we have of early reading and writing practices are often the remarkable survivals that escaped conservation and reclassification in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. So much primary evidence was lost as modern book owners systematically remade the archive in their own modern image. Perceptions of what was normal and what was anomalous in earlier cultures of the text—perceptions of literary history itself, embodied in library shelves—are shaped to a great degree by the largely silent work of the book collector.
On the other hand, as I will argue, Pugh and Parker were not outliers in early book culture; the relatively flexible, open-ended, recombinant texts that they engaged and maintained were the raw materials of the intellectual products of the handpress era. It will be the burden of the chapters that follow to develop the particular into the general—to trace early compiling and collecting practices in diverse readers, canonical writers, and ambitious amateurs from the Renaissance. The next chapter begins by pressing the issue of curatorial impact beyond the case study and into a field of collected artifacts from a range of institutions and individuals under the organizing category of a single author, Shakespeare.
CHAPTER 2
Making Shakespeare’s Books
Material Intertextuality from the Bindery to the Conservation Lab
Among the most highly valued items in special collections at Oxford’s Bodleian Library is a volume of Shakespeare’s poetry containing quartos of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets gathered together by an eighteenth-century owner named Thomas Caldecott.1 So highly valued is the book that it cannot be consulted according to the usual procedures. One must first appeal for special permission at Duke Humfrey’s Library, then trudge across Broad Street to the New Library to read it under close supervision in the Modern Papers Room—and for good reason. The volume brings together rare early editions of its three constituent works: Venus and Adonis and Lucrece from a 1594 printing and the Sonnets from 1609. The texts themselves are, in the language of cataloging, “perfect,” with no major defects or latter-day adulterations;2 their pages have been cropped, washed, and rebound in stately tooled leather with crisp marbled endpapers. Only a few scant traces of the books’ four centuries of use and circulation remain, most of which are annotations written in by modern archivists and connoisseurs. The earliest record of provenance is one that Caldecott himself left in the flyleaves: “I purchased the contents of this volume June 1796 of an obscure bookseller of the name of Vanderberg near St. Margaret’s Church Westminster. He had cut them with Several others out of a Volume, put each of them separately into blue paper, and priced them at 4s 5d.”
Rare books most often appear to us today as material artifacts without material histories.3 Aside from the occasional binder’s or conservator’s note, there are few reasons to suspect that the generally uniform, modern-looking texts we consult in special-collections libraries have ever existed in other configurations—that ways of using and assigning value to them have ever been different from our own. But Caldecott’s Shakespeare shows evidence of at least three modes of readerly engagement, not a single overarching one. First, working backward, there is that of its current owner, Oxford University, which values the book’s early imprints and relatively unspoiled condition and which protects it using a special classification number and a curatorial policy granting readers only the most limited access in highly controlled environments. Second, there is that of Vanderberg and Caldecott, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century owners respectively, who valued the texts as collectors’ items and who had no reservation about physically restructuring them to maximize profit (in the case of the former) or prestige (in the case of the latter). Third, and more distantly, there is whatever early modern compilation these items might have inhabited before they were cut into individual units and anthologized in a morocco-bound volume in 1796. At each of these historical junctures, questions arise about the influence of archival practices over our perceptions of literary artifacts. How does the administration of texts for careful scholarly use in today’s libraries conceal the work of earlier readers and collectors, who were sometimes more likely to reshape books according to their own desires than to venerate them as reservoirs of literary content, frozen in time? More gravely perhaps, how did the work of earlier collectors—in wresting texts from their contexts, in building volumes of one author’s collected verse—conceal even earlier forms of textual organization that may have seemed to them unprofitable, distasteful, or not worth saving?
Chapter 1 raised these questions through case studies of compiling and disbinding activities at two key early libraries. This chapter moves outward to consider textual (re)assembly across multiple institutions and early collectors, focusing on a single figure: Shakespeare. Using a range of archival specimens that, like Caldecott’s volume, preserve evidence of their being engineered and organized by successive owners, but which have long been of interest only to bibliographers, I argue that the parameters of reading and interpretation are frequently established and sometimes imposed by the collectors, compilers, conservators, and curators who in a very literal sense make books. For each new set of attitudes concerning the order of texts in books and libraries, an earlier set of attitudes is partially concealed, preventing certain reader-text interactions and enabling a host of others. As the specimens I examined in my first chapter have begun to suggest, the problem is acute in the case of early printed texts, which were assembled, organized, and read in ways that are foreign to us today. Before they were extracted into individual units and clothed in decorated covers, many such texts—particularly small-format literary works—existed in composite volumes, user- and retailer-initiated anthologies, topical arrangements of disparate authors or genres, evoking complex histories of early book production and reception. But such texts are only ever available to us now through the mediations of readers and owners who suppress those histories—who (perhaps inevitably) remake what they acquire according to their own historically situated notion of the book. This chapter affirms that these processes of making and remaking books play a critical role in generating meaning, establishing links between works in the same binding, which may be read or ignored, or dissolving such links so that works can stand alone. Moving from the familiar, individuated Shakespearean texts most often found in libraries today to the radically unfamiliar assemblages of early print culture, I propose that we can ground historical interpretations—and discover new ones—in the largely reader-driven, recombinant productions of Renaissance writers’ first audiences.
Making Shakespeare in Modernity
Shakespeare has long been a primary point of reference in modern bibliographical scholarship in English. As the scientific New Bibliography gave way to a more reflexive textual criticism in the late twentieth century, attention shifted decisively from the ideals of eclectic editing to the varied representational machinery through which texts and canons are transmitted in time.4 Following D. F. McKenzie’s influential dictum, “forms effect meaning,” critics interested in the materiality of texts have worked for two decades or more to show that print apparatuses—from early paratexts to modern classroom editions—are implicated in literary strategies and historical patterns of reception.5 But as I have been arguing, while the compositors, vendors, and editors of Shakespearean texts have been revealed as important agents in meaningmaking, those most directly responsible for the configuration and classification of texts by Shakespeare are not often discussed. We saw in the last chapter that binding, curatorship, and conservation—like other aspects of textual presentation—produce rather than simply make available literary works to be read. As with editing (or perhaps more fundamentally than with editing), collecting practices circumscribe interpretive possibilities within a recognizable, physical text. And also as with editing, these practices are inexorably subjective: the resulting text does not transparently re-present a literary work that exists, fully formed, in advance; it impresses into the historical substructure of that work the values, assumptions, and biases of those who make it, at each stage of its construction.
