Multiple Forms and Formats of Literature
Manuscripts
Before (and for many years after) the invention of the printing press (ca. 1440), texts were produced and reproduced by hand. Unfortunately, no manuscripts in Shakespeare's hand have survived, so all we know about drafts and revisions of his plays come from reconstructions created by actors in his troupe and differences across printed copies. We do, however, have evidence of what Shakespeare's handwriting looked like, as some legal documents bearing his signature are still extant. The manuscript copies which printers used to produce quartos of Shakespeare's plays (see below) were often produced by scribes or from drafts created for the actors to learn their parts. Indeed, many of Shakespeare's plays were printed directly from such "foul" papers: as the editors of the Internet Shakespeare Editions explain, "a manuscript of this kind might include deleted material, false starts, and other inaccuracies, and the handwriting would be less readable than a scribe's."
Literature also circulated in commonplace books: household books that might include poetry, quotes from plays, and even recipes and financial records. The poets Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey, for instance, contributed to miscellany now known as the Devonshire MS, the "first sustained example of men and women writing together in the English tradition." Manuscripts carry a lot of value for modern scholars, as they may offer first drafts of canonical texts, contexts for literary and cultural production, and can help paleographers (who study medieval and early modern handwriting) identify individual contributions across several manuscripts. Although we might not have manuscripts from Shakespeare himself, we have a number of surviving commonplace books which include excerpts from his plays. For instance, as Laura Estill has argued, the circulation of the proverb "fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits / Make rich the ribs, and bankrupt quite the wits" (Loves Labours Lost 1.1.26-27) in commonplace books demonstrates that many people who wrote down this quote had never seen Shakespeare's play, and in fact "it was the process of dramatic excerpting itself that led to the dissemination of the 'fat paunches' proverb" (203).
If you are interested in learning more about paleography, you can start at Folgerpedia's List of Online Resources for Early Modern English Paleography, which includes links to free tutorials, plenty of open-access images of early manuscripts, and resources for how to use and interpret the materials you find online.
Want to contribute to a real-life project aiming to transcribe early modern manuscripts? After checking out tutorials above, go over to this introduction to secretary hand (a common style in the period), which includes samples of individual letters and then use your newfound expertise to help Shakespeare's World with their scanned materials!
[note: this would probably be a good place to link to manuscript/paleography assignments if any are included in our textbook]
Additional Resources:
The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 "provides a complete catalogue of literary manuscripts by 237 British authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It offers descriptions of more than 37,000 manuscript texts of poems, plays, discourses, translations, etc., as well as notebooks, annotated printed books, corrected proofs, promptbooks, letters, documents and other related manuscript materials, many hitherto unrecorded, found in several hundred public and private collections world-wide. It will provide a new and productive research tool not only for those interested in particular authors and works, but for anyone interested in the literary culture of the early modern period, in manuscript production and dissemination as a social phenomenon, and in the history of literacy and readership."Manuscripts Online "enables you to search a diverse body of online primary resources relating to written and early printed culture in Britain during the period 1000 to 1500. The resources include literary manuscripts, historical documents and early printed books which are located on websites owned by libraries, archives, universities and publishers."
Printed Books: Quartos
Depending on the length and projected costs of the text, printers had a number of size options for printing books. We refer to these formats based on how many times a single sheet was folded to create the final volume. The most popular format for plays were quartos (4o), which were composed by folding a sheet twice to create four leaves. Since pages are printed on both sides (a "recto" is the right-facing side; and a "verso," the left-facing side), this method produces eight pages per sheet. This would make a quarto close to the size of modern paperbacks.
Quartos were relatively cheap (especially compared to folios--see below) and therefore historically critics have associated them with ephemeral (and therefore figuratively and literally less valuable) literature. Scholars like Lukas Erne (Shakespeare and the Book Trade, 2013), Douglas Brewster (Shakespeare and the Question of Culture, 2016), and Zachary Lesser (Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication, 2004) have questioned this claim, demonstrating that drama was indeed a popular and well-regarded genre in the early modern period, and that savvy printers knew printed plays were a good investment.
Some of Shakespeare's plays were popular enough to merit competing and new editions. When that is the case, we refer to them as "Q1" and "Q2" based on the order of publication. Because each edition made use of a different draft of the play, multiple editions are often split into "good" and "bad" quartos, depending on historical evidence regarding the source materials used to produce them. The first quarto of Hamlet (1603), for instance, is considered a "bad" quarto. As professor Ann Thompson (King's College, London) explains, the differences between Hamlet's soliloquies sets the two quartos apart in crucial ways:
Given the importance of Hamlet’s soliloquies to our understanding of the dominance and centrality of his role (and indeed to the enormous cultural prestige of the play), it seems significant that Q1 omits one of them altogether and presents the most famous of them all in a different scene from where we are used to finding it. The missing soliloquy is the last one, ‘How all occasions doe informe against me’, found in Q2 (4.4, K3r-v) after Hamlet has observed the army of Fortinbras. In Q1 this is an extremely short scene (G4v) in which Hamlet does not appear. The Folio text also lacks this soliloquy and has a similarly short scene (p.273). Some have argued that this is a deliberate authorial revision, part of a pattern of ‘cuts’ introduced in order to abridge the play for performance, but this seems debatable, given that F remains an extremely long text.
Most startlingly, Q1 presents ‘To be or not to be’ in its equivalent of 2.2 rather than in 3.1. In Q1 it follows straight on from the decision of the King and his councillor (who is called Corambis in Q1) to spy on Hamlet and Ophelia when Hamlet enters ‘poring vppon a booke’ (D4v). In Q2 there are some 500 lines between Hamlet’s entry with his book (F1r) and his delivery of the soliloquy (G2r-v). These cover the ‘fishmonger’ dialogue with Polonius, Hamlet’s first encounter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the arrival of the Players, the performance of the speech about Pyrrhus, Priam and Hecuba, and Hamlet’s ‘O what a rogue and pesant slaue am I’ soliloquy. Q1 has its (shorter) versions of all this material, but after rather than before ‘To be or not to be’. Several productions of the longer texts have chosen to follow Q1’s placing of the speech, on the grounds that it makes more sense psychologically. Having finally come up with a plan at the end of 2.2 (‘the play’s the thing / Wherein Ile catch the conscience of the King’, Q2 G1r), it seems strange that Hamlet should enter only 50 lines later contemplating suicide.
("The First and Second Quartos of Hamlet")
The "bad" quarto of Hamlet may have been a memorial reconstruction created by the actors involved in the early performances of the play, or may indeed have been produced from a shortened touring version of Hamlet. In either case, regardless of quality this edition is incredibly informative for those of us interested in performance history. Want to explore Q1 in detail? The British Library has a complete scan of one of only two surviving copies left in the world.
You can take a look at facsimiles of surviving quartos of Shakespeare's Plays at the Internet Shakespeare Editions.
Additional Resources:
The Shakespeare Quartos Archive "offers an interactive digital interface for the detailed study of Shakespeare's quartos. With plans to cover all of Shakespeare's plays in quarto, the prototype publishes full cover-to-cover digital photo-facsimiles and TEI-compliant diplomatic transcriptions of 32 copies of the early quarto editions of Hamlet. The project brings together resources and expertise from the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Shakespeare Institute, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities." (Via Folgerpedia)If you're a hands-on learner, check out Claire M. L. Bourne's assignment, which instructs students on folding, cutting, and stitching their own copies of the Hamlet Q1. Your professor may have a similar assignment for your class--get a jump-start by becoming familiar with the range of quartos in the Quartos Archive linked above.
Printed Books: Folios
Nearly half of Shakespeare's plays might never have reached the modern reader if it had not been for the First Folio. After Shakespeare's death in 1616, two members of Shakespeare's theater company, the King's Men, decided to collect all of the plays together in a single edition. John Heminge and Henry Condell sought out the printers Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount and together they collaborated to produce Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623). This book was printed in the larger "folio" format (each sheet folded once to make two leaves), which communicated its value and importance. Book buyers associated folios with expensive volumes, typically religious works, political proclamations, or historical accounts. Because of this, we may consider the First Folio as official evidence of Shakespeare's literary and cultural capital. Although the volume saw subsequent editions in the seventeenth century (a second folio, F2, came out in 1632; F3 was published in 1644; and F4 in 1685), the First Folio remains one of the most important material objects for Shakespeare studies. According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, out of the app. 750 copies printed, 233 survive today. The Folger has 82 of those in their collections, some of which recently went on tour to celebrate Shakespeare's 400th anniversary.
You can explore a complete facsimile of the Bodleian Library's First Folio here.
Broadsides and Pamphlets
The cheapest form of printed literature circulated as single sheets called broadsides. The most common genre for broadsides were ballads, but pamphlets circulated on a variety of topics: attacks on different religious factions, political statements, and news prints. These "cheap print" publications give us an excellent perspective on the popular culture of the period, particularly if we seek to understand how authors and readers discussed issues of gender, race, and class.
The best place to see the range of topics addressed by early modern balladeers is the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA). Take a look at their featured sections, which combine tags in the site with modern pop culture references, exploring issues like "Political Intrigue" ("House of Cards") and "Family Disfunction" ("Arrested Development").
If you're working on the Ballads and Popular Culture assignment, you can find the instructions here.
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