Abstract
Why did Shakespeare not print his own plays? There is a fair consensus that he did not, though 13 of them were printed in his own lifetime, in texts that editors have generally agreed are based on the author’s papers or a good playhouse copy.1 Yet hardly anyone has supposed that Shakespeare actively saw them into print. This is one of those ‘facts’ about Shakespeare’s career usually taken quietly for granted. In the course of this paper I shall review a number of these, arguing that they need to be re-assessed in the light of recent thinking about early modern culture and the place of Shakespeare’s career within it. In particular, I shall be considering: the copyright of play-texts and how it related to their licensing; the relationship between acting companies and their retained playwrights; and the practice of circulating play-texts in manuscript.
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Notes
See, for example, George Walton Williams, ‘The Publishing and Editing of Shakespeare’s Plays’, in William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence, ed. John F. Andrews, 3 vols (New York, 1985), 3: 589–601, 589–90;
Fredson Bowers, ‘The Publication of English Renaissance Plays’, in Elizabethan Dramatists, ed. Bowers, Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, 1987), 62: 406–16, 414. The widely-held assumption that the 1609 text of the sonnets was not sanctioned by Shakespeare and was indeed unauthorized, has been cogently challenged by Katherine Duncan-Jones: see ‘Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets Really Unauthorised?’, RES 34 (1983): 151–71.
Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plagues and Shakespeare’s Theater (Ithaca, NY and London, 1991), p. 17.
See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford, 1923), 3: 177–92;
E. M. Albright, Dramatic Publication in England 1589–1640 (1927; reprint New York, 1971), pp. 217–61; and
G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time (Princeton, NJ, 1971), Chapter 10.
Ann Haaker, ‘The Plague, the Theater and the Poet’, Renaissance Drama, n.s., 1 (1968): 283–306, 298. Text modernized.
Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, ed. J. R. Mulryne, The Revels Plays (London, 1975), xxi and n. 2. In further support of Chambers, see S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, rev. edn (New York and Oxford, 1987), p. 159 and Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plagues and Shakespeare’s Theater, pp. 16–17.
Cited from Joseph Quincy Adams, ed., The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert (New Haven, CT, 1917), p. 24. On the state of the papers left by the Masters of the Revels, see Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: the Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Basingstoke, 1991), pp. 15–16; on Herbert’s distinctive form of entry, see p. 223.
References are to John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. George K. Hunter, The Revels Plays (London, 1975).
See Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1646, 5 vols (London, 1875–94; reprinted New York, 1950), pp. 3: 36, 37,167.
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 46.
See Andrew Gurr, ‘Money or Audiences: the Impact of Shakespeare’s Globe’, Theatre Notebook 42 (1988): 3–14.
See T. H. Howard-Hill, Middleton’s ‘Vulgar Pasquin’: Essays on ‘A Game at Chess’ (Newark, DE, 1995) and esp. ch. 6, ‘The Bridgewater Manuscript and the Evolution of the Text’, for a detailed account of the production of the manuscripts of the play — an account that supposes many more copies than have actually survived.
See F. P. Wilson, ‘Ralph Crane, Scrivener to the King’s Players’, reprinted in The Seventeenth Century Stage, ed. G. E. Bentley (Chicago 1968), pp. 137–55,149.
See S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford, 1970), pp. 125–6;
Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Detroit, 1993), p. 183.
Philip Edwards, Shakespeare: A Writer’s Progress (Oxford, 1987), pp. 21–2. Alfred Hart computed that the average length of a Globe play c.1594–1603 (omitting Jonson and Shakespeare) was 2494 lines: ‘The length of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays’, RES 8 (1932): 139–54.
Virgil K. Whitaker, ‘Note on the Text’, in his Pelican Shakespeare edition of the play, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage, rev. edn (Baltimore, 1969), p. 979.
See Mark Eccles, ‘Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels’, in Sir Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, ed. C. J. Sisson (Cambridge, MA, 1933), pp. 409–506, 462. There is no reason to suppose that Segar would have been lax or unaware of the rules because he was only a deputy; he was a herald and writer, a man of intelligence and integrity and more a friend of Buc’s than his subordinate. Buc was seriously ill throughout 1608 and 1609; Segar was holding the fort for him and had been doing so for several months before he licensed Troilus and Cressida.
See T. H. Howard-Hill, ‘The Evolution of the Form of Plays in English During the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 112–45.
W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1942), p. 147.
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford and New York, 1987), p. 280.
See J. W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139–59. I am aware that the notion of this ‘stigma’ has been challenged (see Stephen W. May, ‘Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical “Stigma of Print”’, Renaissance Papers 1980 [1981]: 11–18), but it remains indisputable that many authors at court or on its fringes inserted apologies of some kind in works that they sanctioned for print, suggesting a degree of embarrassment (however formulaic).
Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), p. 101.
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Dutton, R. (1997). The Birth of the Author. In: Brown, C.C., Marotti, A.F. (eds) Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25994-6_8
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