Browsing Early English Bookstalls

Historians of the book such as Zachary Lesser, Alan Farmer, and Peter Blayney have encouraged us to think about the book trade as a speculative practice and rightly drawn attention to the role that stationers played in the making of early modern drama. To date, however, less attention has been paid to the marketing strategies where the rubber really hits the road—or where the print hits the pavement: the bookstall. We can, for instance, think about the immediate impact made on a shopper’s conscious decision to buy this book rather than that by the other books with which it shared shelf space. Let us begin with, perhaps, the most hypercanonical playtext of the early modern era, Hamlet, and look at the books with which it might have shared space.

The Short Title Catalog’s entry for the second quarto (hereafter “Q2”) of Hamlet is host to a wealth of information about the text. Printed by James Roberts in 1604, this quarto appeared on the shelves of Nicholas Ling’s bookstall in Fleet Street. Further exploration of the Short Title Catalog turned up an additional 24 books printed for Ling between 1600 and 1604, all of which might have been available for purchase in Ling’s shop at the time that Q2 Hamlet appeared on his shelves. Among these 24 texts were an additional six printers with a relationship to Ling’s shop, further widening the scope of theoretical stock on Ling’s shelves. Though Ling worked mostly with printers James Roberts and Valentine Simmes, I also found that Ling was the author of a text that was sold in the shop of John Smethwick—and that Ling had collaborated with three other bookshop owners on different texts between 1602 and 1604: Thomas Bushel, John Trundell, and John Newbury (English Short Title Catalog). This information suggests that it is possible, perhaps even likely, that Ling would stock other books issued by Roberts and Simmes, especially if the books had been commissioned by one of these other shop owners. Indeed, as Zachary Lesser notes in his Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication, a bookseller “could increase his turnover rate by exchanging batches of books with other booksellers, thereby decreasing the number of copies of any particular edition in stock” (33). The records of the other books printed by Roberts and Simmes between 1600 and 1604 corroborates Lesser’s claim. The Short Title Catalog lists a large number of texts that might have been shelved near Q2 Hamlet in Ling’s Fleet Street shop, including the following four lengthily titled plays by Shakespeare: first, the 1600 quarto of The first part of the contention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey and the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the tragical end of the prowd Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable rebellion of Iacke Cade and the Duke of Yorkes first clayme to the crowne, more commonly known to us today as The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth; second, the 1600 quarto of The most lamentable Romaine tragedie of Titus Andronicus; third, the 1602 first quarto of Hamlet; and fourth, the 1604 quarto of The history of Henrie the fourth, vvith the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King, and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henry Hotspur of the north, With the humourous conceits of Sir Iohn Falstaffe (English Short Title Catalog). For the most part, I suspect these other Shakespeare plays were the least interesting of the books surrounding Q2 Hamlet.

Following Lesser’s assertion that booksellers shared their stock with each other, I propose that Q2 Hamlet might have been shelved near a non-fiction quarto printed by Valentine Simmes in 1603, The Earle of Gowries conspiracie against the Kings Majestie of Scotland. Thematic similarities between the two texts suggest that a reader interested in one might be inclined to be interested in the other as well. Though the differences are key, we should not ignore the parallels between The Earle of Gowries conspiracie and Q2 Hamlet. In Hamlet, a sitting monarch is murdered by...