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ABSTRACT
Renaissance clothes were piecemeal assemblages of parts. This pervasive practice is connected to early English theater, which emphasized variety rather than the (neo)classical focus on unity of time, place, action, genre, audience, and affect. Like aging costumes, aging plays could be updated by changing their parts without needing to create or buy something entirely new. Like early modern clothes and costumes, and like the earliest portraits of Shakespeare, the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623 is a heterogeneous miscellany. But for marketing purposes the Folio constructs a series of bibliographical and rhetorical uniformity-effects. The Folio celebrates ‘the great Variety of Readers' but denigrates the great variety of play-texts. Its claims to unity of authorship and condemnation of alternative printings underlie the myth of a unified one-parent canon consisting of one-version and one-date works., which misrepresents early modern composite play-production and its most successful patchwork playwright. To illustrate the complexity of the relationship between early performances and posthumous print, the essay examines in detail the Folio text of The Life of Henry the Fift, re-examining certain Folio-only passages in light of the known performance of the play by the King’s Men at Whitehall for a court audience on 7 January 1605.
Acknowledgements
This essay has been significantly improved by generous criticism and input from Terri Bourus, Gabriel Egan, Mark Peter Hutchings, Rory Loughnane, Murat Öğütcü, Emma Smith, and the anonymous peer-reviewers for Shakespeare, and by feedback from auditors in the session on ‘Constructing the First Folio’, Shakespeare Association of America annual conference, Minneapolis, 2022.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Isaacson, Einstein, 67.
2 Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, sig. πA1v; Connor, ed., ‘Preliminaries’, 2:lxxv, ‘TO THE READER’, 9–10.
3 James, et al., The Holy Bible. This new edition, ‘Appointed to be read in churches’ (title-page), was commisioned by the King at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604; it is regularly attributed to him rather than the forty-seven translators.
4 Connor (Literary Folios, 18–19) identifies only three earlier literary folios with more sheets: George Chapman’s Whole Workes of Homer (c.1616, STC 13624), Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616, STC 14752), and Josuah Sylvester’s Diuine Weekes and Workes (1621, STC 21653). But all three print their works in single-column pages, meaning that each sheet contains less text than the 1623 Shakespeare folio.
5 Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, sig πA4v; Connor, ‘Preliminaries’, 2:lxxviii, ‘To the memory of my beloued’, 39.
6 For a critical history of twentieth-century folio compositor studies based on such variations, see Egan, Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text, 55–269 (indexed 310–11).
7 Blayney, First Folio, 24.
8 Hailey, ‘Paper’, 13.
9 Higgins, Shakespeare's Syndicate, 31.
10 Hailey, ‘Paper’, 14; Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, sig. **6v (marginal note).
11 West, History, 6; Smith, Four Centuries, 8.
12 Thanks to Shakespeare, we take that mixture for granted, but ancient Greek drama did not contain stage directions (Taplin, ‘Did Greek Dramatists’), and neither did Elizabethan translations of Seneca.
13 For recent overviews of the massive scholarship on this topic see Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, and Bate, Classics Made Shakespeare.
14 In all editions of Erne’s Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, the front cover/jacket reproduces Sir Anthony Van Dyke’s portrait of Sir John Suckling (c. 1640), holding a Shakespeare folio, opened to Hamlet.
15 Lidster, ‘Authorizing the Folio’s “Shakespeare”’, 1.
16 Egan and Taylor, Authorship: Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well, King Henry the Sixt (The First Part, The Second Part, The Third Part), Henry the Eight, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Macbeth (in folio order).
17 Egan and Taylor, Authorship: Arden of Faversham, Edward III, Spanish Tragedy, Sir Thomas More, Pericles, Cardenio, Two Noble Kinsmen (in order of the New Oxford Shakespeare dating of Shakespeare’s writing). I do not include here Shakespeare’s conjectured share in the lost first version of Sejanus, because none of it survives.
18 Shakespeare, sig πA3r; Connor, ‘Preliminaries’, 2:lxxvii, ‘To the great Variety of Readers’, 20–24.
19 Pollard influentially argued that this sentence referred only to five ‘bad quartos’, including the 1600 Henry the fift (Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 64–80).
20 ‘diverse, adj. and adv.’; ‘divers, adj. and n.’ Oxford English Dictionary.
21 Orlin, Private Life, 241–2.
22 Ibid., 196, Plate 5.
23 Cooper, Searching for Shakespeare, 48; for the ‘supportasse’ see also p. 120.
24 Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 22.
25 Kerrigan, Originality, 44.
26 The best overview of the relationships between costume-management and dramatic structures remains MacIntyre, Costumes and Scripts.
27 Orlin, Private Life, 236.
28 Bentley, Profession of Dramatist, 234–63. For new costumes connected with such additions, see Bentley (259) and Bourus and Taylor, ‘Performance-testing the Adaptation Hypothesis’, 383–7 (and images throughout, including color images online).
29 Edmondson and Wells, ‘Limitations’, 446, 444.
30 Brown University, ‘National Tour of “First Folio!”’
31 Taylor and Jowett, Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606–1623, 239–43. (As the title of that book indicates, we did not even consider the possibility of reshaping before 1606.)
32 The 1600 title page has ‘CRONICLE’, but the head-title and all running titles spell the word ‘Chronicle’, as do the title pages of both reprints (1602, ‘1608’); in my text I therefore use Chronicle. For a reliable and accessible digital facsimile see British Library.
33 Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, h1–k2. For a reliable and accessible digital facsimile see Bodleian. Quotations from the 1623 version cite the folio signature and the line numbering in Loughnane, ed., ‘King Henry the Fift’.
34 Wells and Taylor, Three Studies, 39–164; Taylor, ed., Henry V; Wells and Taylor, Textual Companion, 375–85.
35 Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, esp. p. 238; Urkowitz, ‘Good News’, esp. p. 203; Werstine, ‘One Hundred Years’ (esp. 323–6, 331–32); Bourus, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet; Holderness and Loughrey, Cronicle History, 13.
36 Taylor, ‘Playhouse Manuscripts’, esp. 354–55.
37 Taylor, ‘Shakespearean Magnitudes’, esp. 252, 265–79. For forthcoming defences of the quarto, see Nance and Taylor, ‘Textual Genealogies and Shakespeare’s History Plays’, Taylor, ‘Shakespeare’s Two French Lessons’, and Wagoner, ‘Un-Silencing Inessential Texts’.
38 Bourus, ‘The Good Enough Quarto’, esp. 103–5. We might add, ‘Like actual fathers, actual Jacobean folios are never ideal’.
39 Astington, English Court Theatre, 40–55, 75–7, 239.
40 National Archives, Audit Office, Accounts, Various, ‘A.O. 3/908/13’ (digital image in Folger, ‘Shakespeare Documented’, doi.org/10.37079/385).
41 Syme, ‘The Jacobean King’s Men’, 233–43.
42 Dutton, Court Dramatist, 189, fn. 28.
43 Croft, ‘Rex Pacificus’, 147.
44 Öğütcü, ‘Court Performance’, 90, fn. 15. (A typographical error identifies the passage as ‘TLN 262–367’; the first number should be 282.)
45 Smith, King Henry V, 98. The documented omission of this material, beginning in the eighteenth century, may be related to the fact that the Scots were constitutionally integrated into Great Britain by the Act of Union (1707), three decades before the first known posthumous revival of Shakespeare’s play (1738): later audiences took for granted the united kingdom that James I put on the agenda in 1603–4.
46 Of course, there could have been other deletions. Players at court, as well as in the commercial London theatres, performed on what the Chorus calls a ‘Scaffold’ (Pro.10; Astington, English Court Theatre, 75–6). But unlike the polygonal wooden Globe, the Whitehall playing spaces used before 1607 were rectangular rooms in stone or brick buildings: for the 1605 court performance, the three and a half lines of the Chorus (Pro.11–14) that referred to ‘this Cock-Pit’ as ‘this Woodden O’ might easily have been omitted.
47 For photographs of manuscript examples, see Kidnie, ‘Playhouse Markings’, 84–7.
48 For examples of lines intended for deletion but nevertheless printed, see Bourus et al., Critical Reference Edition: Titus Andronicus 8.91.D1–D5, Loves Labours Lost 4.3.287.D1–D22, 5.2.782.D1–D6, Romeo and Juliet 8.230.D1–D4, and Measure for Measure 1.2.1.D1–D7.
49 I argue elsewhere that the Folio Life (h6v) contains three lines (3.5.64–6) that were intended for deletion, and that 3.5.67–8 were meant to replace them (Taylor, ‘Shakespearian Magnitudes’, 256).
50 On the fears of invasion, see Brown, ‘Historical Context’, 79.
51 Gurr, The First Quarto, 1.80–150.
52 Brown, ‘Historical Context’, 78.
53 Parry and Enis, Shakespeare before Shakespeare, 50; Brownlow, ‘John Shakespeare’s Recusancy’, 188; Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 34 (None of these scholars notices the link between the 1569 archival spelling and the spelling in the Chronicle History.)
54 Öğütcü, ‘Court Performance’, 89.
55 Taylor and Loughnane, ‘Canon and Chronology’, 527.
56 Dutton, ‘Dating and Contexts’; Dutton, Shakespeare, Court Dramatist, 177, n. 10. The ‘Generall’ was first connected to Lord Mountjoy by Smith, ‘The “Henry V” Choruses’, 40–45.
57 Öğütcü, ‘Court Performance’, 88–89.
58 Lockyer, James VI and I, 51–2.
59 Brown, ‘Historical Context’, 79.
60 Lublin, Costuming the Shakespearean Stage, 113–14.
61 See ‘Gowrie’ in McInnis, Steggle, and Teramura, ‘Lost Plays Database’. On use of the discarded clothing of King James’s ‘recently arrived Scottish entourage’ for Gowrie, see MacIntyre, Costumes and Scripts, 272.
62 Massai, Shakespeare’s Accents, 162.
63 National Archives, C 82/1690, no. 78 (digital image in ‘Shakespeare Documented’, doi.org/10.37078/125).
64 Barroll, ‘Shakespeare, His Fellows’, 134–8. Barroll notes that Hunsdon, no longer Lord Chamberlain, was old, sick, and out of favor.
65 Dutton, Shakespeare, Court Dramatist, 194.
66 National Archives, Audit Office, AO 1/388/41 (digital image in ‘Shakespeare Documented’, doi.org/10.37078/363); Law, Groom of the Chamber, 8–27.
67 Smith, King Henry V, 223, 234.
68 Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 90.
69 Dugdale, The Time Triumphant, sig. A3.
70 Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 35, 98, 114.
71 Ibid, 37, 73, 119.
72 De Young, ‘1600–1509’; de Critz, Anne of Denmark; de Critz, Anne Vavasour.
73 Dutton, Shakespeare, Court Dramatist, 194–5; Öğütcü, ‘Court Performance’, 81–85.
74 Lawrence, ‘Jacobean Royal Premieres?’ 97.
75 For the cultural and educational background see Baldwin, Shakspere’s Five-Act Structure.
76 For act divisions in early modern public and private theatres, see Taylor, ‘Structure of Performance’.
77 The Chorus thus contributes to the systematic amplification of scale found throughout the folio additions to the quarto text (analyzed in Taylor, ‘Shakespearian Magnitudes’).
78 My elaborate 1982 bibliographical conjecture assumes that ‘the Folio act-divisions are wrong’ (Taylor, Henry V, 15, fn. 1), and then imagines a printing-house scenario that could have led a compositor to deliberately interpolate the mistaken folio ‘Actus Quartus’. It leaves the alleged misnumbering of Actus Secundus and Actus Tertius completely unexplained.
79 Court performances in 1605 were illuminated by 152 candles (Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 163). For a reconsideration of act intervals in indoor theatres more generally see Hutchings, ‘The Changeling by Design’ and Approaching the Interval.
80 White, ‘Light and Darkness’, 125.
81 Taylor, ‘Structure of Performance’, 22–5.
82 The folio’s Actus Primus contains 7650 spoken words; I have here subtracted the 626 words of the anti-Scots passage that must have been deleted for the 1605 performance.
83 The folio’s Actus Quintus contains 4265 words; I have here subtracted the fifty-six words of the passage referring to the “Generall of our gracious Empresse’.
84 Stern, Problems of Chronology, 117.
85 Taylor and Loughnane, ‘Canon and Chronology’, 513–17, 528–31, 548–53.
86 Bourus, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet, esp. 181–207; Taylor and Loughnane, ‘Canon and Chronology’, 542–8.
87 James et al., Holy Bible, sig. A2 (the first page after the engraved title page).
88 See White, King James Only Controversy.
89 Stott, What Blest Genius, 176; Dávidházi, Romantic Cult of Shakespeare; Laporte, Victorian Cult of Shakespeare; Carlyle, On Heroes, 180; Arnold, ‘A French Critic on Shakspeare’, Prose Works, VIII, 170.
90 On Smart and Alexander, see Taylor, ‘The Politics of Attribution’.
91 Flatter, Shakespeare’s Producing Hand; Tucker, Secrets of Acting Shakespeare; Weingust, Acting from Shakespeare’s First Folio. Doran and Gaines spoke on their ‘Folio-based methods to directing Shakespeare’s works’ at a forum on ‘Shakespeare’s First Follio at 400’, hosted by the Newberry Library in Chicago on 5 September 2023.
92 Smith, Four Centuries, 344.