Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature

Chapter 5. The Custom-Made Corpus: English Collected Works in Print, 1532–1623

c h a p t e r 5 The Custom-Made Corpus English Collected Works in Print, 1532–1623 In 1906, when Alfred W. Pollard reported in The Academy the discovery of two seemingly related quarto compilations, he hit on what would become one of the most enduring mysteries in Shakespeare studies.1 One compilation had surfaced in a German library a few years before, still in its early seventeenthcentury binding; the other had recently been broken up for sale at Sotheby’s. Their ten constituent play texts were identical: the two-part Whole Contention (1619), Pericles (1619), A Yorkshire Tragedie (1619), Merchant of Venice (1600), Midsommer Nights dreame (1600), Merry Wives of Windsor (1619), King Lear (1608), Sir Iohn Oldcastle (1600), and Henry the fift (1608).2 The varied publication dates suggested that the two volumes were reader-assembled Sammelbände. But for Pollard, ‘‘the chances that two collectors, without any determining cause, had bound together precisely the same editions of these plays, without the admixture of any others, seemed very remote.’’ He concluded that the publishers—most visibly, Thomas Pavier, whose imprint is on most of the title pages—had been issuing the plays as a Shakespearean collection. Since the latest publication date among the quartos is 1619, the editions from 1600 and 1608 could only be accounted for by ‘‘supposing that they belonged to unsold stock, and that the news of the forthcoming folio of 1623 caused them to be thrown on the market as what we now call a ‘remainder.’’’3 The mystery of the Pavier Quartos—more popularly, the ‘‘False Folio’’4 — became such when, shortly after Pollard’s discovery, it was determined that these earlier dates were forgeries. In a landmark work of bibliographical forensics , ‘‘On Certain False Dates in Shakespearean Quartos,’’ W. W. Greg replaced the ‘‘remainder’’ hypothesis with a story of piracy that with few exceptions continues to guide critical treatments of the texts.5 Greg’s analysis of the The Custom-Made Corpus 151 watermarks in the collection showed that the individual quartos had been printed on the same mixed stock of paper, all in or around 1619. Pavier, it seemed, owned the rights to only some of the plays and falsified the earlier dates to pass off his illicit reprints as unsold editions. That The Whole Contention and Pericles had been signed continuously, while the other quartos were bibliographically independent, served to Greg ‘‘to show that Pavier was not able to carry through what must . . . have been a rather shady bit of business, wholly without protest from those who conceived their rights to have been invaded.’’6 The subsequent discovery that the Stationers’ Company, also in 1619, issued an order at the request of the Lord Chamberlain to prevent the printing of ‘‘playes that his Majesty’s players do play’’7 hinted again that the quarto compilation was aborted because the folio was in preparation. The Pavier project, it seemed, was a failed collected works of Shakespeare. Figure 27 shows the back page of a particular Pavier quarto, a copy of Henry V now at the Huntington Library.8 The play was rebound individually in the modern era and, like most collectors’ items, purged of any evidence of earlier ownership or circulation. But if you look very carefully at this leaf, you can see a trace of an earlier material arrangement. The trace is not what curators call ‘‘offset,’’ or transferred from page to page while the ink was still curing in the printing house (which is common and easier to see). It is an almost imperceptible darkening of the paper that comes from the oil in ink or its acidity relative to a facing leaf.9 The impression spells out in mirror image ‘‘woman’’ across the top of the page, with a lighter ‘‘k’’ in the line below. A search of texts contemporary with Pavier’s reveals that the image is in fact the title page of Thomas Heywood’s play, A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse (1617), which must have been bound with Henry V for some time in order to leave such a visible mark (Fig. 28). What is surprising here is not the likelihood that two dissimilar quartos were formerly bound in the same volume; this sort of compiling, I have shown, was common practice in earlier periods. It is rather that this particular Shakespearean quarto, thought to be part of Pavier’s collection project, was compiled—or ‘‘admixed,’’ to use Pollard’s term—with a...