The Stationers' Company.—In the early period of English printing, which began about 1480 and lasted up to 1557, there was very little supervision over the publishing of books, and as a result the competition was unscrupulous. There was a guild of publishers, called the Stationers' Company, in existence, but its efforts to control its members were only of a general character. In 1557, however, Philip and Mary granted a charter to the Stationers' Company under which no one not a member of the Stationers' Company could legally possess a printing press. Queen Mary was, of course, interested in controlling the press directly through the Crown. Throughout the Elizabethan period the printing of books was directly under the supervision of Her Majesty's Government, and not under the law courts. Every book had to be licensed by the company. The Wardens of the company acted as licensers in ordinary cases, and in doubtful cases the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, or some other dignitary appointed for the purpose. When the license was granted, the permission to print was entered upon the Register of the company, and it is from these records that much important knowledge about the dates of Shakespeare's plays is gained.
The Stationers' Company was interested only in protecting its members from prosecution and from competition. The author was not considered by them in the legal side of the transaction. How the printer got his manuscript to print was his own affair, not theirs.
Many authors were at that time paid by printers for the privilege of using their manuscript; but it was not considered proper that a gentleman should be paid for literary work. Robert Greene, the playwright and novelist, wrote regularly in the employ of printers. On the other hand, Sir Philip Sidney, a contemporary of Shakespeare's, did not allow any of his writings to be printed during his lifetime. Francis Bacon published his essays only in order to forestall an unauthorized edition, and others of the time took the same course. Bacon says in his preface that to prevent their being printed would have been a troublesome procedure. It was possible for an author to prevent the publication by prosecution, but it was scarcely a wise thing to do, in view of the legal difficulties in the way. Nevertheless, fear of the law probably acted as some sort of a check on unscrupulous publishers.
The author of a play was, however, really less interested than the manager who had bought it. The manager of a theater seems, from what evidence we possess, to have believed that the printing of a play injured the chances of success upon the stage. The play was sold by the author directly to the manager, whose property it became. Copies of it might be sold to some printer by some of the players in the company, by the manager himself, or, in rarer cases, by some unscrupulous copyist taking down the play in shorthand at the performance. When a play had got out of date, it would be more apt to be sold than while it was still on the stage. In some cases, however, the printing might have no bad effect upon the attendance at its performances.
During the years before 1623, seventeen of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto. Two of these, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, were printed in two very different versions, so that we have nineteen texts of Shakespeare's plays altogether published before the First Folio. A complete table of these plays with the dates in which the quartos appeared follows:—
1594. Titus Andronicus. Later quartos in 1600 and 1611.
1597. Richard II. Later quartos in 1598, 1608, and 1615.
1597. Richard III. Later quartos in 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612, and 1622.
1597. Romeo and Juliet. Later quartos in 1599 (corrected edition) and 1609.
1598. I Henry IV. Later quartos in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, and 1622.
1598. Love's Labour's Lost.
1600. Merchant of Venice. Later quarto in 1619. (Copying
on the title-page the original date of 1600, however.)
1600. Henry V. Later quartos in 1602 and 1619. (Dated on the title-page, 1608.)
1600. Henry IV, Part II.
1600. Midsummer Night's Dream. Later quarto in 1619. (Dated, however, 1600.)
1602. Merry Wives of Windsor. Later quarto in 1619.
1603. Hamlet.
1604. Second edition of Hamlet. Later quartos in 1605 and 1611.
1608. King Lear. Later quarto in 1619. (Title-page date, 1608.)
1608. Pericles. Later quartos in 1609, 1611, and 1619.
1609. Troilus and Cressida. A second quarto in 1609.
1622. Othello.
These are all the known quartos of Shakespeare's plays printed before the Folio. They represent two distinct classes. The first class (comprising fourteen texts) of the quartos contains good texts of the plays and is of great assistance to editors. The second (comprising five texts), the first Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Merry Wives, the first Hamlet, and Pericles, is composed of thoroughly bad copies. Two of this class were not entered on the Stationers' Register at all, but were pure piracies. Two others were entered by one firm, but were printed by another. The fifth was entered and transferred on the same day. Of the fourteen good texts, twelve were regularly entered on the Stationers' Register, and the other two were evidently intended to take the place of a bad text. It is evident, therefore, that registry upon the books of the Stationers' Company was a safeguard to an author in getting before the public a good text of his writings. It also indicates that the good copies were obtained by printers in a legal manner, and so probably purchased directly from the theaters, whether from the copy which the prompter had, or from some transcript of the play. The notion that all plays were printed in Shakespeare's time by a process of piracy is thus not borne out by these facts.
The five bad quartos deserve a moment's attention. The first of these, Romeo and Juliet, printed and published by John Danter in 1597, omits over seven hundred lines of the play, and the stage directions are descriptions rather than definite instructions. The book is printed in two kinds of type, a fact due probably to its being printed from two presses at once. Danter got into trouble later on with other books from his dishonest ways. The second poor quarto, Henry V, printed in 1600, was less than half as long as the Folio text, and was probably carelessly copied by an ignorant person at a performance of the play. The third, the Merry Wives of Windsor, was pirated through the publisher of Henry V, John Busby, who assigned his part to another printer on the same day. As in the case of Romeo and Juliet, the stage directions are mere descriptions. No play of Shakespeare's was more cruelly bungled by an unscrupulous copyist. The first edition of Hamlet in 1603 was the work of Valentine Sims. While the copying is full of blunders, this quarto is considered important, as indicating that the play was acted at first in a much shorter and less artistic version than the one which we now read. For eight months of 1603-1604 the theaters of London were closed on account of the plague, and Shakespeare's revision of Hamlet may have been made during this time. At any rate, the later version appeared about the end of 1604. The last of these pirated quartos, Pericles, was probably taken down in shorthand at the theater. Here, unfortunately, as this play was not included in the First Folio, and as all later quartos were based on the First Quarto, we have to-day what is really a corrupt and difficult text. Luckily, Shakespeare's share in this play is small.
The title-pages of the quartos of Shakespeare bear convincing testimony, not only to the genuineness of his plays, but also to his rise in reputation. Only six of his plays were printed in quartos not bearing his name. Of these, two—Romeo and Juliet and Henry V—began with pirated editions not bearing the author's name. Three—Richard II, Richard III, I Henry IV—were all followed by quartos with the poet's name upon them. The sixth play, Titus Andronicus, was one of his earliest works, and its authorship is even now not absolutely certain.
Since the name of a popular dramatist on the title-page was a distinct source of revenue to the publisher after 1598, it was to be expected that anonymous plays should be ascribed in some cases to William Shakespeare by an unscrupulous or a misinformed printer. Here arose the Shakespeare 'apocrypha,' which is discussed in a following chapter.