Making Shakespeare's Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in The Archives by Jeffrey Todd Knight

Making Shakespeares Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in
the Archives
Jeffrey Todd Knight
Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 3, Fall 2009, pp. 304-340
(Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/shq.0.0095
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of California @ Berkeley (19 Jan 2014 18:31 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shq/summary/v060/60.3.knight.html
Making Shakespeares Books:
Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives
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Bodleian Library is a volume of Shakespeares poetry containing quartos
of Venus and Adonis, Te Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets gathered together by
an eighteenth-century owner named Tomas Caldecott.
1
So highly valued is
this book that it cannot be consulted according to the usual procedures. One
must rst appeal for special permission at Duke Iumfreys Library, then trudge
across Broad Street to the New Library to read it under close supervision in
the Modern Iapers Roomand for good reason. Te volume brings together
rare early editions of its three constituent works: Venus and Adonis and Lucrece
from a 1594 printing and the Sonnets from 1609. Te texts themselves are nearly
awless (or in bibliographical terms, perfect), that is, with no major defects or
latter-day adulterations;
2
their pages have been cropped, washed, and rebound in
stately red morocco with gilt tooling and crisp marbled endpapers. In fact, only a
few scant traces of the books four centuries of use and circulation remain, most
of which are annotations written by modern archivists and connoisseurs. Te
earliest record of provenance is one that Caldecott himself left in the yleaves:
I purchased the contents of this volume June 1796 of an obscure bookseller of
the name of Vanderberg near St. Margarets Church Vestminster. Ie had cut
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2007 conference of the Association of
Literary Scholars and Critics in Chicago and the 2008 annual meeting of the Shakespeare
Association of America in Dallas. I am grateful to the participants at both events and to the
Bibliographical Society of America for a fellowship that helped fund the research. I also thank
Jerey Masten, Stephen Orgel, Bill Sherman, and Vendy Vall for their attention to the
manuscript at various stages of preparation.
1
Bodleian Library MS Arch. G.e.32. According to a note in the rst yleaf, the book was
donated to the Bodleian in 1833. Caldecott was a barrister and prominent collector of works
by Shakespeare. Ie also produced controversial editions of Hamlet and As You Like It in 1819.
2
Tere is, according to the Bodleian catalogue entry, one slight imperfection in the title page
of the Sonnets volume. Te Bodleian catalogue is available online; see the University of Oxford
OLIS (Oxford Libraries Information System) at http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/olis/ (accessed 22
July 2009), searching by individual titles. Te entire volume can be viewed at http://www.
rarebookroom.org/Control/shaluc1/index.html. Unless otherwise specied, dates supplied in
these notes are taken from the Oxford online catalogues.
MAKING SIAKESIEARES BOOKS
305
them with Several others out of a Volume, put each of them separately into blue
paper, and priced them at 4s 5d.
3
Iaradoxically, as Villiam Sherman observes in his recent study of readers
marks (and their erasure), the ideal copy of a rare book today is often a historic
object with most of the traces of its history removed.
4
Tis is especially true
of the surviving early printed texts by Shakespeare. Aside from the occasional
binders or conservators note, we have few reasons to suspect that the generally
uniform, familiar-looking books that we consult in special collections libraries
have ever existed in other congurationsthat ways of using and assigning value
to them have ever been dierent from our own. But Caldecotts Shakespeare
shows evidence of at least three modes of readerly engagement, not a single
overarching one. First, working backward, its current owner, Oxford University,
values the books early imprints and relatively unspoiled condition and protects it
by a special classication number and a curatorial policy granting readers only the
most limited access under highly controlled environments. Second, Vanderberg
and Caldecott, the books eighteenth- and nineteenth-century owners, valued the
texts as collectors items and had no reservation about physically restructuring
them to maximize prot (in the case of the former) or prestige (in the case of the
latter). Tird, and more distantly, there is the evidence of whatever early modern
compilation these items might have undergone before they were split into
individual units and anthologized in a morocco-bound volume in 1796. At each
of these junctures, questions arise about the inuence of archival practices on our
perceptions of Shakespearean texts. Iow does the administration of books for
careful scholarly use in todays libraries conceal the work of earlier readers and
collectors, who were sometimes more likely to reshape such texts according to
their own desires than to venerate them as reservoirs of literary content, frozen
in time. More gravely, how did the work of earlier collectorsin physically
wresting such texts from their contexts, building volumes of Shakespeares
Collected Verseconceal even earlier forms of textual organization that may
have seemed to them unprotable, distasteful, or not worth saving.
Tis essay looks closely at the processes of assembly and reassembly through
which Shakespearean texts, and literary texts in general, are made available
3
For Caldecotts note, see the inner rst yleaf, recto. (No other information about
Vanderberg is known.)
4
Villiam Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Ihiladelphia: U
of Iennsylvania I, 2008), 164. Sherman notes that this is a paradox familiar to curators and
conservators. Stephen Orgel makes a similar point in his discussion of marginalia: One of the
strangest phenomena of modern bibliophilic and curatorial psychology is the desire for pristine
copies of books, books that reveal no history of ownership. See Margins of Truth, in Te
Renaissance Text: Teory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester UI,
2000), 91107, esp. 92.
SIAKESIEARE QUARTERLY
306
and read. Using a range of archival specimens that, like Caldecotts volume,
preserve evidence of engineering and organization by owners but which have
long been of interest only to specialists, I argue that the parameters of reading
and interpretation are frequently established and sometimes imposed by the
collectors, compilers, conservators, and curators who, in a very literal sense,
make books. Vith each new set of attitudes concerning the arrangement and
organization of texts, an earlier set of attitudes is partially concealed, preventing
some reader-text interactions and enabling others. As the specimens examined
here begin to suggest, the problem is acute in the case of early Shakespearean
texts, which were assembled and read in ways that, due to their handling in
the modern era, are not always evident to us today. Before they were extracted
into individual units or bound in gilt-tooled morocco, many such texts existed
in composite volumes, user-initiated anthologies, and topical arrangements of
disparate authors or genres, evoking complex histories of intertextual reading
and reception. But such texts are only available to us now, as Sherman and
others have shown, through the mediations of owners and collectors who
suppress those historieswho (perhaps inevitably) remake what they acquire
according to their own historically situated notion of the book. I contend
that these processes of making and remaking texts help to generate meaning,
establishing links between works in the same binding or dissolving links so
that works stand alone. Moving from the familiar, individuated Shakespearean
texts most often found in libraries today to the radically unfamiliar assemblages
of early print culture, I propose that we might better ground our historical
interpretations, and discover new ones, in the recombinant productions of
Shakespeares readers.
Two lines of inquiry form the basis for this investigation. Te rst is the
broad concern among literary critics of the early modern period to account for
the material supports and representational machinery through which texts
particularly Shakespearean textsare transmitted through time.
5
Following D.
F. McKenzies inuential dictum, forms eect meaning, materialist scholarship
has for nearly two decades shown that textual apparatusesfrom early printed
paratexts to modern classroom editionsare implicated in what a work conveys
and how it is interpreted. Shakespeares poetry and plays have always had a
special place in these discussions because the stakes of editing and reproducing
them are so high.
6
But while compositors, stationers, and editors have been
5
Te most prominent summary discussion of materiality in relation to early modern
literature, and to Shakespeare in particular, is that of Margreta de Grazia and Ieter Stallybrass,
Te Materiality of the Shakespearean Text, Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 25583.
6
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986),
4. For important early treatments of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed apparatuses,
307
exposed as important agents in Shakespearean meaning-making, those most
directly responsible for the conguration and codication of Shakespeares
texts as material forms are less often discussed.
7

Te specimens I examine here
suggest that binding, curatorship, and conservationlike other, better-studied
aspects of textual presentationproduce, rather than simply make available,
literary works to be read. As with editing (or perhaps more fundamentally than
with editing), such practices circumscribe interpretive possibilities within a
recognizable, physical text. Such practices are inevitably subjective; the resulting
text does not transparently re-present a literary work that exists, fully formed,
in advance; it impresses into the structure of that work the values, assumptions,
and biases of those who make it, at each stage of its construction.
Te second, more specic line of inquiry that subtends my investigation is an
emergent desire among literary scholars and bibliographers to challenge what
one recent study calls Romantic-cum-Victorian notions of the organically
whole text.
8
Sustained attention to the historical specicities of literary
production and consumption has led to a growing awareness that early
modern books possessed a uidity or plasticity not found in their modern
counterparts.
9
In many cases, the current conventional denition of a textas
which have become too numerous in the secondary literature to list, see Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling
Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: U of California I, 1988); Arthur F.
Marotti, Irint and the Lyric, in Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca:
Cornell UI, 1995), 20990; Jerey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and
Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UI, 1997), 11355; Evelyn Tribble,
Margins and Marginality: Te Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: UI of
Virginia, 1993); and Vendy Vall, Te Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the
English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell UI, 1993). Te foundational account of the Shakespearean
text as it was ushered into modernity by eighteenth-century editors is by Margreta de Grazia,
Shakespeare Verbatim: Te Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford
UI, 1991). Andrew Murphy has recently oered a comprehensive history of the Shakespearean
printed apparatus in his Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing
(Cambridge: Cambridge UI, 2003).
7
Exceptions can be found in the established elds of provenance research, binding history,
and the history of libraries and book collections. But these elds have generally operated under
the positivist model of book history against which McKenzie argued, investigating owners,
binders, and librarians as important historical channels through which texts are transmitted
but not ultimately as participants in those texts meanings. For the central reference works
in provenance research and binding history, see David Iearson, Provenance Research in Book
History: A Handbook (London: British Library, 1998); and English Bookbinding Styles 1450
1800: A Handbook (London: British Library, 2005).
8
Simon Ialfrey and Tiany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford UI, 2007), 2.
Ialfrey and Stern are concerned with the emphasis on parts over whole texts in the conventions
of performance.
9
Scholars of medieval manuscript culture have long recognized this. As Ralph Ianna
explains, Quite contrary to usual modern expectations about book production, medieval
codices were very frequently neither planned nor executed as (or from) whole volumes, but
308
a discrete entity with unambiguous, stable boundarieshas been shown to
distort earlier practices. McKenzies analysis of the early modern printing house
long ago dispensed with the erroneous assumption that a book was normally
put into production as an independent unit.
10
Vorks were printed in parts,
often across multiple presses, and were put together in nonuniform ways that
vex attempts to describe a standardized practice. More recently, scholars have
turned to evidence of reading and book use to show that texts were similarly
put together (and taken apart) after the initial sale.
11
Juliet Fleming, Villiam
Sherman, and Adam Smyth have demonstrated that early modern readers
cut, combined, and collaged printed texts with relatively little compunction, a
practice that runs counter to the modern concept of the book as a xed totality.
12

Alexandra Gillespie and Seth Lerer have found similar attitudes at work in the
sixteenth century, where printed books were still being treated like the malleable
manuscript anthologies that were so much a part of medieval culture.
13
Early
Tudor book owners, Gillespie explains, were liable to imagine what we describe
as a printed edition as something readily divided into parts.
14
Like manuscript
compilers, they fractured and recombined works into Sammelbndevolumes
containing multiple printed texts arranged to suit individual tastesand their
activities were facilitated by early printers, who designed literary products that
rather were uid, developing entities. See Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and
Teir Texts (Stanford: Stanford UI, 1996), 7.
10
D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: Printers of the Mind and Other Essays, ed. Ieter D.
McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S. J. (Amherst: U of Massachusetts I, 2002), 42.
11
Te idea of book use developed out of the history of reading and particularly studies of
marginalia. Tese studies established that early modern reading habits were active and goal
directed. See Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, Studied for Action: Iow Gabriel Iarvey
Read Iis Livy, Past and Present 129 (1990): 3078. Other important recent accounts include
Ieidi Brayman Iackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy
(Cambridge: Cambridge UI, 2005); Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Teory:
15001700 (Chicago: U of Chicago Library, 2005); and Sherman, Used Books.
12
See Adam Smyth, Rend and teare in peeces: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-
Century England, Seventeenth Century 19 (2004): 3652. Juliet Fleming, Sherman, and Smyth
expanded this notion of textual fragmentation in a series of panels on Te Renaissance Collage
at the 2007 Renaissance Society of America meeting and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
An edited collection by the same title is also forthcoming.
13
Alexandra Gillespie, Ioets, Irinters, and Early English Sammelbnde, Huntington Library
Quarterly 67 (2004): 189214, and Caxtons Chaucer and Lydgate Quartos: Miscellanies from
Manuscript to Irint, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12 (2000): 125;
and Seth Lerer, Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology, PMLA 118
(2003): 125167, and Medieval Literature and Early Modern Readers: Cambridge University
Library Sel. 5.515.63, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97 (2003): 31132. For
a comprehensive account of the miscellany as the preeminent form of textual production in the
Middle Ages, see Te Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen
G. Nichols and Siegfried Venzel (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan I, 1996).
14
Gillespie, 209.
309
might be shaped and reshaped into all sorts of dierent books.
15

Lerer traces
the development of this anthologistic impulse from the Middle Ageswhen
anonymous assemblages of text were the ruleto readers in the sixteenth century,
who continued to compile Sammelbnde despite the supposed ascendancy
of the self-enclosed text. Vell into the rst decades of print, he notes, the
anthologistic impulse controlled much of the dissemination, marketing, and
critical reception of vernacular English writing. Even when individual copies of
major, authored poems were produced, contemporary or later readers could bind
them together with other works, creating clusters of literary writing.
16
Indeed, as Iaul Needham explains, Until the nineteenth century, generally
speaking, there was no such thing as a ready-bound edition, corresponding
to the clothbound books with which we (in English-speaking countries) are
familiar today.
17

In the hand-press era, booksor at least the small-format
books that contained works of vernacular literaturewere most often sold
unbound or temporarily stitched together, congured by the reader according
to his or her needs.
18
Te cost of bindings relative to the texts themselves was
high, which meant that works rarely stood alone in self-enclosed units but were
mixed with other works to save money.
19
As a rule, then, printed books were
unique, customizable objects. But this customizability is no longer as visible
in archives today.
20
Most texts have passed through the hands of modern
collectors and owners who, knowingly or not, remade them according to their
own denition of the book: slim, perfect, individually bound. Iarticularly in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, texts of exceptional value were cut out of
old covers and put into new ones, erasing evidence of earlier reading practices
(as the example of Vanderberg so clearly illustrates).
21
Such texts, whether in
15
Gillespie, 209. For a concise denition of Sammelbnde, see Lerer, Medieval Literature and
Early Modern Readers.
16
Lerer, Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology.
17
Iaul Needham, Te Printer and the Pardoner: An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William
Caxton for the Hospital of St. Mary Rounceval, Charing Cross (Vashington, DC: Library of
Congress, 1986), 17.
18
See Iearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 12. Te notion that texts in this period were sold
unbound has recently been questioned by critics and historians. Many large-scale, folio-sized
books were, it seems, sold bound. For the most prominent revisionist account, which traces the
rise of the ready-bound book in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Stuart
Bennett, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles 16601800 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2004).
19
On the cost of bindings and texts, see I. E. Bell, Te Irice of Books in Medieval England,
Library, 4th ser., 17 (193637): 31232. Again, this habit of binding together books was most
common with smaller formats like quartos and octavos, which would have been impractical to
bind individually.
20
On the reform of early printed books at the hands of modern collectors and curators, see
also Stephen Orgel, Margins of Truth; and Sherman, Used Books, 15178.
21
Needham, 18. Needham specically discusses Caxtonian Sammelbnde as a case study.
310
individual or institutional collections, were subjected to restructuring: Leaves
were washed, bleached, and pressed, to remove stains and annotations. . . . edges
were trimmed and gilded; modern covers of various inappropriate designs were
put on.
22
Te result, Needham concludes, is the early printed book familiar in
archives todaybut it is something smaller, thinner, meaner, and less honest
than what had been before.
23
Shakespeare oers a particularly illuminating case study in the emerging
question of how printed books were made (and unmade) by readers. As
common sense might suggest, the likelihood that a text has undergone the
structural renovations outlined by Needham is directly proportionate to how
valuable it seemed to modern owners and collectors. Texts now considered
literary often reach us as the most heavily processed of all early printed
materials (the periods lower-prestige, nonliterary books are far more frequently
found in original bindings and unkempt Sammelbnde). Vithin that literary
subset, plays by Shakespearewhich Tomas Bodley notoriously ranked with
all other dramatic texts as the rie-raes and baggage bookes to be excluded
from his library
24
were eventually of the utmost value and thus subject to
forms of bibliographical intervention which may have come into fashion. As
a result, the surviving archive of Shakespearean texts has a particularly varied
morphology, though it is one that has been oversimplied, or suppressed, by
modern collecting practices.
A representative example is the sole copy of the so-called sixth quarto of
Pericles (1635) now held at the British Library.
25
Like many extant Shakespeare
plays, the text is trimly bound in morocco as if to adorn a gentlemans shelf in the
nineteenth century. In fact, the book was one of many bequeathed to the library
by David Garrick at his death in 1779. It owes its neat, modern appearance to
the British Museum bindery, where the book was given new covers (tooled in
gold with Garricks coat of arms) in the century after its donation. Tough the
librarys catalogue lists the text as an individual itemwith no notes in the
entry suggesting anything to the contraryearlier catalogues from Garricks
22
Needham, 18. In his appendix B, Needham lists all known Caxtonian Sammelbnde, along
with the stories of their being dismantled and transformed into individually bound books in
modern collections, including those of book dealers, individual owners, and large institutional
archives such as the British Library.
23
Needham, 18.
24
On Bodleys exclusion of dramatic texts from his library, see Ieidi Brayman Iackel,
Rowme of Its Own: Irinted Drama in Early Libraries, in A New History of Early English
Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia UI, 1997), 11330,
esp. 113.
25
British Library (BL) C.34.k.41. Te sixth quarto designation is technically inaccurate, as
the text is an octavo. Sixth edition would perhaps be more accurate, but to avoid confusion I
have followed the traditional nomenclature.
311
collection reveal a dierent picture.
26
Before it was rebound in the nineteenth
century, Pericles was one part of a larger compilation; and this volume, otherwise
left mostly intact, retains an eighteenth-century table of contents originally
written in the yleaves that conrms the arrangement of texts in Garricks time
(Figure 1).
27
To say the least, these are strange bedfellows: a morality play called
Te Conict of Conscience (1581), an interlude called New Custom (1573), the
sometime Shakespeare history play Edward the Tird (1599), John Marstons
Antonios Revenge (1602), Pericles, Gorboduc (1575), and the comedy Albumazar
(1634).
28
Such groupings were not arbitrary, despite their seeming unevenness.
Garrick was an avid collector who assembled a wide-ranging library of dramatic
texts, most of them in composite volumes, for his own use and others.
29
Tis
volume, one of the few to survive the nineteenth-century rebinding campaigns
at the British Museum,
30
bears the traces of its shifting shapes and uses. Te
contents list indicates that Garrick at one point moved Albumazar to another
volume (likely as he adapted it for the stage
31
). Moreover, a second contents
list (Figure 2) written on the back page of Antonios Revenge indicates that this
composite book has origins in an even earlier composite book whose texts were
reshaped and redistributed throughout Garricks collection. Te earlier hand is
that of the seventeenth-century collector and former owner, Richard Smith,
32

and the superseded arrangement of texts is even more peculiar: sixteenth-
century interludes mixed with Stuart masques and Restoration comedies;
works from authors as dierent as John Bale, Ben Jonson, George Chapman,
26
A manuscript catalogue, produced around 1778 by Edward Capell, is preserved in the
British Library under shelf mark 643.l.30. An informative printed edition is also available;
see George M. Kahrl with Dorothy Anderson, Te Garrick Collection of Old English Plays: A
Catalogue with an Historical Introduction (London: British Library, 1982).
27
BL C.21.b.40.
28
Te dates listed here follow the table of contents (see Figure 1).
29
On Garrick as a book collector, see Kahrl and Anderson, Garrick Collection, Introduction,
172; and George Vinchester Stone Jr. and George M. Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical
Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UI, 1979), 165. As Stone and Kahrl indicate, little
book-historical attention has been paid to Garricks collecting habits and the composition of
his volumes.
30
Te Garrick collection was dispersed because of the British Museums policy of classifying
books not by donor, but by subject. Early on, many of Garricks books were disbound in order
to sell duplicate copies. In the nineteenth century, faced with a disintegrating collection, librarian
Anthony Ianizzi embarked on a wholesale rebinding campaign that transformed most of the
composites into individually bound books (Kahrl and Anderson, 184).
31
Garrick revived the play in 1747 and produced his own adaptation in 1773. See Iarry
Villiam Iedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann, eds., Te Plays of David Garrick . . ., 7 vols.
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UI, 198082), 7:428n.
32
Many of Garricks plays were originally owned by Iumphrey Dyson; after Dysons death
in 1632, his collection passed to Richard Smith. Smith died in 1675, after which many of his
plays found their way to Garrick (Kahrl and Anderson, 184).
312
Figure 1: An eighteenth-century contents list from BL C.21.b.40, listing seven plays bound into
one volume. British Library Board. All rights reserved.
Figure 2: A seventeenth-century contents list from BL C.21.b.40, indicating an even earlier
arrangement of texts. British Library Board. All rights reserved.
313
and Matthew Medbourne.
33
Tese composites stand in stark contrast to the
slim, modern-looking Pericles, whose status relative to the other texts is now
encoded in its ne binding. Tat it once formed part of an eighteenth-century
assemblage of texts, itself once a component of a seventeenth-century group of
texts, is made all but imperceptible by an imposed nineteenth-century notion of
its xity, autonomy, and canonicity.
For generations of collectors and owners whose legacy is still visible in
archives, the relatively exible composite volume was the most conventional,
practical means of storing and using most kinds of literary texts.
34
But as artifacts
of literary historyartifacts conveying a range of possibilities for intertextual
reading and canon formation not readily obvious to usthese composite
volumes have not been closely examined by scholars. One reason for this neglect
is a tendency to see intellectual activity as something independent of archival
infrastructurea tendency that is perhaps evident in a gure like Garrick, whose
revivals and adaptations have been shown to inuence modern interpretations
of Shakespeares plays but whose methods of reading and organizing the texts
that presumably facilitated those revivals and adaptations have hardly been
explored at all. Te fundamental reason for this neglect, however, is clear in the
fate of Garricks Pericles: despite the ubiquity of seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century composite volumes, Shakespeares works are rarely found in them. In the
modern era, prestigious literary textsthe works that attract the most critical
attentionwere almost systematically extracted, decontextualized, and clothed
anew in material congurations that reect little history of ownership or use.
Vhere a Shakespearean text can be found in an undisturbed composite volume,
it is most often one of the apocryphal or otherwise noncanonical texts. At St.
Johns College, Cambridge, for example, there is a mid-seventeenth-century
volume combining eight books of controversial religious and political prose
with a copy of Te Birth of Merlin (1662), a play attributed to Shakespeare and
33
Te contents, in order, are Villiam Davenant, Luminalia (1637); John Caryl, Te English
Princess (1667); George Digby, Elvira (1667); Abraham Bailey, Te Spightful Sister (1667);
Matthew Medbourne, Te Converted Twins (1667); George Chapman, Te Blind Beggar of
Alexandria (1598); Tomas Ieywood, How Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1630);
Villiam Rowley, A Shoemaker a Gentleman (1638); John Bale, Te Chief Promises of God (1547);
Tomas Norton and Tomas Sackville, Gorboduc (1575); and Ben Jonson, Te Case Is Altered
(1609). All except Gorboduc are traceable to dierent volumes in Garricks library. Dates for all
these works are taken from the British Librarys Integrated Catalog, online at http://catalogue.
bl.uk (accessed 23 July 2009).
34
Te obvious exceptions are folio-sized works, but even texts in larger formats found their
way into composite books. Needham (17) also argues that the common phrase tract volume,
which suggests pamphlets or other ephemera, is not adequate to cover most kinds of early
modern compilation.
314
Rowley (Figure 3).
35

St. Johns College, Oxford, preserves a similar example: an
eighteenth-century collection (with an original hand-written table of contents)
bringing together a diverse array of plays, masques, and pageants, including
the 1662 Birth of Merlin text and the second quarto of Te Merry Devil of
Edmonton (1612), a play also attributed on its title page to Shakespeare.
36
In
fact, a cursory survey of the extant copies of these two noncanonical plays at the
British Library, Oxford, and Cambridge shows that over half occur in composite
congurations. Ilays with less dubious canonicity almost never do.
37

Te
implication is something of a bibliographic corollary to a point made by Stephen
Orgel: the authentic Shakespeare is often one furthest removed (in this case,
literally) from its early contexts of reception and circulation.
38
Caldecotts volume of collected verse is thus both symptomatic and
anomalous in modern economies of collecting and archiving: symptomatic
in that its highly valuable texts were extracted from a larger, earlier book and
placed into individual units (by Vanderberg), anomalous in that the volume
has survived this long in its present composite state (engineered by Caldecott).
Given the taxonomic pressures evidently placed on such volumes over time,
the books longevity is most likely attributable to the fact that its constituent
texts share the same author and genrecriteria which easily square with
modern habits of textual organization, precluding, at least in part, the need
for reconguration. Many like it, as the volumes in the Garrick collection
attest, were not so fortunate. A similarly instructive case can be found in the
collection of one of Garricks contemporaries, Villiam Iunter, now housed
at the Glasgow University Library.
39
Iunter, an anatomist and celebrated
35
St. Johns College, Cambridge, Gg.3.42. A full listing of contents is available in the
Cambridge catalogue, online at http://ulmss-newton.lib.cam.ac.uk/ (accessed 5 July 2009). Te
volume was owned by Charles Otway, whose library came into the colleges possession in two
bequests: one during 168335 and the other at his death in 1721. Many of Otways books are
organized in this way.
36
St. Johns College, Oxford, IB4 / 16.a.2.15. Te volume, probably bound in the eighteenth
century, contains thirteen texts, including works by Ieywood, Tomas Sackville, Marlowe, and
John Shirley. For a full listing of contents, see the OLIS catalogue (http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/
olis/).
37
I base my gures on the English Short-Title Catalogue, online at http://estc.bl.uk (accessed
23 July 2009). Of the entries with copy-specic information, four of seven early copies of Te
Merry Devil of Edmonton and three of ve early copies of Te Birth of Merlin exist in composite
volumes at these three archival centers in the United Kingdom. Early copies of the more
canonical Shakespearean plays survive in multitext volumes almost exclusively in special cases,
such as in Edmund Malones collection of dramatic texts at the Bodleian Library.
38
Stephen Orgel, Te Authentic Shakespeare, Representations 21 (1988): 125.
39
Iunter died in 1783, four years after Garrick. Te Iunterian collection arrived at the
University of Glasgow in 1807. A full contents list of the Collection is available in the Glasgow
University Library Catalogue, online at http://eleanor.lib.gla.ac.uk (accessed 9 July 2009).
315
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316
book collector, acquired a number of early modern literary texts at auction,
and as his surviving manuscript catalogue indicates, the majority of these were
formerly in composite congurations.
40
Figure 4 shows the typical appearance
of a composite volume from the Iunterian collection today: once made up of
many texts, it has been split into individual units, each unit uniformly rebound
in twentieth-century calf. Of the volumes containing Iunters early editions
of Shakespeares works, all but one were reshaped in this way.
41
Among them
was a collection of thirteen Elizabethan and early Jacobean texts comprising
40
Glasgow University Library (GUL) Gen. 1312. It seems that the only early modern literary
texts from Iunters collection that were individually bound during his lifetime were large-scale
works like Miltons Paradise Lost. Te majority of his literary holdings, however, were small-scale
quartos and octavos.
41
Te only one that was not reshaped (although apparently it was rebound) was GUL
Sp. Coll. Iunterian Co.3.22, which contains a 1629 quarto of Richard III with four non-
Shakespearean plays.
Figure 4: GUL Sp. Coll. Iunterian Co. 3.33, formerly a compilation of eleven early printed plays
bound as one volume. Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department.
317
masques, entertainments, two comedies by Jonson, and histories, including
quartos of 1 and 2 Henry IV.
42
Another volume formerly combined works by
Ihilip Massinger, John Ford, Tomas Middleton, and others with the sixth
quarto of Shakespeares Richard II (1634).
43
Still another, which seems to have
served as a custom-built collected works, contained ten playsthemselves
already amalgamsby Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, including a copy
of Te Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare.
44

Tese are now unbound, resembling the modernized texts pictured in Figure 4.
Yet Iunters less valuable Shakespearean texts seem not to have called for the
same treatment. One late copy of Hamlet (1676) was left in a tract volume (the
modern term for a compilation of cheap or ephemeral texts bound together)
containing over twenty printed books and manuscripts on subjects as diverse
as the pay of British land forces, Iorace, and reform eorts at Oxford.
45
In
cases like this, it was not the Shakespearean text but the manuscripts that were
extracted in the twentieth century and were given a new classication.
46
Behind the modern-looking, individually bound book, then, lies a signicantly
wider range of material contexts in which Shakespeares works might be
encountered. Te dierence, as it pertains to the activities of collectors from
the late seventeenth century onwards, is a curatorial one; where once it was
acceptable, even necessary, to bind rare books into larger volumes in order
to ensure their preservation, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the
same books disbound and reshaped into individual units for precisely the same
reason.
47
But such practices, as we have seen, go beyond mere preservation; they
reify notions of a texts canonicity, and they selectively impose the value systems
and expectations of a given moment in the history of collecting. An autonomous
Shakespearean text is thus, in most cases, a desired Shakespearean text, freed
from the clamor of intertextuality and resubmitted to later readers shorn of its
history. Such texts reect and reinforce notions of stylistic unity, authenticity,
and other desires that, today, seem intrinsic to the work. Te anthologies and
42
GUL Sp. Coll. Iunterian Co.3.27.
43
44
45
46
Te volume survives in its original binding with an eighteenth-century table of contents
listing several manuscripts that are now absent from the volume. To take one example, item 10, a
play in manuscript called Te Female Rebellion, was extracted sometime in the twentieth century
and placed in the manuscripts sequence as GUL MS Iunter 635. My thanks to Julie Gardham,
Senior Assistant Librarian, Special Collections Department, Glasgow University Library, for
her generous help with this and the other Iunterian volumes.
47
A text is more prone to damage the more it is handled; a text in a composite book is likely
to be handled unnecessarily, as readers leaf through it to nd another text. In the last half-
century, the practice of disbinding composite books has fallen out of favor.
318
multitext volumes of earlier owners manifest a dierent set of desiresdesires
less familiar to us because of biases inherent in modern ways of making (and
making available) Shakespeares books.
Moving back before the work of modern collectors, for whom early printed
texts were secondhand acquisitions, to that of Shakespeares rst readers, for
whom rarity, exchange value, and conservation were less determining factors, we
nd similar principles of assembly reecting bias in the structure of books
although the bias is of a dierent kind. Figure 5 displays a manuscript table of
contents from a composite volume of early printed plays now held at the Folger
Shakespeare Library.
48
Te volume, which contains copies of Shakespeares
1 Henry IV (1632) and Richard III (1629), resembles the collections of play
quartos explored above, except that it was bound up much earlier, shortly after
the date of its latest imprint, 1635. Te reader, who likely bought most or all of
the texts himself, seems to have been interested in the lives of the major political
gures of the past.
49
Alongside the two history plays by Shakespeare are, among
others, Tomas Ieywoods Te First and Second Parts of King Edward the Fourth
(1626); Te Troublesome Raine of King John (1622), attributed to Shakespeare;
Jonsons Catiline (1635); George Chapmans Caesar and Pompey (1631); the
anonymous Tragedy of Nero (1633); and Ieywoods two-part play Te Troubles
of Queen Elizabeth (1632).
50
Tis arrangement, one of the few to have escaped modernization, may reect
the same desire to preserve that would motivate eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century collectors to construct similar composite volumes. But it also reects
the more immediate bias of readerly selection, the buyer having chosen the texts
and commissioned the binding at initial sale, not in accordance with the dictates
of a preexisting literary canon, but out of his or her own intellectual preferences
or needs. Vhere the value systems of modern collectorsGarrick, Villiam
Iunter, the British Libraryare often hidden in seemingly neutral curatorial
practices, those of rst-hand readers are visible in the artifact itself. Like the
48
Folger Shakespeare Library (FSL) STC 4619. Because the Folger catalogues its early
printed books by STC number, the composite volumes in its collection have multiple call
numbers, one for each imprint. I follow the Folger catalogue in listing the rst call number as the
main one; all others can be found by consulting the bd. w. (bound with) tag in each catalogue
entry. My thanks to Steven Galbraith, Andrew V. Mellon Curator of Books, and J. Franklin
Mowery, Eric Veinmann Iead of Conservation, Folger Shakespeare Library, for their help with
this and all other Folger volumes discussed below.
49
Galbraith describes the binding of STC 4619 as contemporary; Mowery estimates that it
dates from the 1630s to midcentury, likely close to 1635 (the date of the latest imprint in the
collection) (e-mail from Steven Galbraith, 29 February 2008).
50
Te Troubles of Queen Elizabeth is often referred to by its subtitle, If You Know Not Me,
You Know Nobody.
319
Figure 5: An early seventeenth-century book comprising fifteen plays and entertainments. Inside
front cover, Clum Britanicum. A Masque at White-Hall in the Banquetting-House . . . (STC
4619). From Folger Shakespeare Library.
320
personal anthologies unearthed in an earlier periods literature by Lerer and
Gillespie, the collection documents one readers interest and taste, impressed
into the comparatively malleable structure of an early modern codex.
Bibliographical formations from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
where they were left to stand in contemporary bindings, consistently exceed
modern notions of the self-enclosed, single-text book; their patchwork states
often have less to do with preservation or stabilization than with prevailing
norms of direct readerly involvement. As historians and literary critics have
pointed out, the material conditions of book production in the hand-press
era compelled readers to take an active role in the structure of texts from the
moment of purchase.
51
Before books were commonly sold ready bound, it
was the consumer who made executive decisions that are now the province of
producerswhich texts to include in a binding, how to organize them, and
what packaging would create the most serviceable volume for the purpose at
hand. Texts could be interleaved with blank pages or bound with manuscript
quires to accommodate later additions, such as hand-written indexes, scholarly
notes, or other texts.
52
Material could also be subtracted or turned to dierent
purposes, paper (especially the blank paper which made up the yleaves and
margins) being expensive and unlikely to go to waste.
53
Even after the initial
sale and ownership, texts continued to be seen as radically customizable
and subject to change, as later owners often preferred to impose their own
congurations and bindings instead of accepting what came before. Ierhaps the
most visible evidence of this attitude is preserved in title pages from the period,
which routinely advertise texts as enlarged, annexed to other texts, digested,
reorganized, or outtted with new and improved apparatuses. It might be
argued that mutability and exibility, not stability or perfection, made printed
books desirable to their earliest readers.
Shakespeares books were no exception. Of the surviving assemblages of
early printed material containing one or more works by Shakespeare, many,
like the historical-lives volume above, have a clear thematic coherence: they
comprise a set of individual books, sold unbound, organized into an anthology
51
See Iearson, English Bookbinding Styles, 12; and Smyth, 44.
52
On practices of interleaving and supplementing printed books with manuscript material,
see Iackel, Reading Material, 142. On the customization of books more generally, see Villiam
I. Sherman, Vhat Did Renaissance Readers Vrite in Teir Books. in Books and Readers
in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer
(Ihiladelphia: U of Iennsylvania I, 2002), 11937.
53
As Sherman explains, paper was relatively expensive in the STC period and accounted for
much of the cost of a bookwhich meant that, unlike today, the scraps of paper most readily
available for miscellaneous notes were those which surrounded printed texts (Vhat Did
Renaissance Readers Vrite in Teir Books. 131).
321
or a collection based on their associated content. But more practical schemes
of organization are also apparent in these compilations. Texts of similar size
or works printed by the same shop were frequently bundled together, creating
volumes of consistent form but inconsistent content (a practice rooted in
incunabular culture).
54
Texts sold in segmentsfor example, multipart plays
or works with continuationsseem to have encouraged readers to generate
composite volumes. One volume now at the Folger combines 1 Henry IV (1604)
and 2 Henry IV (1600) into a single contemporary binding, with a provenance
traceable to the seventeenth-century owner who had them bound.
55
Other
methods of organizing such texts were idiosyncratic and depended on where
they were to be used. Te archiepiscopal library at Lambeth Ialace, for example
(which took no great interest in literary texts), bound small-format books like
Shakespeares into compilations by publication year, each volume serving as a
partial record of that years printed output or perhaps that years purchase. Tis
yearbook approach to text management seems to have roots in Archbishop
Matthew Iarkers collecting habits; at Lambeth and in Iarkers library at
Cambridge, it produced an abundance of exible, parchment-bound resource
anthologies indierent to modern distinctions between literary and nonliterary,
canonical and ephemeral.
56

Vhen the archiepiscopal library acquired a copy of
2 Henry IV, then, it bound the play with other material printed in 1600. Te
Shakespearean text became the fth of six booklets in one binding, including
the verse tribute to Queen Elizabeth E. W. His Tameseidos, the political poem
Englands Hope, against Irish Hate, a declaration of war by the King of France
against the Duke of Savoy, and two collections of funerary elegies.
57
Sure
54
On incunable bundling, see Lucy Lewis, For no text is an island, divided from the main:
Incunable Sammelbande, in Light on the Book Trade: Essays in Honour of Peter Isaac, ed. Barry
McKay, John Iinks, and Maureen Bell (London: British Library, 2002), 1326.
55
FSL STC 22282 (bound with STC 22288a). Te seventeenth-century owner was
Tomas Twisden.
56
Matthew Iarkers Renaissance library is now preserved at Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge. Like the archiepiscopal library at Lambeth, it has generally survived the rebinding
campaigns of modernity intact. Iarkers library catalogue includes a special section for
these anthology-like volumes, which Iarker obviously used in his research, labeled Bookes
in parchement closures as the lye on heapes (Iarker Register, Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge, MS 575). See Bruce Dickins, Te Making of the Parker Library: Sandars Lectures . . .
(Cambridge: Cambridge UI, 1969); and R. I. Iage, Matthew Parker and His Books: Sandars
Lectures (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1993).
57
Lambeth Ialace Library 1600.22. During the revolution, the volume was sent to Cambridge
along with the other Lambeth books, where the librarians recatalogued it only by its rst text.
Cambridge readers thus knew the volume as E. V. his Tameseidos and others, as it is listed
in the class catalogue there. A full list of contents for 1600.22 is available in the Lambeth Ialace
Library Irinted Books Catalogue, LAMILIT, online at http://80.169.35.3:8080/ipac20/ipac.
jsp.prole (accessed 23 July 2009).
322
enough, when attitudes toward books began to shift in modernity, this volume
was remade according to the systems of literary value outlined above. But this
time it was a thief, not a dealer or owner, who separated the Shakespeare book
from the others, leaving a gap in the binding that is visible today.
58
Ve can now turn to Henry IV as a way to consider the interpretive
implications of these patterns of assembly. In examining Iunters collection at
Glasgow, I identied a volume, now disbound, that once contained comedies,
masques, and histories, including two Shakespeare texts, 1 and 2 Henry IV.
Such an assemblage would square with current critical consensus: that the plays
blend history with comedy, evoking a world in which, as David Scott Kastan
has shown, Exuberance and excess will not be incorporated into the stabilizing
hierarchies of the body politic.
59
But another volume that I describe above,
the Folger lives compilation from the 1630s, presents a dierent readerly
context, bringing 1 Henry IV together with Richard III, Te Troublesome Raine
of King John, Chapmans Caesar and Pompey, Ieywoods Troubles of Queene
Elizabeth, and other plays concerned with political gures and the (frequently
vexed) maintenance of power. In this volume, we might speculate, the subversive
energies of Falsta and Eastcheap would be more easily eclipsed by the problem
of succession and Ienrys tenuous control over his territories. Moreover,
this Lambeth volume, assembled by the archiepiscopal librarians, brings the
play even further into the realm of ideological orthodoxy. Te juxtaposition
produced by binding texts together highlights two related themes that are
central to Shakespeares second tetralogyaging rulers and the containment
of rebellion. Tameseidos (1600), written at a moment of great anxiety over
succession, pleads with an aging Elizabeth to Liue thou for euer: . . . to
maintaine Artes, as hitherto thast done; / For wayle the Muses must when thou
art gone.
60

Te two books of elegies mourn the death of Sir Ioratio Iallavicino,
the Elizabethan intelligencer, aristocrat, and nancier of Englands wars.
61
And
the two political pamphlets concern Irish and French rebellion over land.
62

Taken in such a context, it is dicult to imagine how Falstas exuberance at the
58
According to the Lambeth catalogue notes, the copy of 2 Henry IV disappeared shortly
after Vorld Var II.
59
David Scott Kastan, Te King hath many marching in his Coats, or, Vhat Did You Do
in the Var, Daddy. in Shakespeare after Teory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 12948, esp. 136.
60
[Edward Vilkinson,] E. W. his Tameseidos Deuided into Tree Bookes, or Cantos (London:
V. Vhite for Simon Vaterson, 1600), sig. D2r.
61
An Italians Dead Bodie, Stucke with English Flowers. Elegies, On the death of Sir Oratio
Pallauicino (London: Tomas Creede for Andrew Vise, 1600), sig. B2r. On Iallavicino, see
Lawrence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (Oxford: Clarendon I, 1956).
62
Englands Hope, against Irish Hate (London: V. V. for Tomas Ieyes, 1600) is a virulently
anti-Irish poem about the Nine Years Var. Te Kings Declaration and Ordinance Containing the
Cause of His Warre against the Duke of Sauoy (London: Iohn Flasket, 1600) concerns Ienri IVs
323
Kings death in 2 Henry IV[T]he laws of England are at my commandment
(5.3.12526)
63
could elicit anything but the readers contempt. Indeed, in this
archiepiscopal anthology, the pathos of the nal scenes might well reside not in
Ials repudiation of Falsta, but in the Epilogues appeal to pray for the Queen
(l. 30).
In all of these cases, the reader has created a rubric for interpretation that we
can begin to theorize, and such rubrics, it is clear, were not fully determined by
the criteria of author, genre, and textual autonomy which guided later forms of
assembly. To be sure, these criteria did exist in early print culture. Te Folger
volume containing only 1 and 2 Henry IV is an example of a compilation that
demonstrates authorial and textual continuity, and several early collections,
such as the Bridgewater Library at the Iuntington, contain composite volumes
of exclusively Shakespearean materials.
64
But the compilations that do map
on to such categories were still subject to a degree of contingency and readerly
intervention alien to modern norms of textual order.
65

A well-known example of this contingent canonicity is the group of plays
known as the Iavier quartos.
66
Although the circumstances of their production
are debated, these texts are considered to be an early eort at gathering
Shakespeares works into a single volumea volume whose constituent parts
were also apparently sold in individual units. Te collection, sometimes called a
protracted conict with Charles Emmanuel I, who sought to expand his duchy and then to align
with Spain against the King.
63
Citation of line numbers from Shakespeares works follow Stephen Greenblatt, gen. ed.,
Te Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition (New York: V. V. Norton, 1997).
64
On the Bridgewater catalogue, which lists a compilation of Diuers Ilayes by Shakespeare,
see Iackel, Reading Material, 249.
65
One exception to this schema can be found among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
collectors who infamously cut up early editions to make specimen books, among them, James
Orchard Ialliwell-Ihillipps, whose compilations are now at the Folger. Vhether such activities
were normal or aberrant is still up for debate. On latter-day practices of cutting, see Christopher
de Iamels introduction to the exhibition catalogue Disbound and Dispersed: Te Leaf Book
Considered (Chicago: Caxton Club, 2005). On Ialliwell-Ihillipps, see Marvin Spevack, James
Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: Te Life and Works of the Shakespearean Scholar and Bookman (New
Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2001).
66
Te rst account of the Iavier quartos was that of A. V. Iollard, A Literary Causerie:
Shakespeare in the Remainder Market, Academy (2 June 1906): 52829. Iollards account
relied on the anachronistic notion of remaindering (selling unsold stock in ad hoc collections,
which did not become common until the eighteenth century), and it was quickly superceded
by V. V. Gregs theory of piracy, rst set out in On Certain False Dates in Shakesperian
Quartos, Library, ser. 2, 9 (1908): 11331. For recent discussions about the Iavier quartos that
continue to rely on Gregs theory, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge:
Cambridge UI, 2003), 25558; Sonia Massai, Italian Inuences on the Iublication of Late
Tudor Drama, in Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge UI, 2007),
6987; and Murphy, 91107.
324
nonce collection to highlight to its ad hoc quality,
67
was published by Tomas
Iavier in 1619, four years before the First Folio. Several of the individual title
pages bear false imprints and dates to hide the fact that Iavier did not own the
rights to all of the plays. Te rst three quartosparts 1 and 2 of Te Whole
Contention and Pericleswere printed with continuous signatures, suggesting
that an authorial collection of some sort was planned. Indeed, several groupings
of the texts either survive in early bindings that resemble the collected-works
format (Figures 6 and 7) or show evidence of having once been congured in
this way.
68
Te latter seven quartos, however, were signed individually, as if
to stand outside of the planned collectionan indication, for the critics and
historians who have told the story, that Iavier was guilty of piracy.
69
But the
texts inconsistencies also show that nonteleological notions of book assembly
67
Te category, used to describe a set of plays printed separately but later bound into
one book, was adopted from V. V. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the
Restoration, 4 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 193959), 2:67980. It is important to
note, however, that the idea of a nonce collection is based on modern ways of thinking about
books and that many early printed texts that we consider monolithic entitiessuch as Edmund
Spensers earliest works volume, or Samuel Danielsare technically nonce collections.
68
In addition to the groupings mentioned below, see Greg, Bibliography, 3:1108.
69
In 1619, responding to a letter from the Lord Chamberlain, the Stationers Company
issued an order to prevent the publication of what is now assumed to be the Iavier collection,
after which, so the theory goes, Iavier had the remaining plays printed in single units to avoid
Figure 6: A set of Iavier quartos now held at Texas Christian University. Image courtesy of
Special Collections, Mary Couts Burnett Library, Texas Christian University.
325
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326
governed even authorial collections such as this one and that the Iavier quartos
might be more protably viewed as a user-driven compilation than a never-
realized work. Of the two known complete sets that survive in early bindings,
neither follows the continuous signatures set out in the rst three quartos: one,
now at Texas Christian University, was arranged with Te Yorkshire Tragedy
between Te Whole Contention and Pericles; in the other, now at the Folger,
A Midsummer Nights Dream assumes the second position (Figure 8).
70
Te
contingency of assembly is vividly evoked in a third example: a set of Iavier
quartos at the Folger, now disbound, that once contained a text that was neither
published by Iavier nor written by Shakespeare.
71
Te volume as it exists today
in a modern binding includes only Te Whole Contention and Pericles; however,
according to a table of contents preserved in the yleaves, the texts were originally
accompanied by Ieywoods play, A Woman Killed with Kindness, which, in fact,
occupied the rst position in the otherwise Shakespearean collection.
72
Such a
volume suggests how early owners, enabled by the built-in exibility of printed
products like the Iavier quartos, could make booksand frameworks for
readingboth inside and outside prescribed schemes of organization.
I would like to conclude by examining several early modern compilations that,
like this one, combine Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean works in formats
not set out in advance by producers but that also embody distinct possibilities
for interpretation grounded in particular forms of assembly. Such volumes are
numerous in archives, although they are not often discussed except by specialists
in bibliography (whose primary concern, until recently, has often been the
integrity of text and author, not the book itself as a historical object
73
). Like
many of the assemblages surveyed in this essay, these texts reect the desires and
labors of readers who were predisposed to compile because of the exigencies of a
system of book production dierent from our own. But the following specimens
contain Shakespearean texts in readerly environments that are very much at
odds with modern archival and literary categories. Indeed, where such volumes
survive, their present untreated or unprocessed states are often attributable to
suspicion. Te seven plays are A Yorkshire Tragedy, Te Merchant of Venice, Te Merry Wives of
Windsor, King Lear, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle, and A Midsummer Nights Dream.
70
FSL STC 26101 copy 3. Te Iavier quartos are STC 26101, 22341, 22297, 22300,
22303, 22293, 22291, and 18796.
71
FSL STC 26101 copy 2.
72
Te table of contents was written in by the quartos eighteenth-century owner, Bishop
Iercy, on the verso side of the front yleaf. As a binders note in the back of the modern volume
explains, It may safely be assumed that the original order is shown in the list on the verso
of the old y-leaf. A fairly thorough account of the volumes provenance and circulation can
be reconstructed with the records left by Iercy and Folger bibliographers (information on
provenance has been written on the back yleaf ).
73
See McKenzie, Bibliography, 411.
327
Figure 8: A set of Iavier quartos from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Front endleaf 2r (first
page of manuscript contents list) of [King Henry VI. Part 23] The VVhole Contention betvveene
the Tvvo Famous Houses . . . (STC 26101 copy 3.) From Folger Shakespeare Library.
328
some miracle of provenance which allowed them to escape modernization. Te
rst is exemplary in this respect: Folger STC 22341.8 is a unique copy of Te
Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare (1599) that was rediscovered in 1920 in a
lumber room at an English country house, where it had apparently been held
since it was purchased and made into a book.
74
Te volume, which retains its
original limp vellum binding, includes four additional octavos of poetry printed
around the same time, which are, in order: Shakespeares Lucrece (1600),
Middletons The Ghost of Lucrece (1600), the sonnet sequence Emaricdulfe
. . . by E. C. Esquier (1595), and Shakespeares Venus and Adonis (1599).
75
Te
contents are remarkable in seeming to lend themselves, from the standpoint
of production, to such multigenre, multiauthor forms of compilation. Te
Passionate Pilgrim represents something of a microcosm of the whole, mixing, as
it does, Shakespearean with non-Shakespearean works into a verse miscellany.
76

And evidence suggests that this edition of Venus and Adonis was sold as a unit
with Te Passionate Pilgrim because the same two texts are preserved in a similar
binding at the Iuntington; bibliographers have pointed out that they issued
from a common printing house, perhaps marketed together.
77
Structurally and
thematically, moreover, there are strong associations between the two works.
Four of the rst eleven poems in Te Passionate Pilgrim are fragments of the
Venus and Adonis story, dealing, often in sexually explicit terms, with the
goddess advances on the unwilling boy.
78
Venus and Adoniss master trope of
role reversal, already present in the collection, resonates obliquely with opening
lines of Te Passionate Pilgrim, which do not come from Ovid:
79
74
Te Shakespearian Find in Note on Sales, Times Literary Supplement, 26 February
1920: Te extreme probability is that it [the volume] has been there ever since it was bound up
in London over three centuries ago.
75
Iublication dates follow STC dates listed in Folger Shakespeare Library catalogue entries.
76
Te classic account of the publication and reception of Te Passionate Pilgrim is that by
Arthur Marotti, Shakespeares Sonnets as Literary Iroperty, in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary
Teory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Iarvey and Katharine Eisaman
Maus (Chicago: U of Chicago I, 1990), 14373, esp. 15054. For a more recent account, see
Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeares Poems in Early Modern England (New York: Ialgrave,
2003), 14390; and Murphy, 1920.
77
Te Iuntington volume comprises call numbers 59000, 59001, and 59002 (STC 22358,
22342, and 6350). Te third text is John Davies Epigrammes and Elegies, which was likely
printed in the same year but not by the same house. On the possibility that Te Passionate
Pilgrim and Venus and Adonis were sold together by the printer, V. Leake, see Joseph Quincy
Adamss introduction to the facsimile volume, Te Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare
(New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1939), xilxiii.
78
Te Passionate Pilgrime. By W. Shakespeare (London: [T. Judson] for V. Iaggard, 1599).
79
On gender inversion in the poem, see Jonathan Bate, Sexual Ierversity in Venus and Adonis,
Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 8092; and more comprehensively (on reversal as a both
theme and trope), see Anthony Mortimer, Variable Passions: A Reading of Shakespeares Venus
and Adonis (New York: AMS, 2000). Recent critical accounts have questioned this focus on role
329
VIen my Loue sweares that she is made of truth,
I do beleeve her (though I know she lies)
Tat she might thinke me some vntutord youth,
Vnskilful in the worlds false forgeries.
(Folger STC 22341.8, leaf 1r [1.14])
Te lines, along with those of the collections next poemwhich malign the
speakers tempting Female euill (Folger STC 22341.8, leaf 2r [2.5])would,
of course, later emerge in print as Sonnets 138 and 144, respectively. But
visible here is how anthological thinking guides interpretation, how those
interpretations can change in relation to dierent forms of assembly. Stripped
of the familiar context of the Sonnets volume, the speakers lying love no longer
denotes any one mistress gure but is free to take on shades of reference from
this volume (perhaps aided by the mention of an untutored youth, suggesting
Adonis, named only a few lines later).
80
Te range of potential transpositions,
in other words, becomes broader with a new material context. Tis volume
asks us to read Sonnets 138 and 144 not in the sequence of poems that, for us,
gives them meaning and a title, but in a dierent textual assembly where the
most prominent scene of courtship, iterated across multiple works, is Venuss
courtship of the boy.
A similar point can be made regarding the place of Lucrece in this volume.
Modern critics, addressing the historical problem of Lucreces perceived moral
dilemma, have tended to interpret the poem in the context of the Sonnets or
Shakespeares sources. Nancy Vickers cites Sonnet 106 and Shakespeares
rejection of the poetics of praise, arguing that Lucrece exposes the violence
of erotic description as it was practiced by male writers in the Ietrarchan
tradition.
81
Jane O. Newman and others invoke Ovids Fasti and the tale
of Ihilomela to show how Shakespeare departed from the convention of
the vengeful rape victim, portraying Lucrece instead as a tragic sacrice to
a patriarchal power structure.
82
In both interpretations, Lucreces agency is
minimal, present only in relation to male agency, sexual or political. But in a
reversal. See Richard Rambuss, Vhat It Feels Like for a Boy: Shakespeares Venus and Adonis, in
A Companion to Shakespeares Works, vol. 4, Te Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard
Dutton and Jean E. Ioward (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 24058. Te Folger compilation
under discussion lacks these rst pages, which Adams blames on the abuse of later readers.
80
Te rst mention of Adonis in Te Passionate Pilgrim is at 4.2.
81
Nancy Vickers, Te blazon of sweet beautys best: Shakespeares Lucrece, in Shakespeare
and the Question of Teory, ed. Iatricia Iarker and Georey Iartman (New York: Methuen,
1985), 95115.
82
Jane O. Newman, And Let Mild Vomen to Iim Lose Teir Mildness: Ihilomela, Female
Violence, and Shakespeares Te Rape of Lucrece, SQ 45 (1994): 30426. Other important
readings of the poem which invoke the Ihilomela tale are Katherine Eisaman Maus, Taking
330
compilation where Lucrece is linked, literally, to other works by Shakespeare
works attentive to female agency (and indeed, impropriety) in gures like
Venus and the dark ladya dierent protagonist, one whose will can be
conceived outside the male power structure, is freer to emerge. In fact, such
a protagonist does emerge in Middletons more cynical complaint poem, Te
Ghost of Lucrece, which follows Te Rape of Lucrece. In Middletons text, the
story ends not in the promise of Tarquins banishment and a historic transfer
of power, but in Lucrece coming back from the dead, calling for vengeance,
reinscribing what Newman has called a countertradition of women who
intervene directly in this transfer of power by killing the heir.
83
Tis Lucrece
inhabits a moral world turned upside down, closer to that of Venus or the dark
lady than that of Shakespeares Rome.
84
Casting o her silence, she rails against
the evils of that world and cries out to Tarquin, vowing to haunt, and hunt you
to dispaire.
85
Tis compilation, then, gives us two Lucreces: a silenced victim
and an impatient revenger. Female agency, narrowly conceived (or absent)
in our most familiar context-dependent readings, is recast in this unfamiliar
material context as a force of retribution, a direct intervention in, rather than
an indirect perpetuation of, male power.
My next two examples, also from the Folger, are smaller compilations which
contain, in addition to printed material, manuscript annotations that oer more
explicit clues about how the texts were categorized by their earliest readers. Te
rst example might be best described as an early modern paperback, comprising
copies of two plays, Shakespeares Pericles (1609) and Samuel Daniels pastoral
tragicomedy, Te Queens Arcadia (1606), stitched together in a loose paper
wrapping (Figure 9).
86
Te volume exemplies the cheapest kind of user-
driven compilation produced before the self-enclosed book became standard:
a selection of texts, bought unbound, sewn into a single, relatively imsy book.
Also characteristic of the period, the boundaries of this particular book were
further expanded by a reader who used the blank spaces to add manuscript text,
in this case, a fragment of political satire:
Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeares Rape of Lucrece, SQ 37 (1986):
6682, esp. 73; and Laura G. Bromley, Lucreces Re-Creation, SQ 34 (1983): 200211.
83
Newman, 318.
84
Laura G. Bromley, Te Lost Lucrece: Middletons Ghost of Lucrece, Papers on Language
and Literature 21 (1985): 25874.
85
T[homas] M[iddleton], Te Ghost of Lucrece (London: Valentine Simmes, 1600), sig. A8r.
86
Te Late, and Much Admired Play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. . . . by William Shakespeare.
(London: [By Villiam Vhite and Tomas Creede] for Ienry Gosson, 1609), Folger
Shakespeare Library STC 22335 Copy 1. Bound with Samuel Daniel, Te Qveenes Arcadia.
A Pastorall Trage-Comedie Presented to Her Maiestie and Her Ladies, . . . (London: G. Eld, for
Simon Vaterson, 1606), STC 6262.
331
Figure 9: Two plays bound stitched into a paper wrapping. Front outside cover with manuscript
notes. [Pericles] The Late, and Much Admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre (STC 22335
copy 1). From Folger Shakespeare Library.
332
As nero once, with harpe in hand surveyd
his Flameing Roome, and as it burnt, he plaid
Soe our Great Irince when the dutch eet arriud
Saw his ships burnd and as they burnt he
Te poem, taken from John Denhams Directions to a Painter (1667),
87
criticizes
Charles II for his ineptness and philandering during the Anglo-Dutch war (the
implied nal word is swived). And as the early reader may have noted, these
ideas reverberate throughout the plays included in the volume. Pericles depicts
a corrupt, incestuous King of Antioch; a Governor of Tarsus whose starving
people rise up to kill their leader; a Governor of Mytilene who must be reformed
for frequenting brothels; and Iericles himself, whose perpetual absenteeism
creates unrest in Tyre.
88

Te Queens Arcadia, following its Italian models,
invokes similar themes of misrule and restoration across social groups.
89
Set in
a pastoral world that Iath put o that faire nature which it had, / And growes
like ruder countries, or more bad,
90
the play traces the inuence of a corrupted
traveler who poisons Arcadian society and is eventually brought to order. For
a reader with a demonstrated taste for anti-Royalist satire, it is not surprising
that Daniels text would be of interest: as Annabel Iatterson and Lois Iotter
have explained, the literary culture of the mid-seventeenth century witnessed a
shift in generic consciousness in which tragicomedies took on a new political
signicance.
91

Pericles, however, is usually read in relation to a generic shift to
romance and to constituent themes of faith, family, and redemption found
in Shakespeares other late works.
92

Tis set of works, in contrast, encourages
historical readings not prescribed by that generic category (a category formed, as
we know, much later).
93

Vith the play detached from the modern assemblage of
87
John Denham, Directions to a Painter for Describing Our Naval Business . . . (London, 1667),
34. Te poem is sometimes attributed to Denham and Andrew Marvell.
88
On the theme of kingship in Pericles, see Constance Jordan, Shakespeares Monarchies: Ruler
and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca: Cornell UI, 1997), 3568.
89
For recent accounts of the play in relation to Italian pastoral tragicomedy, see Jason
Lawrence, Te whole complection of Arcadia changd: Samuel Daniel and Italian Lyrical
Drama, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 11 (1999): 14371; and Johanna Irocter,
Te Queenes Arcadia (1606) and Hymens Triumph (1615): Samuel Daniels Court Iastoral
Ilays, in Te Renaissance in Ferrara and Its European Horizons, ed. J. Salmons and V. Moretti
(Cardi: U of Vales I, 1984), 83109.
90
Daniel, Qveenes Arcadia, sig. B1r.
91
Annabel Iatterson, Censorship and Interpretation: Te Conditions of Writing and Reading
in Early Modern England (Madison: U of Visconsin I, 1984), 171; and Lois Iotter, Secret Rites
and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 16411660 (Cambridge: Cambridge UI, 1989), 72112.
92
For a recent consideration of Pericles and Shakespearean romance, see Raphael Lyne,
Shakespeares Late Work (Oxford: Oxford UI, 2007), 2.
93
Barbara Mowat has explained that the use of the term romance to label Shakespeares late
plays is to some extent anachronistically Victorian and inapposite. See Vhats in a Name.
333
the classroom anthology, the traditional focus on Shakespeares career trajectory
gives way to another important chronology: a period of intertwined literary
and political activity in which, Iatterson has shown, romance itself came to
be redened as serious, as a way of perceiving history and even a means of
inuencing it.
94
My next example is a paired compilation that demands a more radically
transgeneric reading. Tis Folger volume combines a copy of Shakespeares Rape
of Lucrece (1632) with a book of religious poetry called Te Blessed Birth-Day
(1636) by Church of England clergyman Charles Fitz-Gery.
95

Te Blessed
Birth-Day is a series of meditations on Luke 2:14,
96
followed by what the title
page advertises as holy transportations: pithy extractions from the writings of
church fathers and some moderne Approved Authors on subjects related to
Christs nativity. It is dicult to imagine what could reconcile this text with the
graver labour Shakespeare promises in his dedication to Southampton in Venus
and Adonis. But here, the two disparate books are paired in a contemporary
binding (a ner binding, in fact, implying more forethought and investment
than might be put into a paperback), and Fitz-Gerys text is actually the rst
and primary text and the only title listed on the spine. As in the previous Folger
volume, an early reader has left behind annotations that give us clues about how
the books were used and valued (Figure 10), but these are more varied. On the
recto side of the second leaf and the verso side of the title page, several iterations
of the Goe little book envoy are recorded. On a leaf of Lucrece are two versions
of a proverb, Te devill was sick, the devill a monke would be / Te devill was
well, the devill a monke was heea warning against those who make pious
resolutions in times of distress. And further down on the same leaf, we nd the
Latin line, Vix tibi praesto dem, cor tibi restat idem, a fragment from a cat-and-
mouse fable about deceptive appearances, most famously recounted by Edward
Coke against the conspirators of the Gunpowder Ilot.
97
Te readers interest
in moral sententiae is, to some extent, prescribed by the 1632 text of Lucrece,
Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy, in A Companion to Shakespeares Works, vol. 4, Te
Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Ioward (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2003), 12949, esp. 133.
94
Iatterson, 160.
95
Te Rape of Lvcrece. By Mr. William Shakespeare (London: R. B[adger] for Iohn Iarrison . . .,
1632), STC 22352. (Te Shakespeare text is given the primary call number even though it
comes second in the volume.) Charles Fitz-Gery, Te Blessed Birth-Day, Celebrated in Some
Religious Meditations on the Angels Anthem. Luc. 2.14 . . . , 2d ed. (Oxford: Leonard Licheld,
1636), STC 10936 Bd.w. STC 22352.
96
Glorie be to God in the high heauens, and peace on earth, & towards men good wil. See
Te Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: U of Visconsin I, 1969), Luke 2:14.
97
Fol. D8r. In context, the lines are loosely translated as Ill never believe you, you still have a
cats heart. Te attribution to Coke is commonplace. See, for example, John Lord Campbell, Te
334
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which was printed with copious commonplace markers.
98
But the readers focus
on falsehood and equivocation is echoed in the adjacent Blessed Birth-Day, which
ends with a call to shake o soul-clogging shackles and nere to doe nor speake
nor thinke a misse.
99
Shakespeares poem, when absorbed into a book charged
with such religious meaning, is forced to undergo a shift in emphasis relative to our
expectations. Vhile chastity and suicide are prominent moral issues in the poem,
this volume brings into focus another issue that might have been compelling: the
immoral example of Tarquin, Vhose inward ill no outward harme exprest (fol.
A6r; l. 91). In this material context, the poems insistent bifurcation between
men who couer crimes with bold stern looks and women whose faces are their
owne faults bookes (fol. C6v; ll. 1252, 1253) make Lucrece something of a parable
about duplicity. Indeed, as Sasha Roberts has shown, Te deployment of literary
texts as sourcebooks of exempla and sententiae was common.
100
And at several
points, meditating on Tarquins crime, the poem suspends the story to convey a
lesson that would be at home in Te Blessed Birth-day:
So that in ventring ill, we leaue to be
Te things we are, for that which we expect:
And this ambitious foul inrmity,
In hauing much, torments vs with defect
Of that we haue: so then we doe neglect
Te thing we haue, and all for want of wit,
Make something nothing, by augmenting it.
(fol. A7r; ll. 14854)
Bound with similar sayings and proverbs in print and manuscript, the poem
becomes a series of potentially detachable set pieces. Te assembly gives us a
Lucrece that, Roberts has shown, was ubiquitous in early commonplace books:
one marked by its moral usefulness.
101
My nal example reects a more elaborate mix of manuscript and printed
text: a set of octavos from the British Library (BL C.39.a.37) containing a 1624
Lives of the Chief Justices of England: From the Norman Conquest till the Death of Lord Tenterden,
3d ed., 5 vols. (London: Edward Tompson, 189499), 1:370.
98
On the commonplace markers in Lucrece, see Ieter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier,
Reading and Authorship: Te Circulation of Shakespeare, 15901619, in A Concise
Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 3556,
esp. 4655; and 7achary Lesser and Ieter Stallybrass, Te First Literary Hamlet and the
Commonplacing of Irofessional Ilays, SQ 59 (2008): 371420. My thanks to an anonymous
reader at Shakespeare Quarterly for this point.
99
Fitz-Gery, Blessed Birth-Day, sig. E8v (page 80).
100
Roberts, 100.
101
See Roberts, 10242, for an account of Lucrece as it was fragmented and redeployed in
early commonplace books.
336
copy of Shakespeares Lucrece, Ieywoods Art of Love (1630.), Ienry Austins
Scourge of Venus (1614), the three-part verse collection Alcilia. Philoparthens
Louing Folly. . . . Wherevnto Is Added Pigmalions Image . . . With the Loue of
Amos and Lavra (1619), and Tomas Overburys Remedy of Love (1620). Te
volumes sixth item (Figure 11) is a manuscript consisting of fourteen love lyrics
(many of which were copied out of popular sources such as Ihilip Sidney and
Tomas Campion), followed by a collection of largely bawdy, satirical epigrams
and sayings resembling a personal miscellany or commonplace book.
102
Iere,
then, Lucrece is positioned not as it is in Vickers reading, which links the work
to Shakespeares Sonnets, at the intersection of Ovidian narrative poetry and
the poetry of praise. Te mixture of stories and sayings also highlights the texts
usefulness, but not in the same way as pairing Lucrece with devotional verse. Tis
seventeenth-century compilation, in contrast to these other models, represents an
anthologized resource on the subject of desire and its consequences. Te volume
is framed by translations of Ovids frequently satirical guides to seduction and
the avoidance of heartbreak, while it proceeds through a story of lust and incest
between parent and child (Te Scourge of Venus); sonnets depicting Reason
conquering Iassion (Alcilia);
103

and (in previous collected editions) a series of
didactic epigrams, appended to the sonnet sequence, imparting suggestions to
men, such as:
Concerning VViues, hold this a certaine rule,
Tat if at rst, you let them haue the rule,
Your selfe at last, with them shall haue no rule,
Except you let them euermore to rule.
104
Blending satire, advice, and exempla, then, the texts in this volume share a focus
on the management and mismanagement of male aections, a set of lessons in
early modern courtship keyed primarily to classical models. Te compilation
asks us to read Lucrece, which derives from the same models, as a contribution to
this discourse: a warning against indulging passion over reason, a potent example
of abhorrent lust or of seduction gone wrong. Te anthologizer created a rubric
102
Te volume has been rebound, but its contents were denitely compiled in this way in
the seventeenth century. Tis is conrmed in the manuscript acquisitions register of the library
of Ians Sloane (MS Sloane 3972C, vol. 2, fol. 133). My thanks to Giles Mandelbrote, Curator,
British Collections 15011800, British Library, for this information.
103
Alcilia. Philoparthens Louing Folly. . . . Wherevnto Is Added Pigmalions Image . . . With Te
Loue of Amos and Lavra (London: Richard Iawkins, 1619), sig. A2r.
104
Alcilia. Philoparthens Louing Folly. . . . Wherevnto Is Added Pigmalions Image . . . With
Te Loue of Amos and Lavra (London: [Tomas Snodham and Tomas Creede] for Richard
Iawkins, 1613), sig. M5r.
337
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338
within which Shakespeares poem may be understood in terms of its private
drama, as a cautionary seventeenth-century tale of gross sexual misconduct.
Vhat I have suggested in each of these brief archival investigations is that
the composite volumes of the early modern period can help us read Shakespeare
historically. By submitting these volumes to bibliographical and literary analysis,
which I have only begun to do here, we open ourselves to interpretive possibilities
grounded not just in the familiar modern book and our own received generic,
chronological, and authorial categories, but also in the frequently unfamiliar
material congurations and categories fashioned by early readers. Tat habits
of assembly shape interpretations of Shakespeares works is clear today every
time an editor or publisher makes a choice about textual presentation: whether
to organize an anthology chronologically to convey a career trajectory, how to
include collaborative texts like Two Noble Kinsmen, whether to give readers one,
two, or three texts of King Lear. Understanding the impact of assembly is even
more urgent when dealing with a textual culture whose readerly protocols are so
distant from oursa culture in which books are often subject to expansion, in
which printed texts can be mixed with manuscript material, authors with other
authors, or literature with topical texts, histories, and ephemera. Scholars have
already begun to look beyond the boundaries of works that formerly stood alone
in self-enclosed units, for example, reading the Sonnets with its early companion
piece, A Lovers Complaint.
105
Tis same attention to intertextualitywhat
might be called proximate or material intertextuality, to distinguish it from
a related but more abstract conceptyields similar interpretive rewards when
brought to bear on composite books such as those that I have explored here.
Vhat thematic or rhetorical echoes can be traced across early printed texts
of Te Passionate Pilgrim and Venus and Adonis. Vhat political ideas might
a reader have taken from (or imposed upon) Pericles and Te Queens Arcadia
during the Anglo-Dutch war or when faced with an ineective monarch. In
what ways might Lucrece be read as a collection of holy transportations or a
meditation on the nature of truth-telling and treason. Iow many Lucreces were
there in early modern culture. Additional provenance research and a broader
eld of reconstructed evidence would allow us to move beyond case studies:
what patterns of compilation and assembly more generally can be discerned
in the surviving archive of Shakespearean texts. Vhat genres were routinely
crossed. Vhat texts were paired and marketed together. Asking such questions
brings to light meanings and associations no longer apparent to us but of
central, structural importance to readers in the early modern periodpart of
the everyday experience of reading Shakespeare.
105
For the most recent of these re-readings and a summary of the scholarship, see Roberts,
14390.
339
Beyond the singular gure of Shakespeare, the changing textual formations
excavated here should persuade us to rethink some of the basic assumptions
about bibliographical history and its relation to literature. Tat a work like 2
Henry IV or Lucrece can be encountered in not one but a range of material
contexts over time in sheets, paper wrappings, paired volumes, patchwork
anthologies, authorial collections, or morocco bindings attests to a structural
complexity that is concealed in the current disciplinary nomenclature. Te
history of the book, as Roger Chartier, Ieter Stallybrass, and others have
argued, can never be a history of the book.
106
Tat is, the book as a unit of
analysis is not a monolithic entity, but a shifting category of textual forms, each
new permutation resulting from a unique give-and-take between the exigencies
of production and compilation and the desires of readers and owners. To see
such permutations as motivated and instrumental rather than (as we typically
see the book form) as natural or self-evident is, furthermore, to acknowledge
the inevitable constructedness of any encounter with an archived text. It is to
acknowledge a dierent kind of agency at work in literary and textual history
the agency of collectors, compilers, conservators, and librarians, who make
books, as writers do. Te bibliographical embodiments of works like 2 Henry
IV and Lucrece, like editorial apparatuses and other more studied aspects of the
texts materiality, are the value-laden products of archival labor, calculation, and
desire. Tose products are generative of, not incidental to, literary meanings
and statuses. Tey reify and reproduce notions of canonicity. Tey establish (or
sunder) aliations between writers, works, and genres. Tey set the parameters,
in the most literal sense, for how readers engage with texts.
Recently, the Folger Shakespeare Library embarked on a collaborative project
to digitize and make freely available all seventy-ve early quartos of Shakespeares
plays. Starting with Hamlet, the Shakespeare Quartos Archive will feature an
interactive research interface in which users will be able to overlay text images,
compare text side-by-side, search full-text, and annotate and tag images.
107

Such a timely, extensive undertaking highlights both the opportunities and the
stakes involved in emerging, computer-based forms of text assembly. As I have
106
Roger Chartier and Ieter Stallybrass have made this point in a number of conference
presentations, Chartier in a paper called Vhat Is a Book, given at the Center for the Study
of Books and Media at Irinceton University, 3 December 2004, and Stallybrass most recently
on the panel Iistories of Reading, Material of Reading, New York University, 1 May 2008.
See also my essay Fast Bind, Fast Find: Te Iistory of the Book and the Modern Collection,
forthcoming in Criticism 51.1 (2009).
107
Shakespeare Quartos Archive One of Five Irojects to Receive the First JISC/NEI
Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants, press release, 26 March 2008, online at
http://www.folger.edu/pr_preview.cfm.prid=216 (accessed 15 July 2009); see also http://
www.titania.folger.edu.
340
argued here, modern owners, both individual and institutional, often rewrote
literary identities and literary history every time they remade a book in their
own image: one text per binding, securely enclosed, perfect. Curatorial attitudes
changed drastically over the course of the twentieth century, but print-based
research tools, the Short-Title Catalogue among them, reect the desire for
textual autonomy that was so pervasive among nineteenth-century collectors.
Tis impulse to decontextualize is present even in rst-generation digital tools
like Early English Books Online, where many of the specimens discussed here
can be found in isolated facsimile. New technologies of digital reproduction,
like the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, oer the opportunity not only to restore
textual and thematic links that have been forgotten, but also to refashion a
Shakespeare read and interpreted through compilation and recombination
rather than the canonicity to which we are so accustomed.
108
(And more so
when such technologies move beyond the authorial mold, to the many writers
whose works were so readily combined with Shakespeares in the early modern
period.) It is inevitable that we will follow the generations of readers who have
remade Shakespeares books according to their own assumptions about texts.
But with our assumptions now moving back toward the uid and interactive,
we are developing tools that may allow us to recompile versions of Shakespeares
works as they were approached by their earliest readers.
108
Many digitization projects similar to the Shakespeare Quartos Archive have been carried
out or are underway at other libraries. Te British Librarys Shakespeare in Quarto project is
perhaps the most prominent of these.

Making Shakespeare's Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in The Archives by Jeffrey Todd Knight

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