Young Shakespeare's Young Hamlet

Print, Piracy, and Performance

T. Bourus

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137465610
• eBook ISBN: 9781137465641
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: European Medieval History

The different versions of Hamlet constitute one of the most vexing puzzles in Shakespeare studies. In this groundbreaking work, Shakespeare scholar Terri Bourus argues that this puzzle can only be solved by drawing on multiple kinds of evidence and analysis, including book and theatre history, biography, performance studies, and close readings.

CHAPTER 1

Piratical Publishers?

“What do you read, my lord?”

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered at the Edinburgh Festival on 24 August 1966. A version of the play then transferred to the National Theatre at the Old Vic, where it opened on 11 April 1967. A version of the text was published by Faber and Faber that year, and the play also opened on Broadway. Asked outside the theatre what the play was about, Stoppard answered (notoriously), “it’s about to make me rich.” As the copyright holder, he received royalties for performances, book sales, and translations. It has been often reprinted and anthologized. Stoppard revised the first edition, and also directed the 1990 film, further transforming playscript into screenplay.¹ Stoppard retained ownership of the texts of all these incarnations.

Shakespeare, by contrast, could not have retained ownership of the play that inspired Stoppard’s. Almost everything we know about Shakespeare’s Hamlet comes from editions printed between 1603 and 1623. But those machined texts did not belong to Shakespeare, and he would have received no percentage of the profit from book sales. Copyright, in the modern sense, was not created until the eighteenth century. The profits would have gone, instead, to a stationer: a printer or bookseller or publisher who belonged to the Stationers’ Company.² To understand the early texts of Hamlet we must therefore understand the early modern book trade. Unfortunately, “book-trade fallacies have flourished” in textual and literary studies, especially in studies of Shakespeare.³

The Worshipful Company of Stationers, granted its royal charter by Queen Mary on 4 May 1557, controlled almost everything to do with the book business. It printed the books; it sold the books; it regulated the conduct of printers and booksellers. However, since the Stationers’ Company was also an association of craftsmen and shopkeepers (much like the Butchers, Goldsmiths, Merchant Taylors, Cordwainers, and other London companies), it combined commercial with fraternal aspirations. Members of the Company of Stationers feasted on cakes and ale on Ash Wednesday, feasted at the election of Company officers, feasted for the annual replacement of the paper windows of print shops, and the like.⁴ The social aspect of Company life was no doubt enhanced by the fact that (with the exception of the small university towns of Oxford and Cambridge) the Company’s charter confined printing in the kingdom to the old medieval walled and incorporated City of London. Consequently, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, nearly the whole book trade was crammed in and around St. Paul’s Cathedral and its environs.⁵ Thus, we must not imagine the business in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in terms of modern large multinational corporations. Think of it, instead, in terms of cottage industries, like a modern dental office, or a local independent bookstore—or, even more precisely, a twenty-first-century microbrewery (an artisanal manufacturing business that often owns its own retail outlet but also seeks wholesale customers). Few printers had more than one press, and even a large operation such as the Jaggards’ in the 1620s seems to have engaged fewer than 15 people, including apprentices.⁶

Into this fraternal business environment came the fraternal texts of a play called Hamlet. It made its first appearance in print in 1603, no earlier than the end of May. We know its date so precisely because the title page declares that the play had been “acted by his Highnesse servants.” The male pronoun “his” refers to King James I, and the word “servants” specifies a company of actors that included William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, which was rechristened (and upgraded) from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to the King’s Men on 19 May 1603.⁷ Modern scholars typically refer to this textual object as “Q1 Hamlet.”⁸ Seventeenth-century readers would have recognized it as a “quarto playbook.”⁹ As Lukas Erne observes, that phrase “encapsulates genre (play), medium (book), and format (quarto) to designate a product with a distinct cultural valence that differs from both the prestigious folio and the smaller-format poetry book.”¹⁰ Like most other quarto playbooks, the 1603 edition of Hamlet could almost certainly have been purchased for six pence, retail, and most copies were probably sold without a hard binding. Another, longer edition with the same title, author, and publisher—which scholars now call “Q2 Hamlet”—was published near the end of 1604.¹¹ We know its date so precisely because some copies of the title page are dated “1604,” and others are dated “1605.” This double dating is not unusual.¹² It indicates that printing was completed late in 1604, and that some copies were printed with the later date so that they would still seem “new” throughout the following year. The older a book, the harder it was to sell at full price.¹³

The dates of these two editions are clear enough, but they continue to be misunderstood. The 1603 edition is a Jacobean book, and therefore it could not “have been read during the uneasy final months of Elizabeth’s reign,” as one Shakespeare scholar claimed in 2012.¹⁴ More importantly, the dates indicate that Hamlet sold quickly. A second edition by the same publisher appeared within, at the most, 18 months of the first, or perhaps as few as 12 or 13 months.¹⁵ In the wider context of Shakespeare in the early London book trade, this is not surprising. Venus and Adonis was published in four editions in four successive years, then twice in 1599; Richard II had three editions in 1597–98; 1 Henry IV, three editions in 1598–99; Lucrece was published twice in 1600; Richard III and Love’s Labour’s Lost were each published twice in 1597–98.¹⁶ As a book, The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark was Shakespeare’s first Jacobean bestseller, and it did much better in bookshops than King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, or the Sonnets.¹⁷ There is absolutely no evidence for the recent conjecture that the second edition of Hamlet was “very probably” printed and distributed when “unsold copies” of the first edition remained in stock, which the publisher “still wanted to unload,” perhaps “even at a discount.”¹⁸ Since the publisher owned what we would now call the copyright, he did not need to finance a second edition until he had unloaded the first. A new edition could be printed quickly enough, once he had exhausted his stock. Even if he acquired another or better manuscript, he had no incentive to rush it into print. No one else could infringe his exclusive right to print that title, so why should he? In any case, why would he want to finance another edition if the first had sold poorly? Moreover, the conjecture assumes that only the publisher had an investment in “unsold copies” that he might have to “sell off” at a discount. Although the publisher certainly retained a fraction of the print-run to sell in his own retail bookshop (perhaps 10%), most of the copies of the first edition would have been sold or traded, at wholesale prices, to other booksellers.¹⁹ Those other booksellers had also invested their meager capital in copies of the first edition. With unsold stock on their hands, they would be most unlikely to purchase from him any copies of the new edition.²⁰ They would also probably, understandably, be annoyed if he published a premature and expanded second edition, thereby undercutting their chances of selling their own unsold copies of the first. Such behavior would undermine a retailer’s faith in the wholesaler, and therefore threaten the publisher’s ability to sell other books in future. In the small world of the London book trade, a publisher would have known, personally, the booksellers who were his most important customers. His reputation with those customers was the foundation of his business.

The “his” to whom the last sentence refers was Nicholas Ling. The 1603 edition also named “John Trundle” as copublisher, and the 1604 edition named “James Roberts” as the printer. The printer of the 1603 edition was not named, but we know that the type used to print it belonged to Valentine Simmes.²¹ But although Trundle, Roberts, and Simmes played important supporting roles in the story of Hamlet as a printed book, Ling was the protagonist. Only two living individuals were identified on both title pages of the first two editions of Hamlet: the author “William Shakespeare” and the publisher “N. L.”²² We know that “N.L.” was Nicholas Ling, because he normally used his initials on title pages and, in the small world of London stationers at the time, no one else had the same initials. Moreover, each title page conspicuously displayed Ling’s large device—what we might call his “logo”: a honeysuckle (an anagram for the name “Nicholas”) wrapped around a North Atlantic fish (called a “ling”). That logo also contained his initials, which were thus published twice on each title page, and supplemented by a visual pun.²³ Like most Elizabethan writers, Ling apparently loved puns. Together, these three printed incarnations of the stationer’s name take up more space on the page than the author’s. As commodities in the book trade, both editions belonged to Ling.

They belonged to Ling until his death. On 9 April 1607, he was buried in the parish church of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West.²⁴ On 19 November of the same year, Ling’s intellectual property rights to Hamlet and 15 other texts (what we would call his copyrights) were officially transferred to another stationer, John Smethwicke.²⁵ Smethwicke, like Ling, was working from a bookshop on the north side of Fleet Street, a short walk west of St. Paul’s, in the churchyard of St. Dunstan’s parish.²⁶ Ling had occupied a bookshop there since 1598, and from 1602 Ling and Smethwicke were close neighbors in that small churchyard (much smaller than the churchyard of St. Paul’s).²⁷ Both Hamlet quartos were sold out of Ling’s St. Dunstan’s shop, and from St. Dunstan’s Smethwicke published Hamlet in another “quarto playbook” in 1611. In November 1623, Smethwick was named as one of the four members of the syndicate that published the “Folio” edition of Mr. William Shakespeare His Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies.²⁸ Most scholars believe that Smethwicke was included in that syndicate because he owned the copyrights to Hamlet and three other Shakespeare plays (all acquired from Ling).²⁹ He reprinted Hamlet, again as a stand-alone quarto, in 1625.³⁰ He was also a member of the syndicate that published the second Folio, in 1632. In 1637, Smethwicke published another reprint of the quarto, the last edition of Hamlet before the closing of the theatres in 1642. Thus, the intellectual property rights owned initially by Ling, and then acquired by Smethwicke, underlay all the early editions of Hamlet, from 1603 to 1637.

Four different stationers were involved in the publication of the first two editions of Hamlet, and soon after a fifth stationer acquired the rights. Consequently, any account of the early printings of Hamlet must be a description of “the dynamics of economic, political, and personal association that constitute a key vector of the trade in books.”³¹ Any theory that focuses on only a single stationer is bound to be misleading...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Prologue: Questions
• 1 Piratical Publishers?
• 2 Piratical Actors?
• 3 Piratical Reporters?
• 4 How Old Is Young?
• 5 Young Shakespeare?
• 6 Revising Hamlet?
• Epilogue: Conclusions and Rebeginnings
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index