Curiosa: Shakespeare's Quartos
Jul. 27th, 2007 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebroadweAh, it's a good day that begins (admittedly rather early) with the final Harry Potter book and continues with the second volume of Lois McMaster Bujold's Beguilement (snagged out from under the noses of my Bujold-reading colleagues from the bestseller shelves, ha!) and rounds out with a series of Shakespeare quartos on my IN shelf. What are Shakespeare quartos, you ask? Let me tell you ...
Quarto is the name for a book format in which the large sheet of paper printed on the press has been folded once longwise, then again perpendicular to that, so that it can be cut into four leaves (eight pages) that will be stitched together into a gathering or quire; the group of gatherings that compose a text are then sewn together and bound into a book. Twenty of Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays were published in this format before his death; afterward, two of his actor colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, put together a folio (large-format) edition of thirty-six of the plays, the First Folio. This edition and its successors in folio format were long viewed as more definitive than the quartos, which occasionally read as if someone were reconstructing the play from half a prompt book and his memories; the Shakespeare we read in school or see performed in the park owes more to the folios than the quartos. But "definitive" is not always a useful concept when dealing with drama, which can mutate in rehearsal and through early performances, or with early printed literature, which still retained some of the fluidity of its oral and manuscript-circulated forebears. Scholars do a lot of work on the quartos these days -- at the very least, they're considered to retain some line readings that are preferable to the ones in folio. The British Library has a very nice site with images of the Shakespeare quartos they hold and some friendly explanations of their background.
So far, I've cataloged a copy of the fifth quarto (1612) of Richard III -- badly preserved, as the bookseller's letter tucked in the front apologizes to his client:
Quarto is the name for a book format in which the large sheet of paper printed on the press has been folded once longwise, then again perpendicular to that, so that it can be cut into four leaves (eight pages) that will be stitched together into a gathering or quire; the group of gatherings that compose a text are then sewn together and bound into a book. Twenty of Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays were published in this format before his death; afterward, two of his actor colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, put together a folio (large-format) edition of thirty-six of the plays, the First Folio. This edition and its successors in folio format were long viewed as more definitive than the quartos, which occasionally read as if someone were reconstructing the play from half a prompt book and his memories; the Shakespeare we read in school or see performed in the park owes more to the folios than the quartos. But "definitive" is not always a useful concept when dealing with drama, which can mutate in rehearsal and through early performances, or with early printed literature, which still retained some of the fluidity of its oral and manuscript-circulated forebears. Scholars do a lot of work on the quartos these days -- at the very least, they're considered to retain some line readings that are preferable to the ones in folio. The British Library has a very nice site with images of the Shakespeare quartos they hold and some friendly explanations of their background.
So far, I've cataloged a copy of the fifth quarto (1612) of Richard III -- badly preserved, as the bookseller's letter tucked in the front apologizes to his client:
I fear the enclosed fragment of Richard the Third, ed. 1612, is hardly worth your acceptance, but such as it is I hope you will receive it-- a complete copy of the third quarto of The Merchant of Venice -- bound by the workshop of Francis Bedford, a notable Victorian binder, in full red morocco with gold-ruled covers, gold-stamped spine, cover edges and turn-ins; marbled endpapers; and all edges gilt (very pretty, even if it is one of the cheaper pretty options Bedford offered his clients :-) -- and an incomplete copy of the eighth quarto of Henry IV, Part I, a very late edition published in 1639, but retaining the legend "newly corrected by William Shakespeare" on the title page. As a nineteenth-century hand notes wryly on the front free endpaper:
Such value is there in anything bearing Shakespeare's name that a copy of this edition was sold. A curious instance of the impudent assertions of the booksellers (or stationers as they were then known) is afforded by the "Newly corrected by William Shakespeare", though he had been dead 23 years when it was published.Mind you, sometimes printers simply inherited the layout of previous editions from each other, but they also weren't averse to trickery (ask me about the fifteen volumes of pirated Elzevier editions of the works of the French Jesuit Maimbourg. No, on second thought, don't. Even my boss hates them.). Still on the to-do list are a couple of copies of quarto Hamlet -- alas, not the early edition with the scrambled version of the "To be, or not to be" speech. Ah, well. If life were perfect, what would we complain about, eh? :-)