Notes Prologue: Questions 1. Paul Menzer, The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). 2. Brian Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3. Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 4. Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 5. See Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and in particular Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 371–420. 6. Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney, Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 7. Hamlet, ed. Terri Bourus, Sourcebooks Shakespeare (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2006). 8. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986; rev. 2nd ed., 2005). 9. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006); and William Shakespeare, Hamlet: 1603 and 1623, ed. Thompson and Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006). Throughout this book, I normally cite the modernized Arden texts of the three versions (as Hamlet 1603, Hamlet 1604, or Hamlet 1623), and their respective line-numbers, unless there is something peculiar to the original printings that is important to the argument. 10. The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 11. Liam E. Semler, Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1, 5. 12. My image of the spiral is intended to revise Robert Darnton’s model of the “circuit of communication,” which has been so influential among 214 M Notes book historians: see “What is the History of Books?” (1982) in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (1990), 107–35. Although Darnton’s model, based on eighteenth-century French print culture, is complicated by Gary Taylor’s model, based on Jacobean London’s mix of print, manuscript, and theatre, Taylor retains Darnton’s circular logic: see “Preface: Textual Proximities,” in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 24–8. 13. I have discussed the idea of performance as experiment in two essays: “Poner in Escena: The History of Cardenio,” in The Creation and Re-creation of Cardenio: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes, ed. Terri Bourus and Gary Taylor (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 297–318; and Terri Bourus and Gary Taylor, “Measure for Measure(s): Performance-testing the Adaptation Hypothesis,” Shakespeare 10.2 (2014), already available online, forthcoming in paginated print. 14. See Tiffany Stern, “Watching as Reading: The Audience and Written Text in the Early Modern Playhouse,” in How to do Things with Shakespeare, ed. Laurie E. Maguire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 136–59. 15. Robert Andrews, “Video Nasties Gallery: Fifteen Years of Anti-Piracy Warnings,” The Guardian, 8 April 2009 (accessed online 22 February 2014). 16. Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 5. 17. Alfred W. Pollard, Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of His Text (London: Moring, 1917), recently reprinted by Cambridge University Press (2010); Johns, Piracy, 5 (quoting the vari- ant first line of “To be or not to be”), 13 (piracy “was reputedly rife in the main thoroughfares of Shakespeare’s London”). 1 Piratical Publishers? 1. Ira Nadel, Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard (London: Methuen, 2002), 162–94, 390–401. 2. On the history of intellectual property rights, see William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3. Peter W. M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1:xvii. For misrepresentations of copyright, in particular, see also 2:860–61. 4. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 95. 5. Peter W. M. Blayney, The Bookshops in St. Paul’s Cross Churchyard (London: Bibliographical Society, 1990). 6. Laurie E. Maguire, “The Craft of Printing (1600),” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 438. Notes M 215 7. On the change from Chamberlain’s Men to King’s Men, see J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 32–3. 8. “Q1” is an abbreviation for “First Quarto,” quarto being a bibliographical description of a book printed with sheets of paper folded twice, thereby producing four leaves (i.e., eight pages). 9. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix: The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragedie (London, 1633), sig. **6v. 10. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7. 11. I will refer to this edition as “1604” (its actual date of printing and first release) throughout this book. Theoretically, either “1604” or “1605” might be an error in the printing of the title page, but it seems unlikely that a compositor would forget what year it was, and the recurrence of such variants in other books manufactured by different printers (see next note) indicates that it was a routine business practice. 12. For other examples of books published by Ling with two dates on differ- ent copies, see STC 11622 (“1594”) and 11622.5 (“1595”), 7193 (“1597”) and 7193.2 (“1598”), 15685 (“1597”), and 15685.5 (“1598”). “STC” numbers come from A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Printed Books Printed Abroad, 1475– 1640, ed. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, rev. ed. 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91). 13. On the “clear tendency . for age to depress value,” see John Barnard and Maureen Bell, “The Inventory of Henry Bynneman (1583): A Preliminary Survey,” Publishing History 29 (1991): 5–46, esp. p. 10. Any modern bookseller knows the same thing. 14. Kirk Melnikoff, “Nicholas Ling’s Republican Hamlet (1603),” in Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography, ed. Marta Straznicky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 95–111, esp. 97. The manuscript from which “the 1603 Hamlet” was printed might have been Elizabethan, but Melnikoff is specifically refer- ring to the printed book. 15. If Q1 had been printed late in 1603, we might expect some title pages to read “1604.” But only two copies of Q1 survive, and only one of those includes the title page. We therefore have no way of knowing whether there were variant title page dates. 16. See William Carroll, ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 181–4, for the lost “1597” first edition; for the 1598 edition as a typical reprint, see Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 44–7. 17. The only Jacobean quarto with “Shakespeare” (variously spelled) on the title reprinted before 1642 more often than Hamlet was Pericles, but that is now recognized as a play coauthored with George Wilkins. I argue that 216 M Notes Q1 Hamlet is a different aesthetic object than Q2, and Q2 is certainly not a simple reprint of Q1; consequently, one might argue that these are different books, and should not be lumped together as a single bestseller. But most scholars believe that Q1 and Q2 are different representations of the same play, and I argue that both were written by the same author; in evaluating the success of a book, we normally consider all its versions and revisions (as we do, for instance, in the case of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). If Q1 were a play written by Thomas Kyd, we would need to treat it as a separate book; but I don’t know of any scholar who believes that. 18. Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 371–420, esp. 373. The complete lack of documentation for this conjec- ture is apparent from the absence of footnotes on this page, as opposed to the preceding page (and most others) of this otherwise important article. 19. Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kasten (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–422. 20. If they wanted copies of the new, “enlarged” edition, they would also presumably want the wholesaler to buy back from them their unsold cop- ies of the first edition—which would, of course, transfer the loss from all those retailers back to the publisher. In either scenario, the publisher would have had a strong disincentive to publish the second edition before the first had sold out. 21. W. Craig Ferguson, Valentine Simmes (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1968), 14 (noting that Ling often fails to name a printer). 22. The term “publisher” is anachronistic, but as Blayney notes, “financing and distribution (the basics of what even a modern publisher does) are not the same as retail bookselling, and it is impossible to explain the early trade in printed books without either inventing a word or borrowing an anachronism” (Stationers’ Company, 1:30–33). I will hereafter use “pub- lisher” for Ling and other stationers performing the same function. 23. R. B. McKerrow, Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices in England and Scotland, 1485–1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1949), p. 118 (#301). For the near-anagram (Honisucal = Nicholas/Nicholus), see D.