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Introduction a Life in Print: Toward a Shakespearean Bio-Bibliography

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Introduction a Life in Print: Toward a Shakespearean Bio-Bibliography Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-13807-0 - Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade Adam G. Hooks Excerpt More information Introduction A life in print: toward a Shakespearean bio-bibliography On the twentieth of October in 1933, at Stationers’ Hall in London, Shakespearean biography and bibliography came together as never before. That evening, Captain William Jaggard, proprietor of the Shakespeare Press on Sheep Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, delivered a lecture on the printing trade in which he told “an unwritten chapter” in the biography of Shakespeare. As the presiding chair noted, Captain Jaggard was uniquely qualified for such a task, due to his profession and place of residence, to his many years of labor in producing the Shakespeare Bibliography (“an out- standing work”), and to the fact that the name of Jaggard was “reverenced by all lovers of, and more especially by students of,” Shakespeare, because it appeared on the title-page of the First Folio in 1623. A facsimile was on hand to mark the occasion. The captain began his lecture by lamenting the sorry state of Shakespearean biography, particularly those brief lives that prefaced edi- tions of the works, which for the most part were copied from the first such account, written by Nicholas Rowe and published in 1709. Since these monotonous and scanty biographies left blank a crucial chapter in Shakespeare’s life – the decade between his marriage in Stratford and his arrival on the London theater scene – Jaggard proposed an explanation for these vital formative years: that Shakespeare had been, as the title of the lecture claimed, “Once a Printer and Bookman.” He offered “five hundred supporting quotations” from the plays and poems that demonstrated Shakespeare’s intimate knowledge of printing and publishing. Admittedly, however, this evidence was indirect and inconclusive. Over the years many other suggestions had been made based on references in the works; although most were “too preposterous to merit discussion,” Jaggard presented a selection of over one hundred of the professions that had been proposed for Shakespeare, from “Actor” to “Zoologist.” The real foundation of his argument was not a matter of quotation and interpretation, though, but a matter of bibliography. Shakespeare’s 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-13807-0 - Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade Adam G. Hooks Excerpt More information 2 Introduction Stratford contemporary Richard Field became a prosperous printer in London, and so without a doubt once the aspiring poet arrived in the city “he was assured of food and shelter with Dick Field, until work could 1 be found.” In Field’s shop, Shakespeare (“poor” and “desperately hard up”) would gain access to the books that nurtured his growth and devel- opment, including a crucial source for his plays, Plutarch’s Lives, which Field himself had printed. Jaggard further deduced that Field helped Shakespeare secure employment as a proofreader in the shop of Henry Denham, who had just started work on another essential book, Holinshed’s Chronicles. There he would also befriend Denham’s young apprentice: the namesake (and perhaps the ancestor) of the lecturer, William Jaggard, who was the “saviour and sponsor of all the known 2 surviving manuscripts of Shakespeare in 1623.” Jaggard thus neatly tied together all the narrative strands of Shakespeare’s life and works, from Stratford to London and back again, from inspiration and composition to publication and preservation. In doing so, he claimed the authority of Shakespeare’s printers – and of Shakespeare himself. Indeed, for Caroline Spurgeon, who once met this “present-day Stratfordian” in his bookshop, he seemed to be a “voice from the dead,” speaking not only for his ancestor 3 but also for his celebrated townsman. Biography and bibliography meet in an uncanny conjunction. Captain Jaggard’s foray into the field of Shakespearean biography that evening was a thoroughly researched argument, and may also have been a self-reflexive act of wish fulfillment. But his eccentric exercise differs only in degree, rather than in kind, from the methods and objectives of main- stream biographical and bibliographical scholarship. First, a problem that previous scholarship has failed to solve is identified: a gap in the evidentiary record at an important point in Shakespeare’s life. Next, the available 1 Jaggard, Printer and Bookman, 3. Although Jaggard does not mention it here, Field served as the printer for Venus and Adonis and Lucrece; see Chapter 1. 2 Jaggard, Printer and Bookman, 4. Jaggard dedicated his Shakespeare Bibliography to the “Elizabethan author, printer, and publisher, to whom the world owes more than it deems for the safe preservation of an unparalleled literary heritage.” The captain was fond of claiming that he was descended from his early modern counterpart, though he did not mention it in the Bibliography or during his Stationers’ Hall lecture. 3 Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery, 96–8. Spurgeon recalled an encounter with the “descendant of William Jaggard” in which the captain described the swirling water of the Avon as observed from Clopton Bridge: “Captain Jaggard, as he said this, was at the further end of his shop ...and his voice, coming thus somewhat muffled from the distance, gave me the most curious thrill and start, as if it were a voice from the dead. For here was a present-day Stratfordian describing to me in prose, in minute detail, exactly what a Stratford man had thus set down in verse nearly three hundred and fifty years ago.” Spurgeon then quotes a stanza from Lucrece. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-13807-0 - Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade Adam G. Hooks Excerpt More information Introduction 3 evidence is reevaluated and reexamined, in part by redefining what can be considered as evidence. A combination of critical (interpretive) and histor- ical (investigative) methods are employed: a careful reading of the plays and poems reveals the source materials they incorporate, as well as patterns of imagery; a collection of documentary records and bibliographical facts is assembled and organized. A compelling narrative is produced, one that offers a plausible explanation for the initial problem – an explanation that stands on the evidence, and is also satisfactory to the scholar. The underlying motivation of Shakespearean biography is to under- stand the connections between the life and the works. The assumption is that the works can be explained through the life, using bibliography to answer several central questions: what were Shakespeare’sinfluences, how did he engage with them, and how did Shakespeare come by his books? In turn, the life is derived from the works, as quotations from the plays and poems are construed as unconscious revelations – evidence of Shakespeare’s professional knowledge that is unmistakable, yet only visible to the discerning scholar. What would otherwise be biographical specula- tion or critical interpretation is given the weight of bibliographical fact. The narrative is sanctioned not only by scholarly authority, but also by Shakespeare himself. Captain Jaggard was a bookseller and bibliographer from Stratford who told a story in which printers and booksellers made Shakespeare, a story about how books and the book trade shaped his life and afterlife. Jaggard’s lecture demonstrates both the possibilities and the problems of merging biography and bibliography. He is the descendant who begets both his forefathers and his objects of study in the image of his own profession. My objective is not to condemn the captain – who seems to have been aware of the more speculative elements in his argument – but rather to suggest that the motives and methodologies evident in his lecture are shared by certain strands of contemporary Shakespeare scholarship. Selling Shakespeare tells a new story about Shakespeare’s life and career in print, a story centered not on the man or writer himself, but on the reputation and authorial personae created, bought, and sold by the early modern book trade. The interests and investments of publishers and booksellers have defined our ideas of the Shakespearean. Because they first made Shakespeare’s life in print, attending to these interests demon- strates how multiple agencies created multiple versions of Shakespearean authorship – and how one of those versions surpassed the rest. Instead of asking only what the book trade did for Shakespeare, I ask what Shakespeare did for the members of the book trade. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-13807-0 - Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade Adam G. Hooks Excerpt More information 4 Introduction What this book offers is a new kind – or, rather, the recovery and extension of a different kind – of biographical investigation and historicist criticism, one based not on external life documents, nor on the texts of Shakespeare’s works, but on the books that were printed, published, sold, circulated, collected, and catalogued under his name. Here biography and bibliography intersect, both methodologically and morphologically, as I recuperate the practice of “bio-bibliography,” a term used to describe the 4 listing of an author’s works accompanied by a brief description of the life. This term encapsulates both the practice and the evidentiary basis of the first efforts to outline Shakespeare’s life and career as a playwright in the seventeenth century. The compilers of these lives were very much aware of the (printed) sources they used, and thus provide an alternative to the established history of Shakespearean biography, which asserts that modern conceptions of Shakespeare’s career began in the eighteenth century, with the rise of a reliance on “authentic” archival methods. While the early compilers did repeat apocryphal stories that are now discredited, they also constructed Shakespeare’s career according to the existence – and the value – of the plays attributed to him in print.
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