While he lived, Shakespeare arguably had some competitors for theatrical preeminence, but what has often been overlooked is that as a published dramatist he had none. In our various measures of Shakespeare's greatness, we have usually ignored the fact that in his own age more editions of his plays circulated than of any other contemporary playwright. Eventually the prolific Beaumont and Fletcher would close the gap, but they never actually surpassed Shakespeare. Ironically, although he never sought his success as in print, he is the period's leading published playwright.

The reason that this has not been observed may be that print has seemed to many an inauthentic calculus of Shakespeare's achievement, but more likely it is simply that this success literally "goes without saying"; it appears to us inevitable that Shakespeare's plays would reach print and thrive in that medium. In his own time, however, that success was hardly assured. We see the drama as the most compelling cultural manifestation of the age and Shakespeare as its most extraordinary figure, but Shakespeare wrote in an environment in which plays, at least English plays, had not yet emerged as a literary genre; they were much like film scripts in the movie industry today. Publishers did not rush to publish new plays, largely because there was not a large and reliable market for them. Although William Prynne, in his book Histrio-Mastix: the Players Scourge (London, 1633), disgustedly insisted that playbooks were "now more vendible than the choicest sermons," claiming that "above forty thousand Play-bookes have beene printed and vented within these two years," even by his tendentious accounting, plays still represented only a small percentage of the books that were purchased. In the 1630s, booksellers sold something like twenty times as many religious books (sermons, catechisms, bibles, and theological works) as they did plays.

Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries

Lady Elizabeth Crew, The Tragedie of Mariam, The Faire Queene of Jewry. Written by that learned, vertuous, and truly noble Ladie, E. C., London: Printed by Thomas Creede, for Richard Hawkins, 1613.

Peter Blayney (in ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, Columbia University Press, 1997, p. 389) has usefully reminded us of what is all too easy to forget, given history's judgments on the period's cultural achievement: plays, even Shakespeare's plays, were a relatively insignificant piece of the book trade. They were at best a risky publishing venture. "No more than one play in five would have returned the publisher's initial investment inside five years," Blayney tells us, and "not one in twenty would have paid for itself during its first year." While Shakespeare provided some publishers with considerable profit, eight of the eighteen plays that appeared in his lifetime did not merit a second edition before he died. And it is worth remembering that Venus and Adonis was published in sixteen editions by 1636, seven more than even the most successful of his plays.

In spite of the literary ambitions of some playwrights, printed plays were generally considered ephemera, among the "riffe-raffes" and "baggage books" that Thomas Bodley would not allow in his library lest some "scandal" attach to it by their presence (Letters of Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library, ed. G. W. Wheeler, Oxford University Press, 1926, p. 219, 222). Publishers did regularly assume the risk of printing plays (though, between 1590 and 1615, on average only about ten were published a year), but they could not have done so imagining either that they were preserving the nation's cultural heritage or about to make their own fortune.

Plays were published in essence because they could be. In a commercial environment where publishing was largely opportunistic, plays were for a publisher a relatively inexpensive investment. If they did not, as Blayney says, offer a reliable "shortcut to wealth" (p. 389), they did allow a publisher the chance to make some money without great financial exposure. Manuscripts became available, probably at a cost to the publisher of no more than two pounds a piece. No record of any payment for a play survives, but evidence like that from the Second Part of the Return From Parnassus, where the printer John Danter is imagined offering an author "40 shillings and an odde pottle of wine" for a manuscript, suggests that this was something like the going rate for a small book. The play text would usually be printed in small pica type on nine sheets of the cheapest available paper. For an edition of 800, which was probably all a publisher would risk, the total costs of copy, registration, and printing would be about eight pounds. With playbooks retailing at around 6d. (viz., the "testerne" the publishers of the 1609 Troilus and Cressida hope its readers will think "well bestowd" with the play's purchase) and wholesaling at 4d., a publisher, especially one who sold his own books, could break even with the sale of about 500 copies and might then begin to turn a modest profit, which would average about a pound a year--certainly not a spectacular windfall but not an insubstantial contribution to the financial health of the stationer's business.

"What made the venture worth the risk," writes Blayney, "was the chance that a well-chosen play would merit a second edition," which, because of its freedom from costs accruing only to the first (the price of the manuscript, entry, license, and registration), would nearly double the publisher's profit on wholesale copies (Blayney, p. 4.12). Interestingly, of plays first printed before 1625, almost half eventually appeared in a second edition (and about sixty per cent of those did so within ten years of the first date of publication), while for those first published after 1625, the number of plays appearing in two or more editions drops to ten per cent. But even with the significant increase in profitability for individual copies of editions beyond the first, and, at least before 1625, with the substantial number of plays that were reprinted (allowing some amendment of Blayney's bleak accounting), no fortunes were made through play publication.

Of course, many plays never reached print at all. Those that did, almost certainly less than a fifth of the number played, arrived at their publishers from a variety of sources, and in the absence of anything like our modern copyright law, the publishers had no obligation to inquire scrupulously into their provenance. All that was legally required to establish title was that they not violate another stationer's claim to the text and that they follow the proper channels of authority in securing their right. If there was no prior claim, a publisher was free to print his copy with no regard for its author's rights or interests. As George Wither wrote in 1624: "by the lawes and Orders of their Corporation, they can and do setle vpon the particular members thereof p[e]rpetuall interest in such Bookes as are Registred by them at their Hall . . . notwithstanding their first Coppies were purloyned from the true owner, or imprinted without his Ieaue."

Until the first modern copyright law was passed in 1709, this remained the case. Copyright belonged to the publisher not to the author, and the legal situation, as George Wither bitterly noted (in The Schollers Purgatory, London, 1624), served the publisher's interest at the expense of that of both the author and the reading public: "If he gett any written Coppy into his powre, likely to be vendible; whether the Author be willing or no, he will publish it; and it shallbe contriued and named alsoe, according to his owne pleasure: which is the reason, so many good Bookes come forth imperfect, and with foolish titles."