Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries

Ben Johnson, The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, London: Imprinted by Will Stansby, 1616.

In this regard, Shakespeare is perhaps somewhat more anomalous than many have supposed. While no doubt the great majority of playwrights "had no mind to be a man in Print," as Robert Davenport says of himself in his preface "To the knowing Reader" of King John and Matilda (1655), many playwrights did not merely allow but actively sought publication to restore their intentions to the play they had written. Although all playwrights would have anticipated that their plays would be shaped by the demands of performance, their scripts legally being the property of the acting company (and the genre itself, as we are often reminded, existing as a subliterary form perhaps incapable of sustaining the burden of literary ambition), many playwrights consciously turned to print to preserve their creation in its intended form.

Notoriously, Ben Jonson labored to rescue his plays from the theatrical conditions in which they were produced, seeking to make available for readers a play text of which he could be said in some exact sense to be its "author." The 1600 quarto of Every Man Out Of His Humor insists on its title page that it presents the play "As It Was First Composed by the Author B. I. Containing more than hath been Publickely Spoken or Acted." Here Jonson asserts the authority of the literary text over the theatrical script, reversing the tendency to offer the play to a reading audience, in the familiar formula, "as it hath bene sundry times playd," as the 1600 quarto of Henry V has it. Even more remarkable is the 1605 quarto of Sejanus, to which Jonson contributes a preface in which he again announces that the printed text is "not the same with that which was acted on the publike stage." But in the published quarto, rather than merely restoring theatrical cuts, he has in fact removed and rewritten the work of a collaborator. While admitting that 'A second pen had a good share" in what was played, in the printed text Jonson replaces the work of his unnamed co-author with his own words never acted, disingenuously claiming that his motive in inserting his own "weaker (and no doubt lesse pleasing)" language was only a reluctance "to defraud so happy a Genius of his right, by my lothed vsurpation" .

Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries

William Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, London: Printed for Philip Chetwinde, 1663

But if Jonson's aggressive determination to extract his plays from the customary collaborations of the theater is unique, his desire for a printed text that will preserve the dramatist's intended form is not. Other playwrights similarly saw print as the medium in which their intentions could be made visible at least to their readers. In the 1623 quarto of The Duchess of Malfi, Webster adds an anxious marginal note next to the italic text of a song sung by the churchmen in act three: "The Author disclaimes this Ditty to be his". More positive in its use of print is Barnabe Barnes's The Devil's Charter (1607), which advertises itself conventionally on the title page that it is presented "as it was plaide before the King's Maiestie, upon Candlemasse night laste: by his Maiesties Servants," and then adds: "But more exactly revewed, corrected, and augmented since by the Author, for the more pleasure and profit of the Reader." A year later, Thomas Heywood insists in his epistle "To the Reader" in his Rape of Lucrece that it has not been "my custome . . . to commit my plaies to the presse"; nonetheless, on account of the copies that have "accidently come into the Printers handes" in "corrupt and mangled" form, "This therefore I was the willinger to furnish out in his natiue habit". In 1640, Richard Brome adds an epistle to The Antipodes in which the "Curteous Reader" is told that this playbook, too, contains "more than was presented upon the Stage," where "for superfluous length (as some of the Players pretended)," cuts were made. Brome says that for this printed edition he thought it "good al should be inserted according to the allowed Original; and as it was, at first, intended for the Cock-pit Stage". For Brome, as for Heywood and Barnes, print restores and preserves the play he wrote, and, incidentally, his remarks reveal that it was the uncut, authorial text that was "allowed" by the Master of the Revels.

Shakespeare, however, never asserted any such proprietary right over his scripts or expressed any anxiety about their printed form. His plays, of course, were subjected to theatrical necessities, revised by various hands to allow them to play successfully within the two hours traffic of his stage, but never did Shakespeare feel obliged to "furnish" the play he wrote in its "natiue habit." Somewhat less than half of his dramatic output ever appeared in print while he lived, and of the plays that were published none is marked by any effort on his part to insure that the printed play accurately reflected what he had written. In their epistle "to the great Variety of Readers" in the 1623 folio, Heminge and Condell tell the would-be purchasers of the volume that the collection contains Shakespeare's plays exactly "as he conceiued the[m]," but that extravagant claim is never one Shakespeare felt inspired to make himself about any printed edition of his work.

Only eighteen of his thirty-seven plays were published in his lifetime, and none in an edition that Shakespeare avowed as his own. Still, with ten reprinted one or more times, at least forty-two separate editions reached print before he died. (If one counts The Taming of A Shrew as Shakespeare's, there are forty-five surviving editions of nineteen plays.) Clearly Shakespeare's plays were successful not only in the theater but also in the bookstalls, where they found a substantial reading audience. The first part of Henry IV appeared in six editions before his death, and a seventh before the folio was published in 1623. Richard II was published five times, as was Richard III. Several other plays were reprinted three times. At the time of his death, the total number of editions of Shakespeare's plays far exceeded that of any other contemporary playwright, and indeed no single play to that time had sold as well as I Henry IV. (Even if one extends the time frame to 1640, only three plays--the anonymous Mucedorus, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus--appear in more editions than I Henry IV's seven, Mucedorus, somewhat improbably to modern taste, topping the list with fourteen printings between 1598 and 1639.)