Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections

Thomas Heywood never managed to publish a collection of his plays, but not for lack of trying. In 1632 he prefaced The Second Part of the Iron Age with a note announcing a future reprint: "If the three former Ages (now out of Print,) bee added to these (as I am promised) to make vp an handsome Volumne; I purpose (Deo Assistente,) to illustrate the whole Worke, with an Explanation of all [t]he difficulties, and an Historicall Comment of euery hard name, which may appeare obscure or intricate to such as are not frequent in Poetry." ¹ The almost neurotic repetition of the parentheses suggests a real uncertainty about this project; nevertheless, Heywood is clearly promising a collection of plays, presumably a largish quarto or octavo rather than a folio, and yet a volume that, like Ben Jonson's folio of 1616 or Shakespeare's folio of 1623, was to make a "whole Worke" of a set of plays. ²

This "Worke" never appeared in print, but I begin with it because it offers an important perspective on the cultural work performed by play collections. The play collection represents a decisive innovation in the publishing of plays, one that incorporated the printed play—an ephemeral text, and the record of an even more ephemeral performance—into high culture by presenting it according to the material, typographical conventions of serious literature. ³ Plays became works only in books, and then only in certain kinds of books. In pursuing this recognition, most critics have chosen to focus almost exclusively on the Jonson or Shakespeare folios, that is, on the successful emergence of the performed text into literature. But I will argue that this decision has distorted our sense of the history of dramatic publication by obscuring our recognition of the difficulties that impeded the publishing of plays in collection, and by limiting our sense of the literary collection as the locus of cultural contests. If we write the history of the play collection around Heywood rather than around Shakespeare or Jonson, a very different sense of that history emerges. Heywood's plays resisted the process triumphantly announced by John Heminge and Henry Condell in their epistle to the Shakespeare folio, which they imagine as offering the "maimed, and deformed" bodies of the quarto texts "cur'd, and perfect of their limbes" in one reunited corpus. ⁴ The collection Heywood had in mind would also have been very different from Jonson's folio: instead of presenting its texts as documents of an elite literary culture, it would have endeavored to make that literary culture available to readers "not frequent in Poetry." It would have been the product of an author less autocratic in his relationships with printers, actors, audiences, or readers, and uninterested in limiting the reception of his plays to an audience of scholars or wits.

Even as critics point out the novelty of the Jonson and Shakespeare folios, by always putting them at the center of the print history of the drama they effectively reinscribe a teleological vision of a theater that was always tending toward the literary, a theater that we can recognize as literary, even if it was somehow misrecognized in its time. This version of dramatic history has in large measure been enabled by those two books, both of which articulate a notion of literary authorship belied by the complex textual histories of the plays themselves. The Shakespeare folio invites us to imagine the flawless textual production of a Shakespeare who never blotted a line: in its prefatory material, and especially in Heminge and Condell's epistle, Shakespearean authorship is unified, monolithic, perfect, supremely effortless. ⁵ Jonson's folio, while it foregrounds the labor that has gone into it, similarly constructs a kind of perfect single authorship, emptied of the collaboration and compromise that necessarily inhere in a theatrical text. ⁶ It is in these...