Shakespeare and the Publication of His Plays

In what S. Schoenbaum has called Pope's "most influential contribution to Shakespearian biography," the eighteenth-century poet and critic wrote:

Shakespear, (whom you and ev'ry Play-house bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight,
And grew Immortal in his own despight. ¹

Pope's lines were no doubt instrumental in reinforcing the opinion, soon to be frozen into dogma, that Shakespeare cared only for that form of publication—the stage—which promised an immediate payoff, while being indifferent to the one that eventually guaranteed his immortality—the printed page. Pope, who counted on his writings, in particular the Iliad and Odyssey translations, to earn him gain and glory, may well have taken comfort in the fact that his motives, compared to what he took to be Shakespeare's, were relatively noble. Yet Schoenbaum's suspicion that Pope's lines may tell us more about his own than about Shakespeare's attitude has not kept us from perpetuating Pope's opinion. To argue, as Thomas L. Berger and Jesse M. Lander have done as recently as 1999, that Shakespeare "never showed the least bit of interest in being a dramatic author while he lived" is still the accepted view. ²

Although this view is widely shared, a dissenting voice tried to make itself heard as long ago as 1965, when Ernst Honigmann suggested that we revise "the modern myth of [Shakespeare's] complete indifference to the printing of his plays." ³ If Honigmann's suggestion—in contrast to other theories of his, such as the "early start" chronology, the "lost years" in Catholic Lancashire, and authorial revision—has failed to provoke much debate, this may be because Shakespeareans have not taken seriously what is after all a central component in the publication of playbooks. As Gerald D. Johnson has pointed out, "The economics of the book-trade have been largely ignored by analytical bibliographers and textual critics, whose primary interest is to recover the text of Shakespeare and other key literary figures from the vicissitudes of the printing houses of the period." ⁴ Now that Peter Blayney has taken a fresh look at a series of bibliographical idées reçues that have been gathering dust for most of the twentieth century, we may be equipped to carry out the project for which Honigmann pleaded several decades ago. ⁵

I will first investigate the narratives that have hitherto served to sustain what I take to be a mistaken belief in the players' resistance to the publication of plays. I will then review the publication history of Shakespeare's plays, which suggests that the Lord Chamberlain's Men had a coherent strategy to try to get their playwright's plays into print. Finally, I will inquire into what can or cannot be inferred from Shakespeare's alleged involvement (as with the narrative poems) or noninvolvement (as with the plays) in the publication of his writings.

I

The narratives that have long served to account for the players' alleged reluctance to publish in print—a reluctance overcome only by dire financial need occasioned by plague closings—usually follow one of two lines. E. K. Chambers's opinion can represent the first: "the danger was not so much that readers would not become spectators, as that other companies might buy the plays and act them." ⁶ As Blayney, Roslyn L. Knutson, and Richard Dutton have shown, there is no evidence that anything of the sort happened in London except in a couple of exceptional cases. ⁷

The other reason allegedly keeping the companies from having their plays printed was that the availability of a printed text might reduce attendance at the playhouse. Timothy Murray well exemplifies this line of argument and its possible implications:

Under solvent conditions, the acting companies stored licensed scripts in their archives and withheld them from publication. The theatrical companies believed that the value of a stage play...