Herbert Lincoln Clarke

During the eighteenth century, changes in the Shakespeare world and developments in the book world were momentous. An overview of these changes is useful for understanding the history of the sales and prices of the First Folio. Shakespeare was restored to the stage in 1660 and continued to be played as Colley Cibber (d 1757, actor from 1690, playwright and manager of the Theatre Royal) replaced Thomas Betterton (d 1710) as Shakespeare’s theatrical standard-bearer. For the eighty-five years up to Nicholas Rowe’s edition (1709), which he based on the Fourth Folio, four editions had satisfied demand. From Rowe onwards the plays became the focus of editorial and scholarly attention and rivalry; in the hundred years after Rowe there were sixty-five editions.'*^ Rowe’s publisher was Jacob Tonson (d 1736), ‘the founder of literary publishing in English’.'** Tonson with his family successors, owning the copyrights, held a monopoly on Shakespeare publication; as a consequence, the Tonson family were central to his promotion up to 1772.^*^ ‘The Tonsons decided who would edit Shakespeare’:*® it was they who chose, in sequence, Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Warburton, Johnson and Capell. Pope’s Dunciad raised Shakespeare rivalry to mock epic proportions.

Defining when Shakespeare ‘made it to the top’, Taylor comments.

Everyone agrees that, after a slow but steady upward climb, Shakespeare’s coronation as the King of English Poets finally occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century, at some time between the death of Alexander Pope (1744) and the birth of William Wordsworth ( 1770). ( 114)

From Rowe’s time onward, one of the remarkable aspects of the interest in Shakespeare was how deep and widespread it was; for example, Arthur Sherbo documents at length ‘how many different men, and women, furnished aid to various editors of

46_{Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, 28.}

^ Ibid, 128. ^

^ Keith Walker, ‘Jacob Tonson, Bookseller’, American Scholar (Summer 1992), 424-30^/(424). o With the Tonsons’ 1714 duodecimo reprint of Rowe, ‘Shakespeare first gained a wide reading public’

(Baic, ShakespeareanConstitutions, 23). This public helped create the cultural ambience within which Folio sales took place.

Shakespeare’.^^ As Brian Vickers puts it, referring to the third quarter of the century, ‘Suggesting emendations was almost a national pastime’.

The manifestations of Shakespeare’s apotheosis were far-reaching. In 1736 a Shakespeare’s Ladies Club was formed ‘with the specific aim of persuading the theatre managers to put on more Shakespeare’.^^ In the period 1733-52, the performance of his plays reached a frequency ‘that has never been equalled’. H i s monument was erected in Westminster Abbey in 1741.^^ The Professor of Poetry at Oxford gave the first academic lectures on Shakespeare in an English university in 1751-56 (114). From 1747 to 1776 David Garrick ran Drury Lane in rivalry with Covent Garden ( 115)- -both theatres prospering from their Shakespeare productions (in 1750 with competing performances of Romeo and Juliet—111). In 1765 Dr Johnson’s much-anticipated and widely heralded edition was published (and within some three months Steevens was advertising his intention to undertake another edition^^). In 1769 Garrick achieved his ‘marketing masterpiece’, a ‘Shakespeare Jubilee’ at Stratford-upon-Avon: ‘reported in newspapers throughout Europe, the Jubilee spawned Stratford’s literary tourism industry’ (119). In 1774 the first Shakespeare public lecture (on 1 Henry IV) was g i v e n . I n 1776 the first complete translation of Shakespeare into French came out (123); in 1784 the first single-volume edition in the eighteenth century appeared; and in 1795-96 the first edition printed in America was p u b l i s h e d . I n 1789 John Boydell opened the Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall; ‘the conception of a gallery of works by major artists devoted specifically to Shakespearean illustration and divorced from theatricalperformance was completely n e w I n 1795 William Henry Ireland (whose father owned a First Folio) published some supposedly Shakespearean manuscripts; such was the interest that Malone’s reply demonstrating they were forgeries sold 500 copies in two days.^° From 1793 to 1800, ‘there were some fifteen editions of Shakespeare’.®^ The century’s scholarship culminated in the great editions of Malone (1790), Steevens (1793) and Reed (1803).

Shakespeare’s ‘cultural presence’ (to borrow Bate’s phrase again) in the latter part of the century can be summarised from two angles. First, the literary: as Vickers puts

Sherbo, ix. For the generality, see pp ix-xii andpp 187-88. For the particulars, see the many names Sherbo cites in connection with each edition.

^ ^ r ia n Vickers, ed, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols (1974-81), v (1979, Reprinted 1995),

"21;

® Bate, 25.

A ^ Vickers, I I I (1975), xi.

o Taylor, 96. The ^wa-feetnete^page references in the remainder of this paragraph are also to Taylor. ^ Sherbo, 27.

^ David Nichol Smith, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1928), 90-91.

* ‘At the time this monumentally important edition was produced, the common publishing practice in America was to import sheets from London or Dubhn’--Heritage Book Shop, Inc, Catalogue 197,

William Shakespeare Collected Editions 1623-1823 (Los Angeles, [1995]), 23.

Bate, 46—my emphasis, added to stress the point that Shakespeareana were beginning to take on a life of their own with no CŒmection to the theatre.

^ Schoenbaum, 1993, 161. Sherbo, 155.

it, ‘dozens of books of criticism or literary history have substantial discussions of his work, and incidental references abound in books, magazines, newspapers, lectures, novels, letters, theatre reviews, and poetry’ and he goes on to say, ‘His prestige is now so great that he is seen not only as England’s greatest writer but as the world’s greatest’/^ Then the commercial: speaking of the Jubilee, the Shakespeare Gallery and the Ireland forgeries. Bate makes the point that they ‘offer prime examples of the process whereby in the latter part of the eighteenth century Shakespeare became commercialised and was made into a commodity of material consumption’ (45). It takes no conceptual leap to embrace the First Folio in that observation.

A turning point in the history of the First Folio occurred at about the middle of the century with the recognition of its textual primacy. Dr Johnson was the first to publish this conclusion (1765): ‘The truth is, that the first is equivalent to all others, and that the rest only deviate from it by the printer’s negligence. . . . I collated them all at the beginning, but afterwards used only the first’.^ Capell criticised Rowe and his successors for their choice of copy-text: ‘The superstructure cannot be a sound one, which is built upon so bad a foundation as that work of Mr. Rowe’s; which all of them, as we see, in succession, have yet made their corner-stone’.^^ He was at pains to tell his readers that ‘so long ago as the year 1745’ he had ‘thought seriously of a cure [for] the wretched condition [that] his Author was reduc’d to by these late tamperings’ ( 19), and concluded that ‘the first folio. . . text. . . is by far the most faultless of the editions in that form’.*^® By the turn of the century, John Home Tooke, a politician and close reader emd annotator of Shakespeare, could confidently write ( 1805): ‘The first Folio in my opinion, is the only edition worth regarding.. . . For, by the presumptuous licence of the dwarfish commentators, who are forever cutting him down to their own size, we risk the loss of Shakespear’s genuine text; which that Folio assuredly contains.

The eighteenth-century book trade was marked by high activity, fast growth, change in taste and serious collecting. Munby and Coral record over 2,400 book catalogues, one third of them in the last two decades. Retail sales escalated: Sherbo speaks of there being 150 booksellers in London between 1726 and 1775.^* The change in book-buyers’ taste is reflected in the organisation of auction catalogues—from an organising principle of ‘Latin and theological works first’ to one of ‘English works first and no distinction between theological and secular works’; at the same time the dominating proportion of books shifted from theological to secular, with the latter

Vickers, V I (1981), 1.

® By ‘primacy’, I mean over the later Folios, which have no independait textual authority whatever, not over some of the Quartos, as Capell already recognised.

^ The Plays o f William Shakespeare, ed Samuel Johnson, 8 vols (1765) I , DT.

“ Mr William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, ed Edward Capell, 10 vols (1768),

I , 19. As mentioned above, Rowe used the Fourth Folio.

“ Ibid, 1,21. Having stated his jHeferencefor the Quartos where they exist, he says in all the rest (as well as in 2 Henry IV, Othello, 2o\d Richard 111) he followed the First Folio.

^ Quoted in Lee, 1924, 87-88, from Tooke’s Diversions of Parley.

ultimately dwarfing the former. Libraries—both private and public—were formed with increasing fervour. There were close links between collecting and scholarship, evidenced in the Shakespeare world, for example, by the collections of Elijah Fenton (who helped Pope^®), Martin Folkes (who helped Theobald’®), Edward Capell (who bequeathed his library to Trinity College, Cambridge, reckoned by Seymour De Ricci ‘as one of the best Shakespearean collections in the United Kingdom’’ *), Dr Johnson (whose library was sold in 1785), Richard Warner (who contributed to the 1773 Johnson-Steevens edition’^), Richard Farmer (who wrote An Essay on the learning o f Shakespeare^^), George Steevens (the sale of whose library in 1800 was the earliest auction of a large Shakespearean collection’"*), Edmond Malone (a serious collector of Shakespeareana, whose collection went to the Bodleian’^), and Isaac Reed (whose extensive library was sold in 1807). Among the wealthy, book-collecting by the end of the century developed into a ‘passion’.’® The passion extended to First Folios, as evidenced by the rapid rise in the rate of sales in the 1780s and 1790s and in prices paid in the 1790s (as we shall see below).

The relationship between editing and owning a First Folio was even closer than is suggested in the previous paragraph. The fact is, after Rowe, all the great eighteenth- century editors except Warburton bought their own copy and worked with it as part of their library. Copies were not only available, they were affordable-even by inhabitants of Grub Street like Johnson. One copy was owned successively by Theobald and Steevens; it is now in the John Rylands University of Manchester Library. Another was owned successively by Theobald, Johnson and Steevens; it is now in the British Library. Dr Johnson possibly owned another copy.” Hanmer owned a copy, now in the Folger. Capell owned a copy, now at Trinity College, Cambridge. Malone owned a copy, now at the Bodleian. From a comment of George Steevens’s, it would seem that Pope owned, as well as used, a First Folio. In a letter to Isaac Reed, dated Hampstead Heath, 5 October 1790, Steevens writes of the contemporary industry in making up incomplete copies and continues: ‘I never knew till yesterday that among others, [Henderson] fitted up one for Pope’.’®

^ Ibid, xi, 2 and3.

Ibid, 8. See Appendix S/P 5 for the sale of Folkes’s library in 1756.

Seymour De Ricci, English Collectors o f Books & Manuscripts (1530-1930) and Their Marks o f Ownership (Cambridge, 1930), 62. W W GregdesaibedCapell’s First Folio, focusing mostly on the preliminaries and their arrangement, in Catalogue o f the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library o f Trinity College in Cambridge (Cambridge, 1903), 116-17.

Sherbo, 46-48.

^ See Appendix S/P 5 for the sale of Farmer’s library in 1798. He accumulates twenty-nine references in Sherbo’s The Birth o f Shakespeare Studies.

De Ricci, English Collectors, 62. Ibid, 63.

Lee 1924, 97.

^ Ibid, 92, but see the footnote to Dr Johnson’s sale in Appendix S/P 5, 1785, regarding the anomalies concerning Johnson’s ownership of Folios.

^ The letter is in a boimd volume, ‘George Steevens letters to I. Reed 1777-1800’ (label on spine), ‘From the Shakespearean Library of Marsden J. Perry’ (label on doublure), in tlie Folger Shakespeare

This making up of incomplete copies is concrete evidence of rising value and demand. In another context Steevens described the ‘fitting up copies of this book for sale’:

When leaves have been wanting, they have been reprinted with battered types, and foisted into the vacancies, without notice of such defects and remedies applied to them.

When the title has been lost, a spurious one has been fabricated, with a blank space left for the head of Shakespeare, afterwards added from the second, third, or fourth impression. . . .

Since it was thought advantageous to adopt such contrivances while the book was only valued at six or seven guineas, now it has reached its present enormous price, may not artifice be still more on the stretch to vamp up copies for the benefit of future catalogues and auctions? (Plays, 1793, i, 445, n 6)

The painstaking care with which Folios were refurbished is illustrated by the detailed bills of Roger Payne (1739-97) accompanying the books upon which he had worked. His bill for the volume which is now Folger 11 is preserved at the Folger. Payne speaks for example of:

Six leaves Inlay’d in so exceeding neat Manner as not to be seen without being told of i t . . . The Title with above 40 pieces to strengthen [it] . . . The Whole Book mended in a great many places and the Whole Book Carefully looked over to clean the dirt away took me 7 full days and 1/2 . . . Finished in the Taste 1 thought suitable to the Book . . . The Greatest care hath been taken of margins. The Binding in the very best m[anner] [£]3.8.^^

The £3/8/- was in addition to £1/5/9 to cover the seven and a half days for mending and cleaning. The substantial refurbishment cost—£4/13/9—reflects the perceived value of the volume.

Table G in Appendix S/P 5 records the details of eighteenth-century First Folio sales. (My research coverage and methods are described in Appendix S/P 4.) Table H in Appendix S/P 6 gives summary data on sales of the Second, Third and Fourth Folios. In the eighteenth century booksellers’ retail sales catalogues became an important feature of the market place and increasingly from 1732 these usefully give printed prices as well as the date the books were first offered for sale. Accordingly, for the eighteenth century (only) 1 include offer prices as well as sales prices to increase the amount of data for analysis, especially for the Second, Third and Fourth Folios. It is true that an asking price in a bookseller’s catalogue does not represent market value as reliably as a price actually paid, such as one recorded at an auction. One could argue Library (Call-mark: MS C.b.2). It is in Steevens’s hand. Peter Blayney kindly alerted me to its existence. ‘A Finding List of Books Surviving from Pope’s Library’, containing 176 titles, in Maynard Mack, Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope

(Newark, NJ, 1982), 394-460, does not contain a Shakespeare Folio.

^ Quoted from the transcription of the bill in Christie’s Catalogue, 16 July 1912 (one lot only), where the bill is reproduced. The transcript in the penultimate line has ‘marging’, which I changed to ‘margins’ having consulted a photocopy of Payne’s original manuscript. In the photocopy the ‘40 pieces’ in line 2 is not clear and I could not confirm manner’ in the last line. The strengthening seems lo apply to the ‘Six leaves’ as well as to ‘TlieTitle’.

that a bookseller’s asking price is what an informed seller believed would attract a buyer and therefore should be close to market value, but inevitably booksellers reduced their offer price at times if a book did not move, as vividly illustrated in Table F in Appendix S/P 4. In fact, the use of offer prices does not affect conclusions concerning the First Folio materially because, of the twenty-two prices noted in Table G, only five appear to be offers (numbers 4, 5, 13, 22 and 23) and most of these are irrelevant for analytical purposes because they are for defective copies. In any case, even if one wished to be purist and use only sales prices, one would be thwarted, because, as Munby and Coral say in their Introduction (xviii), auction catalogues and booksellei([^ retail sales U) catalogues are ‘virtually indistinguishable’ in much of this period, as I experienced when I attempted to italicise data from booksellers’ catalogues in Table H. (To avoid the cumbersome ‘sales and offers’, ‘sales’ includes ‘offers’ in this section.)

Sales of the First Folio took off slowly. I found only three in the first four decades. However, I found eleven in the next four decades, and fourteen in the last two decades, a total of twenty-eight. Table I below, derived from Appendixes S/P 5 and 6, shows these sales by decade in the context both of the sales of the other three Folios and of the publication of Shakespeare editions. The editions cited are the key ones treated by Arthur Sherbo in The Birth o f Shakespeare Studies. For the century as a whole there were fewer sales of the First Folio than of the Second and Fourth, and far more than of the Third (evidencing the greater rarity of the Third). Of all Folio sales in Table I, two- thirds occurred in the last four decades, closely reflecting Shakespeare’s arrival ‘at the top’ some time between 1744 and 1770.

Table I

Number of Sales of the Four Folios by Decade in the 1700s

with Dates of Shakespeare Editions Decade First Second ( Third \ Fourth Unk- j

nown i Total Edition 1700s 1 _Ï 1 1 1 1 4 Rowe 1709 1710s 1 1 1 2 Rowe 1714 1720s 1 1 1 2 1 1 i 6 Pope 1723-25 &1728 Ï73ÔS 1 2 I 1 ÏÔ 1 i 14 Theobajd Ï733 Ï740S 3 _{Ï ]} I 4 : 8 Hanmer 1743-44 Warburton 1747 Ï750S 2 I Ï 1 1 ! 2 ₁ 6 1760s 4 ' 1 1 _{1 3} 14 Johnson 1765 Capell 1767-68 1770s 2 ' I

4 _{1 ^} I 14 Second Oxford Edition

1770-71. Johnson- Steevens 1773 & 1778 1780s 5 9 I 3 1 7 Ï Î 25 Johnson-Steevens 1785 1790s 9 9 I 3 i 5 Ï I 27 Malone 1790 Steevens 1793 Total 28 35 i 15 ! 38 4 i 120

A half-century comparison of sales rates shows that four times as many First Folios changed hands in the second half as in the first half. This rate compares with those of the other three Folios as follows:

Table J

Number of Sales of the Four Folios, First and Second Half of the 1700s

I First Second Third Fourth !

i First half-century ! 6 6 I 3 17

I Second half-century 1 2 2 29 1 1 2 2 1 j

I Rate of 2nd vs 1st Ï/2 j 4x 5x 1 4x 1 + X j

As Appendix S/P 5 reveals, the vendors or former owners of these First Folios included Lewis Theobald, Dr Johnson, George Steevens, David Garrick, Richard Farmer (Canon, Master of Emmanuel College, Librarian to the University of Cambridge and Fellow of the Royal Society), a President of the Royal Society, five doctors (one an MP, another an FRS, a third a Fellow of the Royal Society of Physicians), and an FSA—ie, mostly professional and distinguished men. The Folios of the foregoing all changed hands. There were others belonging to the landed and wealthy, which in this century did not change hands. As Steevens said in 1793, ‘Most of the first folios now extant, are known to have belonged to ancient families resident in the country’.^® Among those whose sale did not contain a First Folio were Thomas Betterton, Blihu Yale, James Thomson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Gray, Thomas Day, Oliver Goldsmith,*^ Sir Thomas Browne,®^ Jonathan Swift,®^ and