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ABSTRACT
This case study of the Dionysus ornament illustrates how the 1623 Shakespearean folio carries with it echoes of previous folio works as it reinterprets this image within its own context. The paper establishes the other Jaggard Press titles in which the headpiece appears to explore how these different contexts draw out the image’s semiotic potential. It notes an extreme uptick in use in Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia, an anatomical work in which urination and ejaculation feature prominently. Operating in tandem with the 1623 prefatory materials, the headpiece participates in the visual organisational logic of the Folio, structures the Folio’s establishment of generic variety, and introduces the volume-wide rhetorical strategy of reading Englishness within a global context. The woodcut’s synchronously urinating dogs also suggest a commentary on the communal bodily experience of live theatre. Having noted ways early modern printed folio projects can be mutually citational through ornaments, the paper discusses how the Shakespearean volume positions itself within the English inflection of classical single-author collected drama through the associations with Dionysus, patron god of drama, and Ben Jonson’s 1616 Workes. The conclusion considers the Second Folio’s adoption of the headpiece as part of the 1623 Folio’s iconic look.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go out to Miranda Fay Thomas and Gabriel Egan, leaders of the the 2023 Shakespeare Association of America seminar on the 1623 folio, and to the seminar's members, particularly my sub-group members Jyotsna Singh and Suzanne Tanner. I am also grateful to seminar auditor Matthieu Bouchard, who alerted me to the headpiece's appearance in The Faerie Queene, and to Karen Raber, who read a draft and offered further animal studies suggestions. Brett Greatley-Hirsch provided helpful assistance with the images. Feedback from Jessica Beckman, Mathew Ritger, Marjorie Rubright, and Stephen Spiess also advanced this work. Special recognition goes to Valerie Wayne, whose many detailed edits significantly strengthened the argument.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The headpiece makes a fourth pit stop deeper into the Folio, where the dogs urinate above the epilogue to 2 Henry IV. This appears to be a late insert to fill out the forme after negotiations had stalled for another play in the quire.
2 I avoid identifying a press by the name of a singular male agent to acknowledge the contributions and labor of unnamed associates, particularly women. The names of these collaborators often appear minimally in the records. The Jaggard Press includes Jane Lee and Dorothy Jaggard. William Jaggard was blind from around 1613 until his death in 1623; during that time his wife Jane Lee appears in the records representing the Press. Her involvement is also made clear in her will. Their son, Isaac Jaggard, took over the business in name and may have finished the Folio’s production with his mother; Isaac’s wife Dorothy executed his will in 1627 and oversaw the sale of the business.
3 Two notable recent books examining the pre-history of Folio texts, printers, and publishers are Zachary Lesser, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes, and Benjamin David Robert Higgins's. Shakespeare's Syndicate. Earlier textual homes of the Folio’s fount and ornaments have received some attention, e.g. forensic examination of their damage has served to establish the order of the Folio’s printing and the relationship of extant copies to each other. Scholars have yet to attend to the semantic resonances of this headpiece’s previous homes within the 1623 Folio.
4 Engraved Triumphs by Johann Theodor de Bry (c1590–1600), Cornelis Bos (c 1543), and François Chauveau (attr., mid 17th c) include a woman micturating and a defecating satyr. was the inspiration for these engravings.
5 An example of an image that moves between device and illustration is Henry Bynneman’s phoenix (McK 203 in McKerrow Citation1913). Many of John Day’s devices engaged with the Reformation content of his work. Joan Merrye Jugge and Richard Jugge’s devices contain references to law, one of their specializations. I argue elsewhere for an expanded understanding of the relation of devices to the work; consult Erika Mary Boeckeler, ‘Left To Their Own Devices.’
6 Ben Higgins limits his discussion of the ornaments to ‘decorative and practical,’ the latter in terms of avoiding white space, before describing the use bibliographers have made of the damage to the most frequently used tailpiece; consult ‘Printing the First Folio’, 42. That tailpiece centrally adorns the cover of Higgins’ Shakespeare’s Syndicate, but the book does not discuss it further.
7 Consult Camille, Image on the Edge, in particular the subsection treating scatological images as parodic inversions of courtly and religious conventions, ‘Courtly Crap’, 111–128.
8 Research on disgust identifies urine as a core trigger of disgust; for many, the centre of disgust is animal waste products, including human waste. This may be, researchers posit, because of the biological need to avoid pathogenic contaminants, but also because urination uncomfortably reminds humans of their animal natures (called ‘animal-reminder disgust’) (Haidot, Rozin, McCauley, 818–19). Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley also mention the role of disgust in adult humor.
9 Wilkinson, however, makes this remark in the context of title page border reuse. I find that different ornament types follow different patterns of use.
10 Bruster describes the practices of two presses: ‘following Vautrollier’s lead, Field almost always suits the borders and ornaments of his texts to their subject matters’ (70). More specifically, ‘several ornaments from this shop would connect particular books and pages with specific themes, communities, and individuals through their patterns of deployment (71).
11 n.b. the Senecan titles are prose works only, not drama. The 1614 Seneca edition is noteworthy in that it contains a version of the woodcut that has trimmed off the rabbits and back half of the dogs, presumably to fit the decorative line borders.
12 A notable exception includes the 1598 Arcadia, where it appears internally to head off the beginning of the sonnet sequence ‘Astrophil and Stella,’ marking a significant shift in the book from prose to poetry. In the 1609 and 1611 Faerie Queene, it also heads off the fourth book, following an internal title page for part two of the work – a practice of a piece with the prefatory materials/first page paradigm noted above. A few of the Stansby Press’s uses of the cut to demarcate textual divisions follow a less clear pattern.
13 Following Higgins’s list (Syndicate, Appendix 2), the six titles across nine editions of Jaggard Press speculative publishing with the headpiece are (1) Thomas Milles’s Treasurie of Auncient and Modern Times (1613, STC 239.5) and its relative, Archaio-ploutos (1619, STC 17936.5), (2) Helkiah Crooke’s Mikokosmographia (1615, STC 6062; 1616, STC 6062.2; 1618, STC 6062.4), (3. William Attersoll’s A Commentarie Upon … Moses (1618, STC 893; n.b. not discussed below), (4) Augustine Vincent’s A Discoverie of Errours (1622, STC 24756), (5) André Favyn’s The Theater of Honour and Knight-hood (1623, STC 10717), and (6) Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623; STC 22273). STC 893).
14 Consult Blayney, 5, and Higgins, Syndicate, 99–100.
15 Consult Sawday, 225, and O’Malley, 7–8.
16 This refers to the work of French anatomist Ambrose Paré, of whose work the Mikrokosmographia is a partial translation. The advertised portable standalone reference book appeared in 1616.
17 Consult Patricia Simons, ‘Manliness and the Visual Semiotics of Bodily Fluids in Early Modern Culture.’
18 If we count the Catalogue, the Dionysus headpiece appears twice.
19 While some English authors’ ‘works’ had been collected in folio form these were primarily of poetry rather than vernacular drama.
20 James A. Riddell describes ‘the extraordinary care that he must have devoted to the arranging of the parts of the Folio, best exemplified by the placing of Every Man in His Humour first in the volume’ (153).
21 Laoutaris’s piece is focused on how they produce authorial value.
22 It also appears in the epilogue to 2 Henry IV (consult fn 1 above). Labeled as such, the ‘Epilogue’ seems to be associated with other ‘paratexts’ on which the headpiece appears.
23 Animal physicality is part of the same symbolic vocabulary as human physicality in the urinating public fountains examined by Catherine Emerson, who points to the frequency of urinating fountain dogs (267). Emerson’s readings of urinating figures in civic fountains and their use in public ceremony stress that the interpretation of statuary micturition as virility, as fertility or fertilization, as dominance, as Christological, among others, depended heavily on context.