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C h a p t e r 7 Edward Blount, the Herberts, and the First Folio Sonia Massai Recent scholarship has helpfully shown how “ideological commitment was not the sole province of authors but also of printers-publishers,”1 thus qualifying the earlier assumption that “like the grocer and the goldsmith,” early modern stationers “were mainly interested in money.”2 This important shift in our understanding of the active role of textual agents involved in the transmission of early English drama into print has also led to more balanced and nuanced views about Shakespeare’s attitude to dramatic publication. While Lukas Erne has effectively demystified earlier theories about the antagonistic relationship between Shakespeare and his stationers, I have shown how a synergy between aristocratic and textual patronage is more likely to have prompted Shakespeare and his company to release his plays for publication than literary ambition alone.3 By focusing on Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), this essay provides further evidence to demonstrate that the publication of this influential collection required a combination of authorizing strategies associated with Shakespeare’s company, his stationers, and his patrons, rather than the intervention of any of these agents operating in isolation from (or in competition with) each other. In his McKenzie lectures, delivered in Oxford in early 2006, Gary Taylor explains why Shakespeare’s fellow actors and company members John Heminge and Henry Condell, whose printed names feature at the end of the dedication and the address to the reader, are unlikely to have been solely responsible for the planning of the First Folio: “in 1623 Heminge and Condell were two senior leaders of the King’s Men, whose professional relationship with Shakespeare can be traced back to the 1590’s. Heminge and Condell had spent Edward Blount 133 their lifetimes in the commercial playhouses; neither was an author or stationer; they had undoubtedly read many play manuscripts, but we have no reason to suppose that they knew the print world as well as they knew the theatre world.”4 Taylor alternatively believes that William and Isaac Jaggard planned the First Folio, while he assumes that they would not have undertaken the publication of such a large and financially risky project without the timely intervention of the leading London stationer Edward Blount.5 Still, according to Taylor, Blount could offer more than financial backing to the Jaggards. InTaylor’s own words, Blount provided the Jaggards and the other two members of the Folio syndicate, John Smethwick and William Aspley, with “credit in two senses: financial, and epistemological.”6 Besides being a successful stationer, Blount was well educated and well read. He often recommended his books to his readers for their aesthetic and literary value and had built his career and reputation by publishing works by Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, George Chapman, John Florio, Ben Jonson, and other early modern authors, including Cervantes and Montaigne as well as Shakespeare, the “three writers [who],” as Taylor notes, “are still at the foundation of the literary canons of the Spanish, French, and Englishspeaking worlds.”7 The paratextual materials prefaced to the First Folio8 are clearly informed by Blount’s publishing strategies as an upmarket literary stationer. Distinctive features in Blount’s books include the lavish use of ornaments to highlight individual sections of their paratexts and the prominence accorded to dedications . In this respect Blount’s earlier dramatic publications provide a far more relevant link and influential model for Shakespeare’s Folio than the folio edition of Jonson’s Workes (1616, STC 14751). Crucially Blount’s nonce collection of William Alexander’s The monarchick tragedies (1604, STC 343; reissued and enlarged in 1607, STC 344) and Samuel Daniel’s Philotas (included in Certaine small poems, 1605, STC 6239, and reprinted with other works in 1607, STC 6263) include dedications to powerful patrons as well as commendatory poems, while Jonson’s folio foregrounds its commendatory poems.9 Among the dedications included in Blount’s books, the most striking example occurs in the first edition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essayes, translated by John Florio and printed by Valentine Simmes for Blount in 1603 (STC 18041). The imprint is exceptionally placed at the bottom of the verso of the title page, which is entirely taken up by the title of the work and its author’s credentials, while the bottom section of the title page invites the reader to turn the page to discover that the Essayes are “now done into English” (A1) “By him that hath inviolably...

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