list showing a seventeenthcentury collection of plays. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Other methods of organizing such texts were idiosyncratic and depended on the particular sites in which they were to be used. The archepiscopal library at Lambeth Palace, for example (which in the early modern period took no great interest in literary texts), bound small-format books like Shakespeare’s into compilations by publication year, each volume thus serving as a partial record of that year’s printed output or perhaps that year’s reading. This “yearbook” approach to text management seems to have affiliations with Archbishop Parker’s own collecting habits, as it produced, at Lambeth as in Parker’s library at Cambridge, an abundance of flexible, parchmentbound resource anthologies that are indifferent to modern distinctions between literary and nonliterary, canonical and ephemeral.38 When the archepiscopal librarians acquired a copy of 2 Henry IV, for example, they bound the play with other material printed in 1600. The Shakespearean text became the fifth of six booklets in a parchment binding, including a verse tribute to Queen Elizabeth called E. W. his Thameseidos, the political poem England’s Hope Against Irish Hate, a declaration of war by the king of France against the Duke of Savoy, and two collections of funerary elegies in Latin and English.39 Sure enough, when attitudes toward printed books began to shift in modernity, this volume was remade according to the systems of literary value that I have been outlining. But this time it was a thief, not a dealer or owner, who separated the Shakespearean book from the others, leaving a gap in the binding that is still visible today.40
Here we can take up Henry IV as a way to begin considering the interpretive implications of the patterns of assembly that I have sketched out in this and the previous chapter. In my discussion of Hunter’s collection at Glasgow, I identified a volume, now disbound, that once contained comedies, masques, and histories, including two Shakespearean texts, 1 and 2 Henry IV. Such an assemblage, it seems, would square with the current critical consensus that the plays blend history with comedy, evoking a world in which, as David Scott Kastan has shown, “exuberance and excess will not be incorporated into the stable hierarchies of the body politic.”41 But another volume that I described above, the Folger “lives” compilation from the 1630s, presents a different readerly context, bringing 1 Henry IV together with Richard III, The Troublesome Raine of King John, Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey, Heywood’s Troubles of Queen Elizabeth, and other plays concerned with political figures and the (frequently vexed) maintenance of power. In this volume, we might speculate, the subversive energies of Falstaff and Eastcheap would be more easily eclipsed by the problem of succession and Henry’s tenuous control over his territories. Moreover, the Lambeth volume just discussed, assembled by the archepiscopal librarians, brings the play even further into the realm of ideological orthodoxy. In this case, the juxtaposition produced by binding texts together calls attention to two related themes that are central to Shakespeare’s second tetralogy: aging rulers and the containment of rebellion. Thameseidos, written at a moment of great cultural anxiety over succession, pleads with an aging Elizabeth to “Liue thou for euer! … To maintaine Artes, as hitherto th’ast done; / For wayle the Muses must, when thou art gone.”42 The two books of elegies mourn the death of Sir Horatio Palavicino, the Elizabethan intelligencer, aristocrat, and well-known financier of England’s wars.43 And the two political pamphlets concern Irish and French rebellion over land.44 Taken in this context, it is difficult to imagine how Falstaff’s exuberance at the king’s death in 2 Henry IV—“The laws of England are at my commandment” (5.3.125–26),45 he famously exclaims—could elicit anything but contempt. Indeed, in this archepiscopal anthology, the pathos of the final scenes might well reside not, as it does for us, in Hal’s repudiation of Falstaff, but in the epilogue’s appeal to “pray for the Queen” (30).
In all of these cases, the compiling agent has created a rubric for interpretation in book form that we can begin to theorize, and such rubrics, it is clear, were not fully determined by the criteria of author, genre, and textual autonomy that would guide later forms of assembly. To be sure, these criteria did exist in early print culture: the Folger volume containing copies of 1 and 2 Henry IV is an example of a compilation that demonstrates authorial and textual continuity (insofar as what we recognize as authors and texts today are taken to be reflected in this earlier period’s theatrical practices), and several early collections, such as the Bridgewater Library at the Huntington, do contain volumes of exclusively Shakespearean materials.46 But the sixteenthand seventeenth-century compilations that map on to these categories were subject to a degree of contingency and reader intervention that is alien to modern norms of textual order.47
A well-known example of this contingent canonicity is the group of plays now referred to as the Pavier Quartos.48 Though the circumstances of their production are still being debated, these texts are generally taken to constitute an early effort at gathering Shakespeare’s dramatic works into a single volume—a volume whose constituent parts were also apparently sold in independent units. The collection, sometimes called a “nonce collection” to highlight its ad hoc quality,49 was published by Thomas Pavier in 1619, four years before the First Folio, with several of the individual title pages bearing false imprints and dates to hide the fact that Pavier did not own the rights to all of the plays. The first three quartos in the series—The Whole Contention, parts 1 and 2, and Pericles—were printed with continuous signatures, suggesting that an authorial collection was being planned. And indeed, several groupings of the texts either survive in early bindings that resemble the “collected works” format or show evidence of having once been configured in this way.50 However, the latter seven quartos in the series—A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, King Lear, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—were signed individually, as if to stand outside of the collection, which was an indication, for many who have told the story, that Pavier was guilty of piracy.51 But the texts’ inconsistencies also demonstrate that nonteleological notions of book assembly governed even collections organized by author such as this one, and that the Pavier Quartos might be more profitably understood and read as a consumer-driven compilation rather than a never-realized “Works.” Of the two known “complete sets” that survive in early bindings, neither follow the continuous signatures—ostensibly, instructions to the binder—set out in the first three quartos: one, now at Texas Christian University, was arranged in the seventeenth century with The Yorkshire Tragedy positioned between The Whole Contention and Pericles; and in the other, now at the Folger, A Midsummer Night’s Dream assumes the second position in the set.52 The contingency of book formation in the period is vividly evoked in a third example: a set of Pavier Quartos at the Folger which, now disbound, once contained a text that was neither published by Pavier nor attributed to Shakespeare.53 The volume, which I discuss further in Chapter 5, stands today in a modern binding that includes only The Whole Contention and Pericles. But according to a contents list preserved in the flyleaves, the texts were originally accompanied by Thomas Heywood’s play A Woman Killed with Kindness, a quarto that in fact occupied the first position in the otherwise Shakespearean book.54 The volume shows that early owners and retailers, enabled by the built-in flexibility of printed products like the Pavier Quartos, could make books—and frameworks for reading—both within and outside prescribed schemes of organization.
Shakespeare, Assembly, and Interpretation
With this broad outline of the contexts and stakes of Shakespearean book assembly, I conclude this chapter by taking a closer look at five early compilations that, like this last volume, combine Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean works in formats not set out in advance by producers, but that embody distinct possibilities for interpretation grounded in historical forms of text assembly. Such Sammelbände are strikingly numerous in archives when we know where to look, though their composite materiality is rarely noted outside of the local catalog notes and almost never discussed as an aspect of meaning-making by literary critics. Like many of the assemblages
