Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilActes des colloques42L’in-folio : la question de l’aut...“Masters of their proper Goods”: ...

L’in-folio : la question de l’autorialité et de l’unité

“Masters of their proper Goods”: Company Politics and Folio Publication, 1616-1652

Lucy Munro

Résumés

Cet article attire l’attention sur la manière dont les éditions in-folio de théâtre publiées en Angleterre entre 1616 et 1652 exploitent non seulement la figure de l’auteur mais aussi l’autorité de la troupe de théâtre. Faisant valoir que l’histoire du folio de théâtre est étroitement liée à celle des King’s Men, la troupe à laquelle Shakespeare lui-même appartenait, il examine en détail les matériaux paratextuels du premier folio de Jonson (1616), du premier folio de Shakespeare (1623), du folio « Beaumont et Fletcher » de 1647 et du folio à pièce unique de The Wild Goose Chase de Fletcher, publié en 1652 en supplément du folio de 1647. Il identifie dans ces volumes une interaction complexe entre la scène et la page, interaction dans laquelle des modèles d’autorité concurrents se combinent pour soutenir le développement du folio de théâtre et promouvoir les intérêts de la troupe de théâtre.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

1I begin this essay with an old joke, one that is a little short of its 400-year anniversary:

  • 1 Robert Chamberlain, Conceits, Clinches, Flashes and Whimzies, 1639, STC 4942, sig. E4r.

One asked another what Shakespeares works were worth all being bound together? he answered not a farthing; not worth a farthing said he why so? he answered that his plays were worth a great deale of mony but he never heard that his works were worth any thing at all.1

2This response to the 1623 publication of Master William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies in the prestigious folio format is a variation on a theme that is also rehearsed in a well-known pair of epigrams commenting on the publication of the folio Works of Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Ben Jonson in 1616:

To Mr. Ben. Johnson demanding the reason why he call’d his playes works.

Pray tell me Ben, where doth the mystery lurke,
What others call a play you call a worke.


Thus answer’d by a friend in Mr. Johnsons defence.

The authors friend thus for the author says,

  • 2 Anon, Wits Recreations, London, 1640, STC 25870, sig. G3v.

3Bens plays are works, when others works are plaies.2

  • 3 John Heminges and Henry Condell, “To the Great Variety of Readers”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Com (...)

4Both jokes draw attention to the vexed relationship between “works” and “plays”, but where the Jonson joke focuses on authorship and literary prestige, the Shakespeare joke invokes another kind of value: financial worth. As such, it is in the spirit of John Heminges and Henry Condell’s letter to the reader that prefaces the 1623 folio, which notoriously exhorts the reader at the bookstall, “what euer you do, Buy”.3 But it also goes beyond the Jonson joke by suggesting that Shakespeare’s dramatic output may be valued differently on page and stage – in the theatres, Shakespeare’s “plays” are prized commodities, but the status of his “works” as literary artefacts is less certain.

  • 4 On the folio format and authorship, see, among others, Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: S (...)
  • 5 B. K. Adams, “Mediators of the Wor(l)d: Editors, Shakespeare, and Inclusion”, Before Shakespeare, 2 (...)
  • 6 TNA, LC 5/135; for a transcription see Allardyce Nicoll and Eleanore Boswell, eds., “Dramatic Recor (...)

5We are accustomed to viewing folio publication as a crucial element in the ways in which playwrights’ status as authors developed in the seventeenth century.4 Moreover, such concerns have also shaped the descendants of these folios, scholarly editions of the works of single authors or, in the case of “Beaumont and Fletcher”, a pair of authors who are treated as a single point of authority. As B. K. Adams puts it in an elegant recent critique, “these editions reflect a Copernican universe in which everything revolves around the brightest star, or author, which outshines every other object in the cosmos […] the sun, or our star author, with his inevitable gravitational pull, orders the universe in such a way that it seems perfectly formed”.5 Like Adams, I want to question the ways in which this “universe” has been constructed, and I do so by drawing attention to the ways in which the dramatic folios of the early seventeenth century exploit a complex network of competing forms of authority that extends beyond authors alone. More specifically, I will argue that the history of the dramatic folio is entwined with that of the King’s Men – the company in which Shakespeare himself was a sharer, and the most powerful and long-lived troupe of the early seventeenth century. When Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex and Lord Chamberlain, referred to the King’s Men as “Masters of their proper Goodes” in a 1641 letter to the Stationers’ Company forbidding publication of some of their plays, he articulated a widespread assumption that the playing company that performed a play had a right to control its circulation.6 Yet the rights of the King’s Men potentially placed limits on the development of dramatic authorship in print. The result was a set of folio books that not only accommodate the demands of playwright and playing company but also use the competing models of authority that they offer as complementary forces.

6As I will demonstrate, the “Shakespeare” that appears in the 1623 folio is the product of both page and stage, in a process that was initiated in Jonson’s 1616 folio, consolidated in 1623, and freshly negotiated in 1647, when plays of multiple authorship were brought together under the not wholly reliable label, Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen, at a time when the activities of the commercial stage were severely restricted by the authorities, and in 1652, when the Beaumont and Fletcher folio’s publishers issued an additional text, Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase, as a single-play folio. The work of the stationers, authors and actors whose labours produced “Shakespeares works” and those of his fellow dramatists ultimately rejects the binary opposition between “plays” and “works” on which both the Shakespeare and Jonson jokes depend. Instead, the dramatic folio addresses the problem of how to make plays “worth any thing at all” by exploiting the cultural and economic prestige of the stage itself.

Folio Publication and the King’s Men

  • 7 Ben Higgins, Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Tr (...)
  • 8 Melissa D. Aaron, Global Economics: A History of the Theatre Business, the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men (...)
  • 9 James J. Marino, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property, Philad (...)
  • 10 For recent appraisals and overviews, see Eric Rasmussen, “Publishing the First Folio”, in The Cambr (...)
  • 11 Sonia Massai, “Edward Blount, the Herberts, and the First Folio”, in Shakespeare’s Stationers: Stud (...)
  • 12 Heidi Craig, “The King’s Servants in Printed Paratexts, 1594-1695”, Huntington Library Quarterly 85 (...)

7It is not new, of course, to argue that the 1623 Shakespeare folio was important to the King’s Men, or to contend that it “roots itself in London’s theatrical culture”, as Ben Higgins puts it.7 Melissa D. Aaron argues that the folio “repackages and resells the plays of the company’s most famous poet-in-ordinary, claiming Shakespeare as their own, while at the same time demonstrating their economic stability, power, and independence”.8 In similar terms, James J. Marino contends that “Heminges’s and Condell’s appeal to a heroic author is also a tactical move in the actors’ struggle for authority over their audience”, while Francis X. Connor claims that the 1623 folio “canonizes Shakespeare only insofar as it returns its readers and (more importantly) its buyers to the theater to see his plays”.9 Other scholars have considered, or attempted to reconstruct, the negotiations that may have gone on between the King’s Men and the stationers in the run-up to the publication of the 1623 folio.10 Sonia Massai comes closest to the subject of this essay when she argues that the project “required a combination of authorizing strategies associated with Shakespeare’s company, his stationers, and his patrons”.11 Moreover, in an important recent intervention, Heidi Craig argues that paratextual allusions to actors in plays printed between 1594 and 1695 “reveal shifting notions of the theatrical past across the seventeenth century […] and the role of printed drama in constructing and recording that past”.12 My argument here builds on these insights, arguing for the central role of the King’s Men in the development of not only the first Shakespeare folio but also the dramatic folio more broadly.

  • 13 Sir John Denham, The Sophy, London, 1642, Wing D1009.
  • 14 Francis Beaumont [sic] and John Fletcher, The Wild Goose Chase. A Comedie, London, 1652, Wing B1616
  • 15 John Hardesty, “The Publisher to the Reader”, in Henry Killigrew, Pallantus and Eudora. A Tragœdie, (...)

8I argue, moreover, that we should pay attention not only to what the first Shakespeare folio and its successors could offer the King’s Men, but also what the King’s Men could offer to the prestige and saleability of dramatic folios. In addition to the well-known first and second Jonson folios of 1616 and 1640/1, the Shakespeare folios of 1623 and 1632, and the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, the early seventeenth century saw the publication of four single-play folios, all of them presenting plays originally performed by the King’s Men: Sir John Suckling’s Aglaura (1638), Sir John Denham’s The Sophy (1642), Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase (1652) and Henry Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora (1653). Two of these folios credit the King’s Men and their Blackfriars playhouse prominently on their title-pages. Thomas Walkley’s edition of The Sophy describes the play as having been “acted at the Private House in Black Friars by his Majesties Servants”.13 Humphrey Moseley’s edition of Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase not only states that it was “Acted with singular | Applause at the Black-Friers”, but also claims that it is “Retriv’d for the publick delight of all the Ingenious; | And private benefit | Of JOHN LOWIN, And JOSEPH TAYLOR, Servants to his late MAJESTIE. By a Person of Honour”.14 John Hardesty’s edition of Pallantus and Eudora – which had previously been published in quarto in 1638 as The Conspiracy – does not credit company or playhouse on its title-page, but Hardesty recalls “the Presentation of this Play at the Black-Friers” in his address to the reader.15 By the late 1640s, when the Beaumont and Fletcher folio was published, the King’s Men were part of the conventional apparatus of the dramatic folio, with a crucial role in enabling the presentation of “plays” as “works”. This process was initiated by the first Jonson folio in 1616.

Jonson’s Works, Whose Plays?

  • 16 See, for example, Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, p. 101-184; Sara van den Berg, “Ben Jonson and (...)
  • 17 Ben Jonson, The Fountaine of Selfe-Love. Or Cynthias Revels, London, 1601, sigs. A2r-A4v. See Matth (...)
  • 18 Jakob Boguszak, The Self-Centred Art: Ben Jonson’s Parts in Performance, Abington, Routledge, 2021, (...)

9The folio edition of The Works of Benjamin Jonson is traditionally regarded as a book that is dominated by the figure of its author.16 Yet it is also an intensely theatrical volume, and one that is intimately concerned with the workings of the commercial stage. It was the first folio volume to incorporate plays performed at public playhouses, which it presents alongside non-dramatic poetry, court masques and entertainments. Moreover, it does not seek to hide the plays’ origins. Some material linking the plays to their performance contexts is lost in the move from quarto to folio, such as the names of the actors that appear in the dialogue of the “Praeludium” to Cynthia’s Revels in the 1601 quarto.17 But, as Jakob Boguszak notes, “[a] surprising shift towards theatrical practice rather than away from it” can be seen in many of the folio’s plays – for example, in its additional and expanded stage directions.18 The 1616 Works also appends to each play a page detailing the year of its first performance, the company that performed it, the “principal comœdians” or “tragœdians” that acted in it, and the fact of its allowance for performance by the Master of the Revels (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Performance history for Sejanus, in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, London, 1616, STC 14752, sig. 2O3v, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Ih J738 +B616 Copy 4.

Figure 1: Performance history for Sejanus, in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, London, 1616, STC 14752, sig. 2O3v, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Ih J738 +B616 Copy 4.

10The Jonson folio records the contributions of individual actors such as Burbage, Heminges, Condell, and Shakespeare – the latter being listed among the leading players in Every Man in his Humour as well as Sejanus – conveying in the process something of the collaborative effort necessary to the success of companies such as the King’s Men.

  • 19 The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, London, 1616, STC 14752, sigs. 3X1r (“LXXXIX. To Edward Allen”), 3Y2 (...)
  • 20 Idem, sigs. 3Y2v, 3Y1r.

11The commercial theatre also seeps into the other sections of the folio, invisibly in the masques, where the contribution of professional actors is not acknowledged, and explicitly in the epigrams, which include a panegyric for the former leader of the Admiral’s Men, Edward Alleyn, an elegy for the boy actor Saloman Pavy, poems titled “To Play-wright”, “On Poet-Ape” and “On Play-wright”, and others that feature plays or playing prominently, such as “To a Weake Gamster in Poetry” and “To Mime”.19 Where the performance information appended to the plays offers a dryly factual overview, the epigrams put the emotion back into Jonson’s interactions with the commercial stage, from the tenderness of the account of Pavy’s premature death, which opens with the lines “Weepe with me all you that read / This little storie”, to the weary irritation with which Jonson deals with other, apparently lesser, dramatists. “With thy small stocke, why art thou ventring still / At this so subtile sport: and play’st so ill?”, he asks in “To a Weake Gamster in Poetry”.20

  • 21 Idem, sigs. F6v, P4v, Z3v, 2G3v, 2O3v, 2X4v, 3K3v, 3S4v, 3D6v.

12At first glance, the theatrical contexts that are invoked in the first Jonson folio appear heterogeneous. Four company names appear against the plays: “the then Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants” (Every Man In His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour); “the then Children of Queene ELIZABETHS CHAPPEL” (Cynthia’s Revels and The Poetaster); “the K. MAIESTIES SERVANTS” (Sejanus his Fall, Volpone, The Alchemist and Catiline his Conspiracy) and “the Children of her Maiesties REVELLS” (Epicoene).21 However, the King’s Men were directly descended from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Children of the Queen’s Revels were similarly linked with the Children of the Chapel, with the actor Nathan Field appearing in the casts of Cynthia’s Revels, The Poetaster and Epicoene. This means that in practice the Folio is dominated by the two groups of actors for which Jonson wrote most extensively between the 1590s and the 1610s; other companies only appear fleetingly – for example, the Admiral’s Men, for whom Jonson wrote in the late 1590s, appear only in the shape of the epigram addressed to Alleyn.

13Unlike later folio collections, the first Jonson folio does not include a preface signed by actors from the King’s Men, or other paratexts that elevate this company above the Chapel/Queen’s Revels troupe. Yet three things nonetheless bring the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men to the fore: the sheer number of plays that are attached to them; the way in which the chronological ordering of the plays and the omission of Bartholomew Fair (1614), first performed by Lady Elizabeth’s Men, means that the sequence concludes with the King’s Men plays The Alchemist (1610) and Catiline his Conspiracy (1611); and the fact that the King’s Men were the only company named in the folio to still be active in London. By 1616, when the folio was published, the Children of the Queen’s Revels had lost their Whitefriars playhouse and merged with Lady Elizabeth’s Men. In contrast, the King’s Men were not only thriving but also presenting Jonson’s own plays, such as The Devil is an Ass, first performed in 1616. This implicit bias towards the King’s Men was to intensify, as the company moved centre-stage in the first Shakespeare folio.

“Friend, & Fellow”: Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies

  • 22 Stationers’ Court Minutes, 3 May 1619, Court Book C, TSC/1/B/01/01. Records of the Stationers’ Comp (...)
  • 23 As Lesser notes, even this name “is a shorthand formulation that elides some of the agency behind t (...)
  • 24 E. A. J. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text, London, Edward Arnold, 1965, p. 25-26; Luk (...)
  • 25 Laoutaris, Shakespeare’s Book, p. 10.

14We do not know whether the King’s Men supported the project to publish Jonson’s plays in folio; it is possible that they had little say in the matter given that all of the Chamberlain’s and King’s Men plays included had already been published in quarto. In contrast, the Shakespeare folio contained a good deal of previously unpublished material, and documentary evidence indicates that its successful completion was dependent on the King’s Men’s acquiescence in the scheme. In 1619, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Lord Chamberlain, wrote to the Masters and Wardens of the Stationers’ Company, resulting in this entry in their Court Minutes: “vppon a letter from the right honourable the Lord Chamberleyne It is thought fit & so ordered That no playes that his Majestyes players do play shalbe printed without consent of somme of them”.22 The entry is usually thought to respond to the 1619 publication of a set of plays in quarto editions, works by Shakespeare among them, that have been collectively labelled the “Pavier Quartos”, though Zachary Lesser has recently argued that “Jaggard Quartos” is a more accurate name, given that the project is likely to have been propelled by William Jaggard and his son Isaac.23 But the fact that contentious editions of two other King’s Men plays – Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy and A King and No King – also appeared in 1619 may argue that the order relates to the publication of the King’s Men’s plays more broadly, as E. A. J. Honigmann and Lukas Erne have suggested.24 Whatever prompted it, Pembroke’s intervention meant that the stationers who published the first Shakespeare folio had to negotiate with the King’s Men. What is more, despite a scholarly tendency to see the origins of the folio in Shakespeare’s bequests to three of his “fellows”, Richard Burbage, Henry Condell and John Heminges, in 1616 – “Was his gift of money to his theatre colleagues for the purchase of mourning rings intended to seal a special bond, a covenant?”, asks Chris Laoutaris25 – we do not know at what stage Heminges and Condell became involved with the folio project.

  • 26 On the Herbert brothers as patrons of the folio, see also David M. Bergeron, Textual Patronage in E (...)

15Whether the King’s Men were willing or reluctant collaborators in the Shakespeare folio, the company’s history and its commercial priorities influenced many aspects of its presentation to readers. The dedication to the Earl of Pembroke and his brother, Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and the epistle “To the Great Variety of Readers” are both signed by Heminges and Condell, whose involvement with the company dated back to the 1590s. Heminges and Condell suggest that the favour shown to Shakespeare by the Herbert brothers lay behind the choice of patrons, drawing specific attention to their appreciation for the plays in performance: “so much were your L L. [i.e. Lordships’] likings of the seuerall parts, when they were acted, as before they were published, the Volume ask’d to be yours” (sig. πA2v). Moreover, the choice of Pembroke also points to the broader patronage institutions structuring the commercial stage, invoking not only Heminges, Condell and Shakespeare’s history in the Chamberlain’s Men, when their patrons had been Pembroke’s predecessors as Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, first Baron Hunsdon, and George Carey, second Baron Hunsdon, but also the current status of the King’s Men, as the Lord Chamberlain had jurisdiction over the company as a senior official in the Royal Household and the courtier in charge of all court entertainment.26 Thus, in contrast with the 1616 Jonson folio, which disperses the authority of its patrons by attaching them to individual texts, the Shakespeare folio concentrates the authority of its patrons and filters it from a King’s Men perspective.

  • 27 It appears in the wills of Augustine Phillips (1605) and Shakespeare (1616). See E.A.J. Honigmann a (...)

16The dedication to the Herbert brothers also insists on Shakespeare’s place in an enduring theatrical community. Heminges and Condell stake a claim to the author as “Friend, & Fellow” and “our SHAKESPEARE” (sig. πA2v). The term “fellow” was often used by actors to refer to their fellow-sharers in a playing company; it probably has the same meaning here.27 Moreover, the community surrounding the King’s Men is crucial to the folio’s paratextual materials. Heminges and Condell sign the dedication to the Herbert brothers and the epistle to the readers; Jonson, a regular writer for the company, writes two of the poems; and the dedication, epistle and poems sit alongside a list of “The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes”. Where the Jonson folio appends the names of actors to individual plays, the Shakespeare folio aggregates them into a roughly chronological list of actors in the Chamberlain’s and King’s Men, presented in two columns and headed by Shakespeare himself (Fig. 2).

Figure 2: “The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, London, 1623, STC 22273, sig. πA5+2r, Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22273 Fo. 1 no.09, accessible online at https://luna.folger.edu/​luna/​servlet/​s/​2my89q.

Figure 2: “The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, London, 1623, STC 22273, sig. πA5+2r, Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22273 Fo. 1 no.09, accessible online at https://luna.folger.edu/​luna/​servlet/​s/​2my89q.
  • 28 See Lucy Munro, “The Names of the Actors: The First Folio and Theatre History”, Shakespeare Quarter (...)

17As I have argued in detail elsewhere, “The Names of the Principall Actors” is a carefully constructed list.28 Rather than faithfully representing the stage history of Shakespeare’s plays – which involved multiple companies and a number of actors who go unnamed here – it presents its own version of the theatrical past, creating a multitemporal, composite playing company and privileging the King’s Men in the process.

  • 29 Bill dated 20 April 1619, in John Witter vs. John Heminges and Henry Condell, Court of Requests, 16 (...)

18The prominence of the King’s Men in the first Shakespeare folio reflects the company’s power and prestige in the early 1620s. When John Witter, the second husband of Augustine Phillips’s wife, Anne, sued Heminges and Condell in the Court of Requests over shares in the Globe in April 1619, he and his legal team chose to describe Witter’s opponents as men “of greate lyveinge wealth and power”, with “mightie and great frendes”.29 The folio’s preliminary materials represent the Herbert brothers as the “mightie and great frends” of Shakespeare and, by extension, the King’s Men, reflecting Pembroke’s more private attempt to protect the company’s interests when he wrote to the Company of Stationers. They also broadcast to readers the fact that the volume has the sanction of the King’s Men, drawing it into the company’s patronage circuits. In the years that followed, the 1632 second Shakespeare folio – which retained the first folio’s preliminary materials while adding additional dedicatory poems, John Milton’s “An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare” among them – perpetuated the association between Shakespeare’s “works” and the King’s Men. The Shakespeare folios would in turn act as a model for the third major collection of dramatic works in the folio format, the 1647 edition of Comedies and Tragedies by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen.

Masters of their Proper Goods? The “Beaumont and Fletcher” Folio

  • 30 For detailed appraisals of the representation of authorial collaboration in the folio, see Masten, (...)

19The negotiations of authorship and collaboration in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio have been analysed extensively, but less attention has been paid to the ways in which the volume engages with the authority of the playing company, another feature that it inherits from the Jonson and Shakespeare folios.30 On 7 August 1641, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, newly appointed as Lord Chamberlain, wrote to the Masters and Wardens of the Stationers’ Company, again seeking to protect the plays of the King’s Men from publication:

  • 31 TNA, LC 5/135; Nicoll and Boswell, eds., “Dramatic Records”, p. 398.

The players which are his Majesties servantes haue addressed them selues vnto mee as formerly to my predecessors in Office, complaining that some Printers are about to Print & publish some of their Playes which hetherto they haue beene vsually restrained from by the Authority of the Lord Chamberlain. Their Request seemes both iust and reasonable, as onely tending to preserue them Masters of their proper Goodes, which in Iustice ought not to bee made common for another mannes profitt to their disadvantage. Vpon this Ground therefore I am induced to require your care (as formerly my Predecessors haue done) that noe Playes belonging to them bee put in Print without their knowledge & consent.31

  • 32 Ibid., p. 399.
  • 33 See OED, “proper”, adj. II.4.

20Essex asked the Stationers’ Company to restrict the publication of the plays of the King’s Men and enclosed a list of plays “to which they now lay claime”, apparently those under threat of immediate publication.32 This list included 26 of the 35 plays that were eventually published in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, alongside plays by Thomas Middleton, James Shirley, William Davenant, and others. Especially notable in Essex’s request to the Stationers is his description of the King’s Men as “Masters of their proper Goodes, which in Iustice ought not to bee made common for another mannes profitt to their disadvantage”. In this context, the plays of Fletcher and others are not the property of individual authors, but commodities in the exclusive possession of the King’s Men, who are entitled to restrict their circulation.33

  • 34 Stationers Register, Liber E, TSC/1/E/06/04, pp. 53-4.
  • 35 An Ordinance of Both Houses of Parliament for the Suppressing of Publike Stage-playes, London, 1642 (...)
  • 36 R.C. Bald, Bibliographical Studies in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, Oxford: Oxford Unive (...)

21In 1641, Essex’s comments reflected the seemingly unassailable prestige of the King’s Men, bolstered as it was by royal authority, and the company were able effectively to block the publication of a folio compilation of Fletcher’s plays. By 4 September 1646, when most of the plays in Essex’s list were eventually entered in the Stationers’ Register by Humphrey Moseley and Humphrey Robinson, the company’s position was much changed and reduced.34 The closure of the London playhouses on 2 September 1642, on the outbreak of the Civil War, had cut off much of their livelihood, and in March 1646 “the King’s Players” petitioned Parliament for money owed them by King Charles.35 It is not unlikely that the company acquiesced to Moseley and Robinson’s entry of their plays in the Stationers’ Register, especially given their apparent willingness collectively to sign the folio’s dedicatory epistle.36

  • 37 Will Sharpe, Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, p. 138.

22As Will Sharpe notes, by the 1640s “Beaumont and Fletcher” were “the King’s Men’s other great authorial brand” after Shakespeare and Jonson.37 This “brand” had been developed on both stage and page: the King’s Men acquired plays such as The Scornful Lady and The Coxcomb from other companies, and stationers coupled the names of “Beaumont and Fletcher” and the King’s Men on the title-pages of multiple quarto editions of A King and No King (1619, 1625, 1631, 1639), Philaster (1620, 1622, 1628, 1634, 1639), The Scornful Lady (1625, 1630, 1635, 1639) and The Maid’s Tragedy (1630, 1638, 1641). In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that the 1647 folio follows the pattern of the 1623 Shakespeare folio closely. The frontispiece and title-page are followed by a dedicatory epistle that is not only addressed to the surviving dedicatee of the Shakespeare folio, Philip Herbert, who had succeeded his brother William as Earl of Pembroke, but also signed by members of the King’s Men: John Lowin, Joseph Taylor, Richard Robinson, Robert Benfield, Eyllaerdt Swanston, Thomas Pollard, Hugh Clarke, William Allen, Stephen Hammerton and Theophilus Bird (Fig. 3).

Figure 3: The signatures to the dedicatory epistle to Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, in Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen, London, 1647, WING B1581, sig. A2r, Penn State University Libraries, PR2420 1647 Q, available online at https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/​digital/​collection/​emblem/​id/​4301/​rec/​4.

Figure 3: The signatures to the dedicatory epistle to Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, in Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen, London, 1647, WING B1581, sig. A2r, Penn State University Libraries, PR2420 1647 Q, available online at https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/​digital/​collection/​emblem/​id/​4301/​rec/​4.
  • 38 John Lowin, et alii, “To the Right Honourable Philip, Earle of Pembroke and Mountgomery”, in Comedi (...)

23Lowin and his colleagues even refer explicitly to the 1623 folio when they tell Pembroke that they are “directed by the example of some, who once steered in our qualitie, and so fortunately aspired to choose your Honour, joined with your (now glorified) Brother, Patrons to the flowing compositions of the then expired sweet Swan of Avon SHAKESPEARE”.38 The signatures to the dedication are the closest that the Beaumont and Fletcher folio comes to the Shakespeare folio’s “Names of the Principall Actors”, and this is an even more exclusive list than the Shakespeare folio.

  • 39 Štollová, “Silence”, p. 514.
  • 40 TNA, LC 5/134, p. 431; Nicoll and Boswell, eds., “Dramatic Records”, p. .
  • 41 Parish Register, St Leonard, Heston, The London Archives (TLA), DRO/026/A/01/001; Honigmann and Bro (...)
  • 42 Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 2, p. 549; Hugh Peters, The Full and Last Relation, of A (...)
  • 43 James Wright, Historia Histrionica, London, 1699, Wing 3695, p. 8.

24Despite the Beaumont and Fletcher folio’s echoes of its predecessor, the changed circumstances of the Civil War are never far from its surface. As Jitka Štollová notes, the book’s preliminaries “become a bibliographical meeting place of dead and banished voices”.39 The dedication to Pembroke reflects the practices and hierarchies of the pre-Civil War company, its double columns presenting the company sharers in order of seniority, beginning with Lowin and Taylor and ending with Clarke, Allen, Hammerton and Bird, who appear to have become sharers around January 1641, when they were sworn as Grooms of the Chamber.40 However, it conceals not only the deaths of two sharers but also political differences among the survivors. Michael Bowyer was buried in St Leonard, Heston, on 2 October 1645, about a week after making a will in which he declared himself “sicke & weake in bodye but of good and perfect memory”.41 A more direct casualty of the war was William Robins, who died fighting on the royalist side at the siege of Basing House, shortly after Bowyer’s death, and was accused of “mocking and scorning the Parliament, & our Army”.42 In his 1699 history of the English stage, Historia Histrionica, James Wright claims that most of the players who were young enough to fight did so on the King’s side, writing that “I have not heard of one of these Players of any Note that sided with the other Party, but only Swanston, and he profest himself a Presbyterian, took up the Trade of a Jeweller, and liv’d in Aldermanbury, within the Territory of Father Calamy. The rest either Lost, or expos’d their Lives for their King”.43 Wright may well be correct about Swanston’s politics, as he is right about his parish of residence. Nonetheless, Swanston appears in the folio alongside his fellows, in the position that we would expect given the date at which he appears to have become a sharer in the King’s Men.

  • 44 James Shirley, “To the Reader”, in Comedies and Tragedies, sig. A3r.

25While the appearance of Lowin, Taylor and their fellows as signatories to the dedication recalls the powerful role of Heminges and Condell in the publication of the Shakespeare folio, the dedicatory epistle also registers the company’s precarious position, praising Pembroke’s “Protection to the Scene” and describing the theatre industry as “now withered, and condemn’d, as we feare, to a long Winter and sterilitie” (sig. A2v). At the end of their epistle “To the Great Variety of Readers”, Heminges and Condell could hand their readers over to their colleagues in the King’s Men, writing, “we leaue you to other of [Shakespeare’s] Friends, whom if you need, can bee your guides” (sig. A3r). In contrast, performances after 1642 were fugitive and sporadic, meaning that the Beaumont and Fletcher folio is nostalgic not only for individual actors but for the commercial theatre itself, suffused with repeated references to what James Shirley terms “this Tragicall Age where the Theater hath been so much out-acted”.44 In this context, the communal gesture of the jointly signed dedication is testament to the residual power of the company’s structures.

  • 45 Moseley’s dedicatory epistle is dated “At the Princes Armes in St Pauls Church-yard. Feb. 14th 1646 (...)
  • 46 Richard Brome, “To the Memory of the Deceased but Ever-Living Authour in these his Poems, Mr. JOHN (...)
  • 47 Štollová, “Silence”, p. 519.

26Yet even as it registers the impact of the war, the folio also reflects some optimism among royalists in spring 1647, when it appears to have reached the stationers’ stalls.45 Some of the dedicatory verses refer to an anticipated return of King Charles to London and – it is implied – a return to business as usual for the commercial stage. Richard Brome mentions “the Report / Of the Kings second coming to his Court” and Shirley concludes his poem with the lines “As I goe Swan-like out, Our Peace is nigh; / A Balme unto the wounded Age I sing, / And nothing now is wanting but the King”.46 As Štollová writes, the folio appeared “amid simmering hopes that the end of the conflict would eventually lift the restrictions on acting”.47 The reconstitution of the King’s Men as signatories to the folio’s dedication thus represents a move back into the public sphere as a corporate body, following their disparate experiences of war.

  • 48 For an overview of performances in 1647-49 and the attempts to suppress them, see Leslie Hotson, Th (...)
  • 49 Perfect Occurrences of Every Dayes Journall in Parliament, 1-8 October, London, 1647, sig. 2Q4r.
  • 50 The Perfect Weekely Account, 6-13 October, London, 1647, sig. P2v.
  • 51 Wright, Historia, p. 8-9.
  • 52 Idem, p. 3.

27Some members of the King’s Men appear to have attempted to translate this optimism into action, and to resume performances in front of paying audiences in London, in the face of further ordinances against playing and playhouses.48 On 6 October, the newsbook Perfect Occurrences reported a performance of Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King – “formerly acted at the Black-Fryers, by his Majesties servants, about 8. yeares since” – at the Salisbury Court playhouse, attended by “some young Lords, and other eminent persons”, which was broken up by the Sheriffs of London.49 The only actor named in this account is Timothy Reade, a famous comic actor associated with the Cockpit and Red Bull, but it is likely that members of the King’s Men were also involved. On 10 October, another newsbook, The Perfect Weekly Account, reported that “Plays begin to be set up apace neverthelesse not without disturbance yet they give out that it shall go forward at three houses, and blacke Fryars is repairing to the end that may be one”.50 In winter 1648, according to Wright’s Historia Histrionica, a combined company of actors performed at the Cockpit for three or four days before they were arrested during a performance of Fletcher and Massinger’s Rollo, Duke of Normandy, or The Bloody Brother, “in which Lowin Acted Aubrey, Taylor Rollo, [Thomas] Pollard the Cook, [Nicholas] Burt Latorch, and I think [Charles] Hart Otto”.51 Four of the five actors named were members of the King’s Men; Lowin, Taylor and Pollard signed the dedication in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, while the rising star Hart had been an apprentice with the company.52 In this context, the Beaumont and Fletcher folio represents part of an attempt by the King’s Men not only to stake a claim to their property and their cultural legacy, but also to make a case for the ongoing viability of their profession.

“So Exeunt”: The Wild Goose Chase

  • 53 “The Stationer to the Reader”, in Comedies and Tragedies, sig. A4r.
  • 54 For an example, see this copy sold at Christies in October 2022, accessible at: https://www.christi (...)

28The idea that the Beaumont and Fletcher folio represents a brief moment of hope for the King’s Men is supported by the more sombre tone of the second Fletcher folio produced during the period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, the 1652 single-play folio of The Wild Goose Chase. The play appears in the list entered in the Stationers’ Register by Moseley and Robinson in 1646, but when the folio was printed the manuscript could not be found. Moseley complains that “a Person of Quality borrowed it from the Actours many yeares since, and (by the negligence of a Servant) it was never return’d”, offering a reward for “whoever hereafter happily meetes with it […] if he please to send it home”.53 Between 1647 and 1652, the manuscript of The Wild Goose Chase was apparently recovered, and it was printed in folio so that it could be bound with copies of the 1647 Comedies and Tragedies, a state in which many copies survive.54 Yet the volume does not simply present an extension to the 1647 folio. It makes its own intervention in the moment of its publication through its extensive paratextual materials – which act as a buffer between Four Plays in One and The Wild Goose Chase when the two folios are bound together – and concludes the 1647 folio project on a markedly more sombre note.

29In Historia Histrionica, Wright mentions the 1652 edition of The Wild Goose Chase in the context of surreptitious performances that sought to preserve a meagre theatrical economy in the years after the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649:

  • 55 Wright, Historia, p. 9-10.

in Oliver’s time, they used to Act privately, three or four Miles, or more, out of Town, now here, now there, sometimes in Noblemens Houses […] At Christmass, and Bartlemew-fair, they used to Bribe the Officer who Commanded the Guard at Whitehall, and were thereupon connived at to Act for a few Days, at the Red Bull; but were sometimes notwithstanding Disturb’d by Soldiers. Some pickt up a little Money by publishing the Copies of Plays never before Printed, but kept up in Manuscript. For instance, in the Year 1652, Beaumont and Fletcher's Wild Goose Chace was Printed in Folio, for the Publick use of all the Ingenious, (as the Title-page says) and private Benefit of John Lowin and Joseph Tayler, Servants to his late Majesty; and by them Dedicated To the Honour’d few Lovers of Dramatick Poesy: Wherein they modestly intimate their Wants.55

  • 56 Craig, “King’s Servants”, p. 162.

30The picture presented by Wright, in which the publication of plays sat alongside surreptitious performances, is probably accurate, but it is not one that the publishers of the folio edition of The Wild Goose Chase choose to represent. Instead, as Craig comments, it “memorializes a dead theatrical tradition, the actors themselves awkwardly outliving their professional usefulness”.56

  • 57 John Lowin and Joseph Taylor, “To the Honour’d, Few, Lovers of Drammatick Poesie”, in Beaumont and (...)
  • 58 The “Drammatis Personæ” features Hammerton, who appears to have joined the King’s Men around Decemb (...)

31Where all of the surviving sharers in the King’s Men gathered to present the plays of the 1647 folio to readers, The Wild Goose Chase is presented by the publishers to just two of their number, John Lowin and Joseph Taylor. Taylor and Lowin in turn contribute a prefatory epistle addressed “To the Honour’d Few, Lovers of Drammatick Poesie”, in which they present to readers “the Rich Remains of our too-long-since lost Friend, Mr. FLETCHER”.57 Like those of the Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher folios, the prefatory materials in The Wild Goose Chase are concerned with the life of the plays on stage. Lowin and Taylor recall Fletcher watching and delighting in The Wild Goose Chase when it was staged in the early-mid 1620s, and the heyday of the Caroline King’s Men is invoked in a list of “Drammatis Personæ” (sig. a1v) recording the cast of a revival of the play in the early 1630s and featuring seven of the ten actors who signed the dedication to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio.58

32These recollections of the prestige formerly held by the King’s Men are counterbalanced, however, by the emphasis elsewhere in the preliminary materials of The Wild Goose Chase on the repression of the stage in the early 1650s and the desperate condition of the actors. “’Tis not unknown to you All”, comment Lowin and Taylor, "how by a cruell Destinie we have a long time been Mutes and Bound”, and they end their epistle with a farewell that is almost an epitaph:

But be the Comœdie at your Mercy as We are. Onely we wish, that you may have the same kind Joy in Perusing of it, as we had in the Acting.
                               So Exeunt
                                     Your Gratefull Servants,
                                            JOHN LOWIN,
                                            JOSEPH TAYLOR.

  • 59 W.E., “An Epigram Upon the Long Lost and Fortunately Recovered Wild-Goose Chase, and as Seasonably (...)

33The plight of Taylor and Lowin is also addressed in one of the folio’s five dedicatory poems, in which “W.E.” laments “this late dearth of wit”, which has rendered “Jose and Jack” “hunger-bit for want of fowl and Sack”, and concludes that the recovery of The Wild Goose Chase “hath revived in a day / Two Poets, and two Actors with one Play”.59 The “Two Poets” are presumably Beaumont and Fletcher, the folio continuing its predecessor’s productive confusion of single and multiple authorship. But while The Wild Goose Chase folio can “revive” the reputation of the dramatists, it can only offer a temporary financial respite to the actors, and – unlike the Beaumont and Fletcher folio – it can no longer imagine a rebirth of the commercial stage.

  • 60 See Hotson, Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, p. 32-33; Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “New L (...)
  • 61 Surrey History Centre, Woking, Surrey, P7/1/1; City of Westminster Archives Centre, London, STC/PR/ (...)
  • 62 On the deaths of Robinson, Benfield and Swanston, see Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 2, (...)

34The honorific used on the title-page of The Wild Goose Chase, “Servants to His late MAJESTIE”, itself registers the changed circumstances of the company in 1652. After the execution of Charles I, the King’s Men no longer had a master. Moreover, the dedicatee of the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, had himself died on 23 January 1650, meaning that the King’s Men had been stripped of two major sources of patronage and protection. The fact that The Wild Goose Chase is addressed only to Lowin and Taylor is also suggestive of the fractured and reduced status of the company. On 28 January 1648, Lowin, Taylor, Robinson, Benfield, Pollard, Clarke, Hammerton and Allen had signed a bond to finance a new iteration of the King’s Men, but their former colleagues, Richard Baxter, Walter Clun, Charles Hart, William Hart and Nicholas Burt, were to feature in a different group that “united togeather as a Company or Society of actors for the acting & performing of Comedies tragedies & other interludes” in December 1648.60 In the event, neither Lowin nor Taylor were to outlive the publication of The Wild Goose Chase for very long: “Master Joseph Taylor” was buried at Richmond on 4 November 1652, and “John Lowen the player” at St Clement Danes on 24 August 1653.61 With their deaths, and those of Robinson in 1648, Benfield in 1649, Swanston in 1651, and Hammerton and Pollard in 1653, the King’s Men of the Beaumont and Fletcher folio passed into theatrical memory.62

Conclusion

  • 63 Chamberlain, Conceits, sig. E4r (number 196).

35The joke with which I began this essay concludes with the conviction of a potential consumer that “[Shakespeare’s] plays were worth a great deale of mony but he never heard that his works were worth any thing at all”.63 In tracing the history of the dramatic folio between 1616 and 1652, I have argued that these volumes resist the division between stage and page on which this joke pivots, but that they do so by exploiting the cultural and commercial value of the King’s Men as a means to give the plays “worth”. As we have seen, however, the changing political and social contexts of the early-mid seventeenth century meant that the capacity of the King’s Men to give value to plays was unsettled in the 1640s and 50s. In the two folios published during the relatively stable reign of James I, the power and prestige of the playing company, buoyed by financial success and royal patronage, bolsters the claims that these books make about the worth of their contents. In the Fletcher folios, in contrast, the relationship between dramatic folio and playing company shifts. From the perspective of the King’s Men, the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647 offered not only a chance to memorialise long-dead colleagues but also to look tentatively towards a new future for the commercial stage. By the time of the publication of The Wild Goose Chase in 1652, the folio’s creators are apparently no longer able to imagine such a revival, and a new division has opened up between stage and page. Fletcher’s “works” may be “worth a great deale of mony”, but his “plays” may not be “worth any thing at all”.

Haut de page

Notes

1 Robert Chamberlain, Conceits, Clinches, Flashes and Whimzies, 1639, STC 4942, sig. E4r.

2 Anon, Wits Recreations, London, 1640, STC 25870, sig. G3v.

3 John Heminges and Henry Condell, “To the Great Variety of Readers”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, London, 1623, STC 22273, sig. πA3r.

4 On the folio format and authorship, see, among others, Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983; Jennifer Brady and W.H. Herendeen, eds., Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1991, p. 111-137; Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authority and the 1790 Apparatus, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, esp. ch. 1; Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Adam G. Hooks, “First Folios: Jonson and Shakespeare”, in A Companion to British Literature, Volume 2: Early Modern Literature, 1450-1660, ed. Robert DeMaria, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher, Chichester, Wiley, 2013, 281-293; Francis X. Connor, Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. On the broader European contexts of play publication, see Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1480-1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.

5 B. K. Adams, “Mediators of the Wor(l)d: Editors, Shakespeare, and Inclusion”, Before Shakespeare, 2019, accessible online at: https://beforeshakespeare.com/2019/06/03/mediators-of-the-world-editors-shakespeare-and-inclusion, last accessed 18 June 2023.

6 TNA, LC 5/135; for a transcription see Allardyce Nicoll and Eleanore Boswell, eds., “Dramatic Records: The Lord Chamberlain’s Office”, Malone Society Collections 2.3, 1931, 321-416, p. 398.

7 Ben Higgins, Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, p. 114.

8 Melissa D. Aaron, Global Economics: A History of the Theatre Business, the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men and Their Plays, 1599-1642, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2005, p. 129.

9 James J. Marino, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property, Philadelphia, University of Philadelphia Press, 2011, p. 135; Francis X. Connor, “Shakespeare’s Theatrical Folio”, Philological Quarterly 91, 2012, 221-245, p. 223; p. 153.

10 For recent appraisals and overviews, see Eric Rasmussen, “Publishing the First Folio”, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ed. Emma Smith, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 18-29; Zachary Lesser, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scraps: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021; Higgins, Shakespeare’s Syndicate; Chris Laoutaris, Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio, London, William Collins, 2023.

11 Sonia Massai, “Edward Blount, the Herberts, and the First Folio”, in Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography, ed. Marta Straznicky, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 132-146, p. 132.

12 Heidi Craig, “The King’s Servants in Printed Paratexts, 1594-1695”, Huntington Library Quarterly 85, 2022, 151-169.

13 Sir John Denham, The Sophy, London, 1642, Wing D1009.

14 Francis Beaumont [sic] and John Fletcher, The Wild Goose Chase. A Comedie, London, 1652, Wing B1616.

15 John Hardesty, “The Publisher to the Reader”, in Henry Killigrew, Pallantus and Eudora. A Tragœdie, London, 1653, Wing K444, sig. [A]2r.

16 See, for example, Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, p. 101-184; Sara van den Berg, “Ben Jonson and the Ideology of Authorship”, in Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, ed. Brady and Herendeen, p. 111-137; Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House, p. 104-139; Loewenstein, Ben Jonson, p. 133-210.

17 Ben Jonson, The Fountaine of Selfe-Love. Or Cynthias Revels, London, 1601, sigs. A2r-A4v. See Matthew Steggle, “Casting the Prelude in Cynthia’s Revels”, Notes and Queries 50, 2003, 62-63.

18 Jakob Boguszak, The Self-Centred Art: Ben Jonson’s Parts in Performance, Abington, Routledge, 2021, p. 19 (his emphasis).

19 The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, London, 1616, STC 14752, sigs. 3X1r (“LXXXIX. To Edward Allen”), 3Y2v-3Y3r (“CXX. Epitaph on S.P. a Child of Q. El. Chappel”), 3V1r (“XLIX. To Play-wright”), 3V2r (“LVI. On Poet-Ape”), 3V4r (“LXVIII. On Play-wright”), 3X4r (“C. On Play-wright”), 3Y1r (“CXII. To a Weake Gamster in Poetry”), 3Y4v (“CXXIX. To Mime”).

20 Idem, sigs. 3Y2v, 3Y1r.

21 Idem, sigs. F6v, P4v, Z3v, 2G3v, 2O3v, 2X4v, 3K3v, 3S4v, 3D6v.

22 Stationers’ Court Minutes, 3 May 1619, Court Book C, TSC/1/B/01/01. Records of the Stationers’ Company have been consulted on Literary Print Culture: The Stationers’ Company Archive, 1554-2007, Adam Matthew Digital, accessible online at: https://www.literaryprintculture.amdigital.co.uk, last accessed 31 March 2024.

23 As Lesser notes, even this name “is a shorthand formulation that elides some of the agency behind the collection” (Ghosts, p. 78). Marino, Owning (see p. 110-15), and Higgins, Shakespeare’s Syndicate (see p. 104-6), use “Jaggard Quartos”; Amy Lidster, Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, uses “Jaggard-Pavier Quartos” (see p. 108-205); and Laoutaris, Shakespeare’s Book, uses “Pavier-Jaggard Quartos” (see p. 58-59).

24 E. A. J. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text, London, Edward Arnold, 1965, p. 25-26; Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, second edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 256.

25 Laoutaris, Shakespeare’s Book, p. 10.

26 On the Herbert brothers as patrons of the folio, see also David M. Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570-1640, Farnham, Ashgate, 2006, pp. 141-157; Massai, “Edward Blount”, pp. 138-145; Chris Laoutaris, “The Prefatorial Material”, in Cambridge Companion, ed. Smith, pp. 48-67, pp. 57-60.

27 It appears in the wills of Augustine Phillips (1605) and Shakespeare (1616). See E.A.J. Honigmann and Susan Brock, eds., Playhouse Wills, 1558-1642, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 73, 107.

28 See Lucy Munro, “The Names of the Actors: The First Folio and Theatre History”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 74.4, Winter 2023, 314-338.

29 Bill dated 20 April 1619, in John Witter vs. John Heminges and Henry Condell, Court of Requests, 1619-20, TNA, REQ 4/1/2; for a digital facsimile see Shakespeare Documented, accessible online at https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/witter-v-heminges-and-condell-shareholdings-globe-bill-complaint-john-witter, last accessed 31 March 2024.

30 For detailed appraisals of the representation of authorial collaboration in the folio, see Masten, Textual Intercourse, p. 113-155; Brooks, Playhouse, p. 140-188; Jitka Štollová, “‘This Silence of the Stage’: The Play of Format and Paratext in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio”, Review of English Studies 68, 2017, 507-523, p. 511-514.

31 TNA, LC 5/135; Nicoll and Boswell, eds., “Dramatic Records”, p. 398.

32 Ibid., p. 399.

33 See OED, “proper”, adj. II.4.

34 Stationers Register, Liber E, TSC/1/E/06/04, pp. 53-4.

35 An Ordinance of Both Houses of Parliament for the Suppressing of Publike Stage-playes, London, 1642, Wing E1794aA; Journal of the House of Lords [1509-1793], 39 vols., London, HMSO, 1767-1830, 8: 234, 4: 496.

36 R.C. Bald, Bibliographical Studies in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938, p. 4. Bald suggests that Essex’s letter “refers to [an] earlier and abortive project of Mosley’s” to publish Fletcher’s works (p. 5); on Mosley’s role in the folio project see also Štollová, “Silence”.

37 Will Sharpe, Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, p. 138.

38 John Lowin, et alii, “To the Right Honourable Philip, Earle of Pembroke and Mountgomery”, in Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen, London, 1647, WING B1581, sig. A2r.

39 Štollová, “Silence”, p. 514.

40 TNA, LC 5/134, p. 431; Nicoll and Boswell, eds., “Dramatic Records”, p. .

41 Parish Register, St Leonard, Heston, The London Archives (TLA), DRO/026/A/01/001; Honigmann and Brock, eds., Playhouse Wills, p. 203-204; Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 9 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1941-1968, vol. 2, p. 387. John H. Astington, “Actors and the Court after 1642”, Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 15, August, 2007, 6.1-23, accessible online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-15/astiacto.htm (last accessed 31 March 2024), suggests that Bowyer and Pollard – aged 42 and 44 in the summer of 1642 – “counted themselves as superannuated” and did not enlist (§ 3).

42 Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 2, p. 549; Hugh Peters, The Full and Last Relation, of All Things Concerning Basing-House, London, 1645, Wing P1702, sig. A2v.

43 James Wright, Historia Histrionica, London, 1699, Wing 3695, p. 8.

44 James Shirley, “To the Reader”, in Comedies and Tragedies, sig. A3r.

45 Moseley’s dedicatory epistle is dated “At the Princes Armes in St Pauls Church-yard. Feb. 14th 1646” (sig. A4v), using old-style dating; this suggests that the “1647” on the book’s title-page means that it was published after the change of year on 25 March.

46 Richard Brome, “To the Memory of the Deceased but Ever-Living Authour in these his Poems, Mr. JOHN FLETCHER” and James Shirley, “Upon the Printing of Mr. JOHN FLETCHERS Workes”, in Comedies and Tragedies, sigs. g1r-v.

47 Štollová, “Silence”, p. 519.

48 For an overview of performances in 1647-49 and the attempts to suppress them, see Leslie Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1928, p. 24-43.

49 Perfect Occurrences of Every Dayes Journall in Parliament, 1-8 October, London, 1647, sig. 2Q4r.

50 The Perfect Weekely Account, 6-13 October, London, 1647, sig. P2v.

51 Wright, Historia, p. 8-9.

52 Idem, p. 3.

53 “The Stationer to the Reader”, in Comedies and Tragedies, sig. A4r.

54 For an example, see this copy sold at Christies in October 2022, accessible at: https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6389592, last accessed 31 March 2024.

55 Wright, Historia, p. 9-10.

56 Craig, “King’s Servants”, p. 162.

57 John Lowin and Joseph Taylor, “To the Honour’d, Few, Lovers of Drammatick Poesie”, in Beaumont and Fletcher, Wild Goose Chase, sig. [A]1r.

58 The “Drammatis Personæ” features Hammerton, who appears to have joined the King’s Men around December 1631; William Trigg, who played Rosalura, was discharged from his apprenticeship to the deceased John Heminges on 21 June 1632, after which date he is unlikely to have played a female role. See David Kathman, “Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers: Freemen and Apprentices in the Elizabethan Theater”, Shakespeare Quarterly 55.1, Spring 2004, 10-11, p. 14.

59 W.E., “An Epigram Upon the Long Lost and Fortunately Recovered Wild-Goose Chase, and as Seasonably Bestowed on Mr. John Lowen and Mr. Joseph Taylor, for their Best Advantage”, in The Wild Goose Chase, sig. a1v.

60 See Hotson, Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, p. 32-33; Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “New Light on English Acting Companies in 1646, 1648 and 1660”, Review of English Studies, 42, 1991, 487-509, p. 491-492, p. 496.

61 Surrey History Centre, Woking, Surrey, P7/1/1; City of Westminster Archives Centre, London, STC/PR/1/2.

62 On the deaths of Robinson, Benfield and Swanston, see Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 2, p. 376, p. 553, p. 588. Hammerton was buried on 19 April 1653 at St Margaret, Westminster (Dean and Chapter of the Collegiate Church of St Peter in Westminster, MA/01/01/006); Pollard was buried on 26 July 1653 at St Bride, Fleet Street (LMA, P69/Bri/A/004/Ms06538).

63 Chamberlain, Conceits, sig. E4r (number 196).

Haut de page

Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: Performance history for Sejanus, in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, London, 1616, STC 14752, sig. 2O3v, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Ih J738 +B616 Copy 4.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/docannexe/image/8481/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 348k
Titre Figure 2: “The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, London, 1623, STC 22273, sig. πA5+2r, Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22273 Fo. 1 no.09, accessible online at https://luna.folger.edu/​luna/​servlet/​s/​2my89q.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/docannexe/image/8481/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 388k
Titre Figure 3: The signatures to the dedicatory epistle to Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, in Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen, London, 1647, WING B1581, sig. A2r, Penn State University Libraries, PR2420 1647 Q, available online at https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/​digital/​collection/​emblem/​id/​4301/​rec/​4.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/docannexe/image/8481/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 418k
Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Lucy Munro, « “Masters of their proper Goods”: Company Politics and Folio Publication, 1616-1652 »Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare [En ligne], 42 | 2024, mis en ligne le 10 décembre 2024, consulté le 09 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/8481 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/137ss

Haut de page

Auteur

Lucy Munro

King’s College London

Articles du même auteur

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search