Shakespeare's Library by Stuart Kells

Author:Stuart Kells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2018-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

Just as some of Shakespeare’s earliest books suffer from the Barrington Problem, so, too, some suffer from the Wise Problem.

In 1619, three years after Shakespeare’s death and just four years before the First Folio, William Jaggard printed a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Only ten plays were included: Henry V; King Lear; The Merchant of Venice; The Merry Wives of Windsor; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Sir John Oldcastle; A Yorkshire Tragedy; and The Whole Contention Between the Two Famous Houses, Lancaster and York—the latter a joining of two playtexts, the early versions of II Henry VI and III Henry VI.

Not all of the plays are strictly Shakespearean. Sir John Oldcastle appeared in the second printing of the Shakespeare Third Folio but is currently thought to be a collaborative work, executed by several authors, none of whom was Shakespeare. A Yorkshire Tragedy, too, belongs to the ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’; as already noted, it is thought to have been written by Thomas Middleton. Pericles, Prince of Tyre is now regarded as at least partly Shakespearean, though it was excluded from the First Folio. George Wilkins was probably the play’s principal co-author.

In the production of the 1619 edition, Jaggard seems to have collaborated with the stationer Thomas Pavier to print the plays in a large quarto format. This seemingly benign project was actually an extremely curious one. In a mysterious Wisean move, Jaggard and Pavier printed six of the ten plays with false title-page dates: not 1619 but 1600, 1608 or 1609. Jaggard and Pavier also used false imprints: four of the plays were falsely attributed to other named stationers. For these reasons, the 1619 collected edition is known as the ‘False Folio’. (At least one edition of Venus and Adonis also appeared with a false title-page date. Burton’s copy, now in the Bodleian, purports to be an edition from 1602, but was in fact printed in 1607 or 1608.)

What were Jaggard and Pavier up to? Falsely dating the plays may have been a way to more safely print content that the publishers did not own. It may have been a ruse to make the plays seem more authoritative, more antiquarian, closer to the author—perhaps in a pre-Dibdinian exercise in first-edition mongering. The false imprints may have been an attempt to make the new quartos look more like the originals. Or the whole thing could have been a stunt to stoke interest in the forthcoming First Folio, which Jaggard would soon print and publish. (Jaggard had already printed the allonymous, Barringtonian The Passionate Pilgrim as Shakespeare’s in 1599 and again in 1612, and had printed at least one genuinely Shakespearean quarto play.)

Today, only two complete copies of the False Folio are known to have survived; they are held by the Folger and the Special Collections of Texas Christian University. Other libraries, including the British Library, hold individual Jaggard–Pavier quartos. At the start of the twentieth century, Shakespeare scholar and Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum Alfred William Pollard was the first to analyse the False Folio in any detail.

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