6One answer to the question of why Shakespeare has become so important to us today lies in the largely untold story of how, since the sixteenth century, thousands of living, breathing readers have used Shakespeare’s text to talk about themselves and to make sense of their lives. While the advent of Shakespeare as a major literary figure may have had to do with nationalistic or institutional agendas, it was also greatly helped on by the work of individuals.

7The often non-linear, circuitous narrative of how in fashioning Shakespeare these individuals fashioned themselves needs to be recounted. Whether they inscribed the inside of books or whether they made manuscript books (commonplace books, miscellanies, diaries) out of printed editions, their task, to some extent, was never to reach completeness. But it was never synonymous with failure for all that. Individually and as a whole, the open-endedness of their venture meant that, however partial their efforts, their way of relating to texts continued to be informed by a genuine interest in past writings and by a strong desire to invent a future for them. In writing themselves thanks to Shakespeare, they rewrote Shakespeare and allowed others to write themselves through Shakespeare’s texts.

8There are many ways of telling this story, but for reasons of space and consistency I wish to concentrate on two areas primarily. I want to look first at how the fashioning and monumentalization of Shakespeare by readers often coincided with their desire for self-exploration. This is where the history of reading and the study of life-writing intersect. Secondly, I wish to give some idea of how readers invented a future for the book through the traces they left inside printed books and in manuscript. This part will be concerned with both professional and amateur readers and will explore the dialectics of the critical apparatus, that is to say, how readerly and editorial practices exerted a mutual influence, how book production influenced book consumption and the reverse.

I

10In some heavily inscribed early editions, readers seem to compete in their claims of ownership of the book and for their right to inscribe their names against Shakespeare’s. This is very much the case of Folger Fo. 2 no. 32, in which a series of eighteenth-century readers have left traces. The names “William Shakespear” “Iames Wightwick” appear together and upside down in a bottom margin of Cymbeline (p. 414, ddd1v). In Folger Fo. 2 no. 49, page 38 of Coriolanus bears the inscription “Anne Clarke her hand and book the lord of heaven upon her” (dd1v). Other hands have been there too: “Patrick Coogan his hand” on a page of King Lear (p. 321; tt3r). Some even attempt to take over the physical but also symbolic space of the book with their self-affirmations. George St George covers the entire inside margin of a page of Hamlet with “George St george his book and god convert him I am your humble Servant to command” (p. 281; qq1r). On the closing page of Anthony and Cleopatra (p. 388, aaa6v), he writes “Georg[e] St georg[e] is a rouge [i.e. rogue] / and owns this booke. / Per me Scripta Georgius St. george / november the 25 – Anno domini – 1711.” Situating the self in time, this inscription is also a somewhat transgressive affirmation of status, which acquires more prestige because it is made in a rare book. The same page bears the inscription “george St george is a rouge [rogue]” in mirror writing, another outward sign of writerly prowess.

11In the case of the Shakespeare folios, the books’ physical size combined with their prestige as cultural objects and as expensive commercial items can lead to extravagant expressions of the self. For instance, in Folger Fo.3 no.8, the blank page after Twelfth Night and facing the opening page of The Winter’s Tale is entirely covered with the inscription “John Barnes His Book 1762” drawn in ink and with decorative dots (p. 275, Z6r) (figure 1).

12Such inscriptions can be seen, I argue, as traces of the way culture operates as a cycle. Indeed, the Shakespeare folios in particular create their own sense of prestige through their format and the way their paratextual material has been configured. To write into such a book is for many early modern individuals a source of prestige and is in some regards empowering. But such writing – often self-consciously ostentatious – inevitably adds further prestige to the book and is a conscious or subconscious message to other potential readers. In a number of folios, individuals celebrate Shakespeare and simultaneously make a show of their own intellectual confidence gained by their ownership of the book. On the third flyleaf of Fo.1 no.45, “The incomparable Shakespear” and the dramatist’s last name are elegantly calligraphed across the page in an eighteenth-century hand (figure 2). Just under these inscriptions, the words “Knowledge & wisdom” appear. A reader again celebrates what she or he regards as the intellectually empowering value of Shakespeare’s works in Folger Fo. 3 No. 8. On a page of Romeo and Juliet (p. 664, Kkk5v) the word “Knowing” has been calligraphed and the almost Cartesian and partly existential phrase “Knowing so I am” appears on a page of Macbeth (p. 712, Ooo4v).

14These are artistic responses to Shakespeare’s works by a reader who was a professional painter. Drawings done by non-professional readers are interesting also, but on other counts – they are often small windows into individuals’ imaginative worlds. They are the striking results of an encounter between the self and the book. In some cases, they may be a form of aesthetic response to a passage, as in Folger Fo.3 no. 20 where a face in profile has been drawn in pencil in a scene where the former Richard II meditates on his place in life from his prison cell: “I have been studying, how to compare / This Prison where I live: unto the World:” (ff4v).

15Early editions of Shakespeare, like other books which have travelled through time, form an archive of human taste, but also record the presence of human beings who have been in contact with them. Among the traces of human presence and activity that the early editions of Shakespeare bear, I have found (in the three hundred copies that I have looked at) buttons, bookmarks, pins, but also traces of a compositor’s hair fallen on the page at the stage of printing and later stains left by rusty scissors, keys, spectacles, coins and even round stains left by various receptacles containing different beverages including claret wine and a variety of burns probably caused by sparks coming from a hearth or from someone smoking with the book in their hand.

19Because Shakespearean early editions are rare books, their provenance is often important to many readers. Books are part of social networks and the social value of the book increases its symbolic and intellectual value. Such relations are often made explicit and public in the private but open space of the book. In Fo. 2 no. 17, a seventeenth-century hand has written on a page of Twelfth Night: “This Book which You Now Look Into was Given Me by Miss Molly Smithe and was the book of an Ancient family the name I bear most Lovingly” (pp. 258-59, Y3v-Y4r) (figure 5). Some owners also like to retrace the illustrious provenance of their book – adding other networks of power and prestige to the folios’ already impressive display of artistic and political influence.

21While Shakespeare’s early editions reveal their users’ social and family ties, they can also bring to light their readers’ sense of existence within time and space. In Fo. 2 no. 36, a “Mr Holland” has repeatedly inscribed the date “1671” in his book. On a page of 3 Henry VI, the same date is calligraphed in the top margin (p. 164, r2v), while a page of King Lear bears the inscription “Mr Holland is my name I say 1671” (p. 313, ss5r).

22Walking in the footsteps of their predecessors, readers pursued these practices well beyond the early modern period. In Folger Fo.4 no.4, two nineteenth-century readers have tried to calculate the time span between the date of publication of the fourth folio (1685) and the time when they signed the book – 1852 for Felix Gouraud and 1884 for Manfred Gouraud (front flyleaf verso).

25Many of the individuals whose traces we have examined invented personal connections with Shakespeare’s text through their encounter with the material book. While national, critical, institutional and even political agendas may have gradually influenced them in their choices in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these readers nevertheless continued the never-ending task of renovation of Shakespeare’s text. Moreover, they were influential in shaping the future of Shakespeare in print through their transformations and personalisation of his early editions. As much as these editions had shaped their reading experience, readers often challenged these and the ensuing editions and forced them to evolve through a variety of writing acts. In this second part, I wish to give some idea of how readerly and editorial practices exerted a mutual influence.

II

27For readers it was often a case of trying – even in the fairly spacious folios – to find room in the remaining blanks to write down these lists. All the more so as readers began to want other types of texts in their editions. Some indeed, like the eighteenth-century annotator of Folger Fo.1 no. 71, perhaps influenced by the introductions of contemporary Shakespeare editions or perhaps by personal interest, copied various extracts of critical texts in the opening pages of their early editions. On the recto and verso of the second flyleaf of Fo. 1 no. 71 one finds for instance an extract of John Dryden’s Of dramatick poesie (1668) which concerns Shakespeare, as well as selected and summarized extracts of Gerard Langbaine’s An account of the English dramatick poets (1691), together with an extract of The Tatler focussing on the themes of Othello and of marital life.

28Margins were also taken up by notes which readers created for themselves in the style of other books they had seen. In the course of the eighteenth century they copied notes lifted from the modern editions of Shakespeare into their early books. Eighteenth-century editors had created notes in order to satisfy early modern readers’ curiosity for Shakespeare’s text and these notes were in turn appropriated by readers. Yet this was very rarely a simple cut and paste process. On the contrary, readers copying editors’ notes often selected them, compared notes in different editions, rewrote them to meet their needs, thus creating manifold levels of understanding and interpretation.

31Philological and editorial interests have thus a transformative effect on the text. But Shakespeare’s history plays also attracted the attention of readers who had historical interests, some of whom seemed determined to transform Shakespeare’s text to make it comply with historical facts as they had read about them in the chronicles. Some of their emendations appear outrageous to us, but they are nevertheless the traces of readers’ struggle for a method in their quest for textual accuracy. Thus, a reader of Folger Fo.2 no. 21 transforms a passage of Richard III in which the Duke of Clarence’s murderers seek to dispose of his body (Act I, scene 4 in the folio). “Well, Ile goe hide the body in some hole” is turned into “Well, Ile goe lay the body in his Bed,” with this explanatory note: “Sr. Richard Baker in his chronicle says – He was laid in his bed to make the People believe that he died of Discontent” (p. 182, sig. f. 5v).

32While sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers of Shakespeare had more freedom in the sense that they were not guided by a critical and editorial apparatus, they also perhaps had less stimulus than eighteenth-century readers who not only had more annotated editions at their disposal but could also be inspired by a large body of printed anthologies of literary extracts of Shakespeare and of other writings.

35

36Likewise, printed commonplace books of literary extracts were sometimes suited to the needs and desires of their readers. While printed anthologies undeniably homogenized tastes, they could also have the opposite effect. A good example of this is the Folger’s copy of Joshua Poole’s Parnassus (published in 1677), a printed commonplace book of poetical extracts under subject headings, that is interleaved with some 195 folios (Folger MS M.a.16). The annotator’s Shakespeare additions consist of extracts from Julius Caesar. Interestingly, while Poole’s book was conceived as an aid to poetry writing, the extractor seems more concerned to turn his or her selected extracts of Julius Caesar towards less elevated, but equally important concerns, those of everyday life. Thus, a number of extracts are commonplaced in a way that reveals that even a play like Julius Caesar could be made to illustrate more mundane concerns such as “Sickness. or Sick. v. Fever. Physic” (f. 57v) or “To keep from sleeping” (f. 62v). Steering away radically sometimes from Poole’s poetic agenda, the annotator also created entries on “2 Shite” (f. 57r) and “2 Vomit” (f. 126r) (figure 7).

37These instances could be related to what one might call urges of anti-editorial rebellion, which some readers could have. A reader of Fo.3 no.22 commenting on a passage of As You Like It in a marginal gloss complained about a number of contemporary Shakespeare editors: “that compleat beetleheaded blockhead Warburton has pretended to understand it as a Description of Beauty & if I mistake not Theobald & his friends are all fools alike” (p. 199; sig. R4r).

38But the reader’s rage also extended to those involved in the printing of the Third Folio. Indeed, the title of the edition is altered by the annotator to “A most detestable & most wretched Edition of Mr. William Shakespear’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies” (figure 8). Heminge’s and Condell’s promise that the works of Shakespeare are “offer’d to your view cured and perfect” is challenged by the reader who remarks “I wish this was true but the Number of Commentators & the various Editions since this Edition prove that this Edition is far from perfect or being cured as it is here called” (sig. a1v).

39Yet editorial rage could lead to important editorial realisations also. By comparing their early editions to those of eighteenth-century editors, readers made some discoveries. The annotator of Fo.3 no.22 came almost to the realisation that there is no perfect original text and that, as a result of this, it is impossible to go back to that state of so-called completeness. Early editions represent states of a text that, as we know, remains in some regards unfinished and unstable. In a margin of The Tempest he notes significantly:

40Johnson, Capel, Rowe & the rest, if any more, of the Editors of our Author, what are ye about ye Blockheads, that you do not tell your Readers as you go along, of these real Imperfections in the Work & tell them that all that can be expected from a Publisher is to give to the World his genuine Words & Meaning, & not to amuse mankind by tell saying My Edition is a compleat Edition. When you ought to know that the Work itself is not a compleat Work. (p. 5, A3r)

41Early editions of Shakespeare are places also where it was easier especially for modern readers to escape from the interpretative frameworks offered by the growing body of criticism which from the seventeenth century onwards sought to help them make sense of texts with little or no critical apparatus. While it could be argued that these interpretative frameworks helped readers develop their tastes and critical awareness, readers had always constructed representations of Shakespeare’s text in their early editions. In fact, this continues to happen now when contemporary readers do not read introductions or critical notes in modern editions of Shakespeare, but still engage with the texts. There are various ways of appropriating Shakespeare’s text and while some might strike more of a balance between honouring the specificities and history of the text and personal response, all responses whether naïve or sophisticated keep literature alive by building a future of interest for it.

42While late twentieth-century criticism has typically tried to steer clear of emotion, privileging instead the disincarnated frameworks of interpretation of structuralism and poststructuralism, early modern readers remind us that emotional response to a work of art is an important mode of interpretation for many individuals – however naïve or inappropriate these responses might sometimes appear to us. Emotions are clearly a source of pleasure and a driving force for many readers. In Folger Fo. 1 no. 73, one reader has been touched by a scene in which Constance in King John is speaking to Pandulph and the Dolphin about her lost son Arthur and also by the scene when the same Arthur is confronted to his executioners. Both passages bear the inscription “very moving” in the margin (p. 12, sig. a6v and sig. b1r).

43An eighteenth-century reader by the name of Mary Elmer has recorded her personal response to what she imagined were the emotions of the main characters in Anthony and Cleopatra in the margins of Folger Fo. 2 no. 57. “See what joy tis to heare of his wifes death,” she writes when Anthony speaks to Enobarbus of Fulvia’s death (p. 362, yy5v). On the next page, when Cleopatra declares “But let it be, I am quickly ill, and well, / So Anthony loves” (p. 363, yy6r), she writes: “Mary Elmer this loue is a strang[e] thing” (p. 363, yy6r).

44At times emotional response is tinged with humour and a hint of criticism. In Folger Fo. 1 no. 73, after Braggart’s concluding lines in Love’s Labour’s Lost (“The Words of Mercurie / Are harsh after the songs of Apollo”), someone has added “So is his that reads thee” (sig. M6v). Often the appreciative comments made on the plays are laconic and seem poised between emotional and aesthetic response.

45Other comments bring out more specifically the qualities found by readers in the writing. Shakespeare’s sense of dramatic timing in Measure for Measure is remarked by one reader of Folger Fo. 3 no. 22: “how finely this brings on the Discovery of Claudio’s being yet living!” (p. 83, G6r). The same reader is equally impressed by an instance of chronography in Hamlet (“But look, the Morn in ruffet Mantle clad, / Walks o’re the Dew of yon high Eastern hill) and notes “A Fine Picture here’s painting [sic]” (p. 731, Qqq3).

47Because they have travelled through time and have been passed on from hand to hand early editions of Shakespeare become places of intellectual and critical transaction and some pages operate as forums for readers to express and, to some extent, share their views. In the same volume, the concluding pages of The Winter’s Tale and Hamlet offer particularly apt examples of this process. The Winter’s Tale is considered alternatively by its readers on its last page as “A wonderfull Pretty Play,” “A comical merry Play” and “A good play” (p. 303), while Hamlet is seen also on its concluding page as “An Admirable play,” “A delicat play,” “a fine Tragedy,” “An excellent tragedy,” “A Courageous Play,” “A dismal Tragedy” and “A Lamentable Play” (figure 9). Possibly again by Samuel Croxall, a quotation from Horace’s Art of Poetry (“–Decies repetita placebit”) indicates that though ten times repeated, Hamlet and no doubt the reading of Hamlet will continue to please.