For high-school students and undergraduates who encounter the Bard in survey courses or, worse, under the antiseptic light of Great Books programs, Shakespearean textual scholarship is the undiscovered country. Travelers who would return from its bourne will welcome the guiding hand of Emma Smith.
The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio is divided into four sections on the 1623 text, Shakespeare’s reputation before and after its publication, the men responsible for producing it, and the physical process respectively. Smith, a fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, reminds us how much we take for granted when we turn from our Pelican Shakespeares to the book that includes the only known text for half of the plays. Who really delivers the line about "gray ey'd morne … / Checkring the Easterne Clouds with streakes of light," which both Romeo and Friar Laurence pronounce in succession? What does the hostess—who is not identified as Mistress Quickly—mean when she tells Pistol, Nim, and Bardolph that on his deathbed poor Falstaff’s "Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields"? Since when did Hero have a mother? Does Kate kiss Petruchio? What exactly is a "scamel"?
Smith takes us through the production of the First Folio by Edward Blount and the printer William Jaggard, the messy business of the introduction from Hemminges and Condell, with its dubious promise of "cured and perfect" texts, and the dedicatory verses from Ben Jonson and others. Those of us used to talking about "problem plays" could do with remembering that the most likely reason for Troilus and Cressida’s not making the table of contents and being sandwiched between the histories and the tragedies is simply that the rights to it were secured only at the last minute. Every page of this book is laced with warnings for amateur formalists who would divine artistic intent where there is only exigency and happenstance.
Smith does an excellent job situating the Folio in the larger context of Shakespeare’s contemporary reputation. She shows that by 1612 audiences seem to have grown bored of him and his influence on the next generation of playwrights was middling. John Webster offered what was at best a backhanded-compliment when, in the introduction to The White Devil, he casually mentioned "the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker, and Master Heywood." By the time the Folio appeared, less than a decade after Shakespeare’s death, his own company included only one of his plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in its repertoire. Why, then, did Blount and his collaborators feel justified in lionizing this scribbler whose works on the stage had given way to Beaumont and Fletcher, whose death had been met with less public interest than that of his old Globe colleague Richard Burbage, and whose memorial in his hometown was that of a businessman with (as John Dover Wilson memorably put it) the look of "a self-satisfied pork butcher"? Was it all just hype?
Smith is a scholar with plenty of time for wisecracks (a distinguished scholar of Middleton who writes slightingly of Shakespeare in middle age is referred to as "the merciless Gary Taylor") and a relaxed unfussy, style. Her insistence on seeing the First Folio as "the product of recoverable human, technological, and commercial enterprise" in whose production Shakespeare himself "is only one agent" does not come at the expense of recognizing the greatness of the plays. If anything, like the Folio’s publishers, who affixed a realistic portrait of the author to their collection rather than an idealized image of poesie—Ben Jonson wore a crown of laurels in the frontispiece to the first edition of his Works—Smith does a great service by emphasizing Shakespeare’s humanity as well as that of his readers. Above all, Smith reminds us that Shakespeare’s works, so far from being pristine and beyond the reaches of critical investigation, came down to us in a slapdash, indifferently edited, and shoddily produced edition in the midst of a shady publicity campaign. They are a glorious mess, and the lavish attention that has been paid to them since is a testament to our capacity, however limited, for recognizing and preserving beauty.
Anniversary volumes tend to be mixed bags. Those that have been released in anticipation of the quadracentenary of Shakespeare’s death have so far proved an exception. Far and away the most enjoyable is Margaret Willes’s Shakespearean Botanical, a beautifully produced encyclopedic treatise on plants in the plays and minor poems featuring scores of full-color illustrations from John Gerard’s 16th-century Herbal. Willes, a distinguished publisher and author of numerous books about the history of gardening, is a botanical expert who happens to be a Shakespeare fan, and she wears her erudition lightly. Her entry on hazel is typical. After quoting lines from The Taming of the Shrew, she informs us that:
The hazel was the nut of the English hedgerows, and had its place in the Tudor agricultural year. The traditional time to go nutting was on Holy Rood Day, 14 September. Six weeks later, on All Hallows Eve, 31 October, came Nutcrack Night, when it was traditional to throw the shells into the fire. Those that burned brightest would prove to be your love. Hazel nuts might also have been a favoured snack for groundlings watching Shakespeare’s plays, for huge amounts of shells were found in the pit when the Rose Theatre was excavated in 1987.
She continues in this pleasant vein for nearly 200 pages, reminding us that the fig "bookends the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra ("I loue long life better then Figs") and has "long had associations with female genitalia," and that "baleful mistletoe," as Tamora puts it in Titus Andronicus, once had evil connotations, not least because no one understood how it was able to grow on trees. We learn that the cultivation of cherries in the British Isles was first encouraged by Henry VIII after he had tasted them abroad, and that the gastronomic authorities of the age believed eating raw pumpkin "maketh a man apt and readie to fall into the disease called the Cholerike passion." She quotes an ancient Sussex recipe for crab apple sauce and explains how Falstaff got it into his head that the potato had aphrodisiac properties.
Smith and Willes’s books are delightful. Both belong on the shelves of every Shakespeare enthusiast.