Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (review)

In some ways, this book takes me back to ancient times when New Bibliographers roamed the earth, but not because Sonia Massai's work is, in any sense, outdated. These New Bibliographers would scrupulously compare reprints of earlier quartos to copies of the earlier quartos from which the reprints were set into type. The New Bibliographers (myself included) would do so in an effort to detect the errors made by the compositors who set the type for the reprints—say, compositors A and B of the Shakespeare First Folio, who together printed at least one play, 1 Henry IV, directly from an earlier quarto. Yet the endeavors of the New Bibliographers to determine the kinds and frequencies of errors made by particular compositors were complicated by the appearance of differences in the reprints that seemed beyond the capacity of a compositor to introduce. To whom could these interesting differences be attributed? Had someone in the printing house consulted a manuscript source?

Massai has a well-researched and persuasive suggestion about the origin of these readings: readers in the printing houses carefully annotating printed play texts to " 'perfect' " (5) them. By perfect, she means " 'to correct, to make perfect, or faultless' " (6). The origins of such practice she traces to the early sixteenth-century humanists, to Erasmus, More, and More's brother-in-law, stationer John Rastell, whose house produced many of the earliest printed English plays. In letters to Erasmus, we find mention of editors in far-flung publishing houses who were charged with the task of checking printer's copy that Erasmus provided and, when necessary, emending that copy according to their learning. Massai connects this humanist practice to the English printing trade of Shakespeare's time chiefly through the stationer John Wolfe, who apparently worked in Italy and who returned from the Continent to set up a printing house frequented, and sometimes inhabited, by humanist scholars laboring to perfect the copy for Wolfe's books. Although Wolfe did not print or publish English plays, Richard Jones did, and Massai demonstrates his care in perfecting his later editions of Richard Edwards's Damon and Pithias and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine.

According to Massai, the early reprintings of Shakespeare that may have benefited from such editorial attention include "the Wise quartos" (the second and third quartos of Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV); the third (1609) and fourth (?1622) quartos of Romeo and Juliet; the Pavier quartos of 1619, some of which are famously falsely dated; the 1623 First Folio versions of Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labor's Lost, 1 Henry IV, and Much Ado About Nothing; and the 1685 Fourth Folio Coriolanus, from copy that may have been annotated by John Dryden or Nahum Tate.

Massai supports her suggestions by pointing both to surviving copies of play quartos corrected in pen and ink by their readers and to prefaces of early modern English books that invited buyers to correct as they read. Thus historicized, her idea deserves to supplant the New Bibliographic vision of (for example) agents in Jaggard's printing house endlessly comparing theatrical manuscripts to printed quartos of Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labor's Lost to supplement the quartos with the handful of readings that differentiated Folio versions from the quartos. The unhistoricized New Bibliographic notion of these printing-house creatures renders them suspiciously like the New Bibliographers themselves, collating multiple early printings and different copies of the same printing in search of stop-press variants, as modern editors should.

Appropriately, the fruits of Massai's study are some fascinating ontological reflections on editorial practice. Early modern printed texts, she concludes, were understood in their own time in dynamic terms as endlessly perfectible. Thus, they demand of us an editorial practice that can find its way between copy-text editing that figures such printed playbooks in static terms as imperfect renderings of once-perfect authorial originals and unediting. The latter receives the playbooks in equally...