Intermediating the Book Beautiful: Shakespeare at the Doves Press

This essay combines the arguments of present-day neuroscience about “hard-wired” letter-recognition in the brain and theories of “intermediality” or movement among aesthetic methods of sensory communication with the mystical early twentieth-century theories of bookness, reading, and vision propounded by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, cofounder and codirector of the Doves Press, in order to propose a theory of modern Shakespeare reading as a distinct kind of experience. Specifically, I will argue for the early twentieth-century fine press edition as a critical, as well as an aesthetic, intervention that intermediates public playgoing and private reading. Moreover, I will suggest, specific qualities of bookness, and particular quiddities of type, enable this intermediality. During the process of preparing Hamlet for publication, Cobden-Sanderson—a proponent and developer of the Arts and Crafts movement’s concepts of the Book Beautiful and the Ideal Book—came up with a unique visual solution to its textual irregularities. The history of Shakespeare at the Doves Press; Cobden-Sanderson as an editor; and his type, layout, and editorial interventions in the Doves Hamlet demonstrate the exigencies of what Harry Berger Jr. has called the “imaginary audition” of a printed playtext that we read and of the modern Shakespeare edition.