Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Syme, Holger Schott

Titel

Introduction: The Patchwork Folio

Ist Teil von

• Shakespeare Quarterly, 2023-12, Vol.74 (4), p.299-313

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Oxford University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The volume’s emblematic title-page, engraved by William Hole “almost certainly under Jonson’s personal direction,” set the stakes for the project, self-consciously aligning Jonson’s collection with the similarly designed title-pages of Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and James I and VI’s Workes, thus giving readers an instant sense of the book’s place in literary and cultural history, with Jonson’s oeuvre cast as an English reflection of much of the breadth of classical literature.1 Notably, though, neither the title-page nor the plays included in the 1616 volume deny their theatrical origins: the complex illustration features many concrete allusions to the stage, even if filtered through a strictly Greco-Roman visual frame of reference, and each play is accompanied by detailed information about its first performance, the companies that enacted it, and the “principall Comœdians” who appeared in it—including, on two occasions, Shakespeare.2 At the same time, Jonson deliberately shaped his print persona as a playwright in sharp distinction from his actual career as a theater professional, excluding most of the drama he had written for companies at Philip Henslowe’s Rose playhouse and as a member of Pembroke’s Men in the mid-1590s.3 Everything about the 1616 volume bespeaks purposeful choices. The copy for it was rigorously prepared by its author, sometimes, but not always, working with the previous quarto printings; typographical decisions were made with a great deal of care and attention, leading to a layout that is by turns imitative of Renaissance editions of Latin drama and highly original, but consistently realized throughout; and the book was carefully proofread as it made its way through the press, though Jonson’s involvement in that process may have been less intense than a previous generation of scholars thought.4 Especially when allowing for what D. F. McKenzie called the “normality of non-uniformity” in early modern printing, the 1616 Jonson folio was in many ways a remarkably uniformly presented book—and one that, with its generous margins and single column of text, made proudly uneconomical use of the format’s potential for grandness.5 The volume that appeared in 1623, although Jonson’s voice is encountered in it before Shakespeare’s, is nothing like the Workes. Macbeth, Measure for Measure (which turns out to be twice removed from Shakespeare’s papers, first by Middleton, then by Ralph Crane), and All’s Well that Ends Well all appear to fall into that category, as does Titus Andronicus, in which the Folio-only “fly scene,” as Gary Taylor and Doug Duhaime have recently shown, cannot have been written by Shakespeare.10 On the other hand, what may be the “the most collaborative of Shakespeare’s plays,” 1 Henry VI, is ironically also one of the texts that can most confidently be identified as printed from authorial manuscript—simply because it preserves so many “inconsistencies in spelling, stage directions, properties, character names, and plot elements” that it “was most likely prepared from an assemblage of the [various] authors’ papers that were somewhat annotated for performance.” [...]in many cases, the printed copy seems to have been “annotated” from (or merely nebulously “influenced by”) whatever manuscripts whoever did the annotating had available.12 But how difficult it is to reconstruct the relationship between quartos, holographs, playhouse manuscripts, and the Folio text has recently been brilliantly demonstrated by Margaret Jane Kidnie in an essay that explodes longheld scholarly convictions about the nature of the copy underlying the versions of Hamlet printed in the second quarto of 1604/5 and the Folio.13 More generally, and with a more deeply corrosive effect on those bibliographical foundations, Paul Werstine has deconstructed the belief that authorial “foul papers” are characterized by inconsistencies that made them unusable in the theater, and that printed texts displaying such inconsistencies must therefore be based on holograph copy. [...]the view that The Comedy of Errors was printed from authorial “foul papers”