Five achieved only one edition, viz. ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (1598), ‘2 Henry IV’ (1600), ‘Much Ado’ (1600), ‘Titus’ (1600), ‘Merry Wives’ (1602 imperfect).
Posthumous quartos of the plays.
Three years after Shakespeare’s death—in 1619—there appeared a second edition of ‘Merry Wives’ (again imperfect) and a fourth of ‘Pericles.’ ‘Othello’ was first printed posthumously in 1622 (4to), and in the same year sixth editions of ‘Richard III’ and ‘I Henry IV’ appeared. [302] The largest collections of the original quartos—
each of which survives in only four, five, or six copies—are in the libraries of the Duke of Devonshire, the British Museum, and Trinity College, Cambridge, and in the Bodleian Library. [303] All the quartos were issued in Shakespeare’s day at sixpence each.
The First Folio. The publishing syndicate.
In 1623 the first attempt was made to give the world a complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Two of the dramatist’s intimate friends and fellow-actors, John Heming and Henry Condell, were nominally responsible for the venture, but it seems to have been suggested by a small syndicate of printers and publishers, who undertook all pecuniary responsibility. Chief of the syndicate was William Jaggard, printer since 1611 to the City of London, who was established in business in Fleet Street at the east end of St. Dunstan’s Church. As the piratical publisher of ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ he had long known the commercial value of Shakespeare’s work. In 1613 he had extended his business by purchasing the stock and rights of a rival pirate, James Roberts, who had printed the quarto editions of the ‘Merchant of Venice’ and ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in 1600 and the complete quarto of ‘Hamlet’ in 1604. Roberts had enjoyed for nearly twenty years the right to print ‘the players’ bills,’ or programmes, and he made over
that privilege to Jaggard with his other literary property. It is to the close personal relations with the playhouse managers into which the acquisition of the right of printing ‘the players’ bill’ brought Jaggard after 1613 that the inception of the scheme of the ‘First Folio’ may safely be attributed. Jaggard associated his son Isaac with the enterprise. They alone of the members of the syndicate were printers. Their three partners were publishers or booksellers only. Two of these, William Aspley and John Smethwick, had already speculated in plays of Shakespeare. Aspley had published with another in 1600 the ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ and ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ and in 1609 half of Thorpe’s impression of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’ Smethwick, whose shop was in St. Dunstan’s Churchyard, Fleet Street, near Jaggard’s, had published in 1611 two late editions of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and one of ‘Hamlet.’ Edward Blount, the fifth partner, was an interesting figure in the trade, and, unlike his companions, had a true taste in literature. He had been a friend and admirer of Christopher Marlowe, and had actively engaged in the posthumous publication of two of Marlowe’s poems. He had published that curious collection of mystical verse entitled ‘Love’s Martyr,’ one poem in which, ‘a poetical essay of the Phœnix and the Turtle,’ was signed ‘William Shakespeare.’ [304]
The First Folio was doubtless printed in Jaggard’s printing office near St. Dunstan’s Church. Upon Blount probably fell the chief labour of seeing the
work through the press. It was in progress throughout 1623, and had so far advanced by November 8, 1623, that on that day Edward Blount and Isaac (son of William) Jaggard obtained formal license from the Stationers’ Company to publish sixteen of the twenty hitherto unprinted plays that it was intended to include. The pieces, whose approaching publication for the first time was thus announced, were of supreme literary interest. The titles ran: ‘The Tempest,’ ‘The Two Gentlemen,’ ‘Measure for Measure,’ ‘Comedy of Errors,’ ‘As you like it,’ ‘All’s Well,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘Winter’s Tale,’ ‘3 Henry VI,’ ‘Henry VIII,’ ‘Coriolanus,’ ‘Timon,’ ‘Julius Cæsar,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ and ‘Cymbeline.’ Four other hitherto unprinted dramas for which no license was sought figured in the volume, viz. ‘King John,’ ‘1 and 2 Henry VI,’ and the ‘Taming of the Shrew;’ but each of these plays was based by Shakespeare on a play of like title which had been published at an earlier date, and the absence of a license was doubtless due to an ignorant misconception on the past either of the Stationers’ Company’s officers or of the editors of the volume as to the true relations subsisting between the old pieces and the new. The only play by Shakespeare that had been previously published and was not included in the First Folio was ‘Pericles.’