salmagundi; or, it may be likened to various suits of clothes, made up of remnants of all colours. One promise I can make, that as my pieces are mostly of new cloth, they will last the longer. Dr. Johnson has said: “All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know, than not.”

The book is bound in wonderfully sturdy feather-marbled boards with deep brown leather spine and corners. There are six compartments with raised bands down the spine with decorative tooling and a black leather title band with gold lettering. The edges of the pages, the inside of the front and back covers, and the recto of the front flyleaf and verso of the back flyleaf all share the same colorful marbling pattern.

The pages measure 12cm x 19.5cm and are quite healthy, with very little foxing and no tears or damage (except for the front fly, which is coming loose at the top). There are no watermarks or chain-lines; the paper was, as with almost all non-specialized printing paper after 1805 in England, wove-made on a machine. The book’s pagination runs [i]-iv, [1]-311 (the first edition may be distinguished from the second in its pagination; it runs up to 306). Its collational formula seems to be 8^o: [#] [A²] B¹²-O¹¹: $1, 2, 3 [5]. Thus, it seems to be an “octavo in twelves” (a full sheet folded in eight with a half-sheet folded in four).

On the verso of the front fly, and inserted after the fly (on a slip of stationery from Botleys Park Hospital Management Committee of Chertsey in Surrey) are an assortment of owners’ marks. Those written on the fly are cryptic and are combination of various pencils and a purple stamped “N6L”; the pencil marks include the notation "Finneron, Woking. Nov | 54".

Pasted on the slip of stationery, in the same hand as the “Finneron, Woking. Nov | 54” notation (though annotated in black and blue inks, not pencil) are slips of paper cut from advertisements for various editions of the book. The slip advertising the 1905 edition is annotated with “Myer, London. Jan | 57”; the first slip advertising the 1845 edition (first) is not annotated; the second slip advertising the 1845 first edition is annotated “Beaucham<> London. 1960”; the final slip advertises Mackay’s 1846 adaptation and is annotated “Hammond, B’haus. Oct | 56”. Whomever bough the book was apparently fastidious about recording its values in various editions when they came up for sale; if the inscription on the fly is the mark of when and where it was first purchased by this owner, it seems that he or she bought the book from E. J. Finneron, a bookseller in the English town of Woking since at least 1935.

There are two bookplates, and these bring me back to the topic of tracking down interesting provenances and the larger conceptual idea of the interconnectedness of our books through their past proximity to one another.

One bookplate shows a hunter’s horn, tied and apparently hanging from a bowed ribbon, on top of a barrel that is lying on its side. The cryptic initials JFTD encircle the horn in a clockwise direction. The second bookplate, pasted on the inside of the front cover, is more clear: a ribbon reading “Sub Tegmine Fagi” (“Concealed Beneath the Beech Tree”) crowns a beech tree that rises from a particolored band. Below this crest is the owner’s name: Henry B. H. Beaufoy, F.R.S. (“F.R.S.” stands for Fellow of the The Royal Society).

Beaufoy (shown below) was likely the book’s first owner. From roughly 1784 through 1843, Beaufoy was one of Europe’s most celebrated and prestigious hot air ballonists; his numerous ascents contributed unprecedented support to the nascent discipline of aeronautics, as well as providing new information to cartographers, meteorologists, and physicists in England and on the continent. Beaufoy was also a great collector of both coins (he wrote a well-regarded book on early English “tokens”) and, more importantly for my purposes, books. Beaufoy collected across a range of topics and genres. Most famously, however, was his assembling together in one library a copy of the first (1623), second (1632), third (1663), and fourth (1685) folios of the plays of William Shakespeare (his library was dispersed at auction by Christie’s in July 1909 and the four folios were eventually split up at auction in July 1912). To put it briefly, then -- and to return to this post’s initial premise -- holding Beaufoy’s copy of A Book for a Rainy Day is likely to be as close as I’ll ever come to all four of the seventeenth century Shakespeare folio collections at once.

Charles Lamb on the Greatest Hits of the Renaissance Stage

My brain this week is stuck in preparatory mode for my doctoral qualifying exams on Friday (yes, that’s right...Friday the 13th) and so this week’s book is related to my exam on the history of the book.

In my exam reading, one particular issue that has caught my attention within the field of editorial studies is the practice of anthologized editions -- how are they assembled and why, what is included and what is excluded, in what order is the material presented, and how are they used? One particular class of anthologized works is the “greatest hits” collection; usually an arbitrary selection of some material that the editor, in his or her subjective judgment, thinks is representative of the period in question.

This week’s book is a late American edition of English poet, critic, and essayist Charles Lamb’s classic of the anthologized Renaissance drama genre: Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakspeare [sic], With Notes. Lamb’s eclectic collection was first published by Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme of London in 1808. My copy was published by Willis P. Hazard of 190 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, PA, in 1856. The title page bills the book as a “New Edition” and presents the contents of the original two-volume set in a single volume. It was printed by Philadelphia book and job printer Henry B. Ashmead, whose substantial, five-story shop was to be found on George Street just above Eleventh Street (that is, at today’s 1104 Sansom Street).

Lamb's book was one of the more popular of several nineteenth-century excursions into the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, going through subsequent editions in London, Philadelphia, and New York in 1808, 1845, 1849, 1854, 1856, 1859, and throughout the twentieth century. As with most of the other anthologies of Renaissance drama from this time, the material selected is almost always couched in explanatory material demonstrating the superiority of Shakespeare -- though Lamb does claim that part of his objective was “[t]o show what we have slighted, while beyond all proportion we have cried up one or two favorite names” (a flaw that modern scholarship has still done relatively little to rectify).

The preface that Lamb provided to the first edition -- and that remained largely unchanged in all of the subsequent editions -- makes his intentions clear; it also indicates how unapologetically intrusive and judgmental the editor was in picking out parts of plays to present and modifying them to suite his tastes (and those, he presumed, of his readers) -- see the third paragraph of the preface in particular. As he puts it, his “leading design” was always “to illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our ancestors”, and he had no qualms about tidying up the texts (though, to be fair, he never goes quite as far as some infamous meddlers did).

The range of material Lamb has selected for inclusion is quite impressive: Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Tailor, Joseph Cooke, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, Anthony Brewer, John Marston, George Chapman, Thomas Heywood, Richard Brome, Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, John Ford, Cyril Tourneur, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, James Shirley, Nathan Field, and the ever ubiquitous “Anonymous”. These writers represent a broad range of dramatic traditions (professional, academic, literary), a relatively wide period of time, and many different genres and styles.

Lamb’s style of presenting the works of these plays consists of selecting choice passages or scenes from various plays and presenting these passages with explanatory headers (often summarizing the passage’s “theme”), annotation including glossarial and critical footnotes, and added stage directions and explanations of action that has been skipped over. The overall effect is rather disjointed and the textual authority of the passages is highly corrupt, though as far as providing access to relatively obscure playwrights and their important works, Lamb did his contemporaries and many later readers a great service.

The pages measure 12cm x 18cm. Ashmead evidently carried out the printing by separating the two volumes into two separate jobs. The pagination of the first volume runs [i]-[xii] [1]-220 and the pagination of the second runs [v]-vi [1]-230; the lack of two leaves at the start of the second volume (that is, pages i-vi) suggests that a dividing, internal half-title and “flyleaf” was meant to be inserted but was for some removed before binding.

The book is printed in octavo, with numeric gathering signatures; on each signed page, there is also an indication of which volume the gathering belongs to (again, suggesting separate but likely simultaneous printing in Ashmead’s shop). The use of machine press seems likely because of the date and the scale of Ashmead’s operation, but the mechanization of the craft has unfortunately resulted in some problems with inking: the type on many pages is often under-inked, blurred, or scarred; indeed, sometimes one page in an opening will be visibly fainter than the facing page -- suggesting the outer and inner formes were being inked separately and not in synchronization.

The binding is a firm hardcover with marbled boards, a leather spine with gilt title, and leather corners. The spine is cracking slightly, especially along the front hinge, and the spine has some damage, but overall the condition is quite good. The only evidence of earlier readers consists of some faint pencil marks next to some of Lamb’s notes, two sentences in his preface, and the title of Ford’s The Broken Heart in the table of extracts in volume two. These may have been made by the same owner who pasted the “Underhill” family bookplate inside the front cover. The bookplate presents the family crest over a Latin phrase that I welcome help with: “Tibimet ipsi fidem praestato”.

Lamb’s book uses the ahistorical “greatest hits” methodology in anthologizing Renaissance drama, though it broadens the field considerably by drawing in a number of works that even most scholars today wouldn't bother reading. Lamb takes the practice to an even higher level of selective control by removing passages from their context and presenting only “extracts”.

This was something that certainly appealed to Lamb’s own predilections as a poet (rather than a scholar, historian, or theatre practitioner) -- he desperately wanted to believe in the discrete, detachable, and discernible nature of poetic genius and its products. Indeed, the practice did not die in the nineteenth century; at least one prominent twentieth-century poet took it up himself to adjudicate on the “essential” poetry of Shakespeare, removing the passages rather brutally from their appropriate dramatic context in so doing.