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C h a p t e r 9 Shakespeare’s Flop: John Waterson and The Two Noble Kinsmen Zachary Lesser The Two Noble Kinsmen is an oddball among Shakespeare’s printed plays. The 1634 first edition is the only Shakespearean playbook in which the Bard’s name appears on the title page alongside that of another playwright, John Fletcher. It is the only play now generally accepted as Shakespeare’s (at least in part) to have been first printed after the publication of the First Folio. Like Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen seems to have been omitted from the Folio because it was perceived by Shakespeare’s editors John Heminge and Henry Condell as either too collaborative or else perhaps as collaborative in the wrong way.1 But Pericles had, in fact, been included in the first collection of Shakespeare’s works, the abortive Pavier quartos published in 1619, in which it was printed after The Whole Contention with continuous signatures, indicating Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard’s intention to sell them as a unit. And unlike Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen was not “reinstated” as one of the plays added at the end of the second issue of the Third Folio (1664). In all these ways the play is eccentric within the Shakespearean canon. In fact The Two Noble Kinsmen did not appear in print again until 1679, and then as part of the collected works not of Shakespeare but of Beaumont and Fletcher, without so much as a mention of Shakespeare’s involvement. By contrast more than three-quarters of all of Shakespeare’s individually printed plays yielded a reprint within twenty years (sixteen of twenty-one plays). Pericles , that other non-Folio (if not noncollected) Shakespeare play, was one of zachary lesser 178 his biggest hits, running through six editions in under thirty years. In 1660, on the other hand, the publisher Humphrey Moseley was still trying to unload copies of the first edition of Kinsmen, now twenty-five years old.2 For the bestselling dramatist of the English Renaissance, then, The Two Noble Kinsmen was a flop. So too was the play’s publisher John Waterson. In fact, Waterson is a good candidate for the least successful of all Shakespeare’s stationers—perhaps even more of a failure than his contemporary John Norton, discussed in this volume by Alan Farmer. Of course, Waterson’s disastrous career cannot explain the omission of The Two Noble Kinsmen from the First Folio, printed in 1623 just as he began his publishing—working out of the highly successful shop of his father, Simon—with The Duchess of Malfi and a funeral sermon preached by Thomas Howell. But his personal failure may have ensured, or at least contributed to, the failure of The Two Noble Kinsmen as a commodity in the book trade. To understand Shakespeare’s flop, however, we need to begin not with John Waterson but with Simon. The story of the 1634 The Two Noble Kinsmen is indeed a story of kinsmen: like another, considerably more successful Shakespeare play, it stars a dead father who refuses to die, a ghost who exerts a lingering control over his son’s fate. * * * In previous work I have argued that situating a play in the context of its publisher ’s career can reveal how it was read by at least one historical reader, the publisher himself, and how that publisher expected his customers to read it.3 Here I suggest a new way to think about the book trade: investigating early modern print culture from the perspective of the “publishing shop.” By “publishing shop,” I mean to focus our attention on a stationer’s bookshop (location , sign, size, and so forth), his retail stock-in-trade, and his publishing copies—all valuable properties that could be and often were, en masse, willed by father or master to son or apprentice, bought and sold by deed, inherited by a widow, or acquired through marriage to her.4 While the names of the stationers changed as the shop was passed on, the names of the titles they published and of the shop itself often remained the same, taking on a cultural life and meaning of their own above the level of the individual.5 By examining the careers of the men and women who worked the shop across that transition, we can see how the social meaning of the shop itself could persist beyond, and sometimes disrupt, the decisions of any individual stationer...

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