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The lavishly illustrated mid-nineteenth-century Bibles, histories of England, and editions of Shakespeare and other literary classics that helped build the fortunes of publishers like Harper's and Cassell's lent themselves well to serial publication in parts because of the time and expense needed for preparing hundreds, sometimes even more than a thousand, of their exquisitely detailed end-grain wood or steel engravings. Regular publication of serial parts in paper wrappers ensured both adequate preparation time and a steady supply of capital. Several editions of Shakespeare produced in this way proved to be important ones, influential not only because their attractiveness made them very popular but also because their editors, generally not professional scholars as authoritative as Dyce, Halliwell, or Wright, were nonetheless acute and dedicated amateur Shakespeareans as well as gifted authors in their own right. Any New Variorum edition of a Shakespeare play is sure to contain dozens of original, useful comments by such editors as Charles Knight, Howard Staunton, and Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke.
These editions pose a problem for historical scholars in that they are difficult to date accurately. After being issued in parts they were usually bound into volumes, both by the publishers for sale as bound sets and privately by owners of the individual parts, and in either case with title pages provided by the publishers from time to time in the paper-bound numbers. Even if the original paper wrappers were dated, they were discarded in binding, and the title pages and copyright pages of the bound volumes bear dates (if these appear at all) later than the dates of original issue of most of the parts. Library catalogues are more likely than not to give the later dates of the bound volumes, so that one is puzzled to find Alexander Dyce in his Strictures (1859) quoting from Staunton's volume of Shakespeare's Tragedies, whose date appears on title page and in catalogues as 1860. Even if a catalogue card does give inclusive dates for an earlier serial publication, these are of no help in finding date of issue of individual parts, which may have been published in a different order than that found in the bound volumes. The result is that it is sometimes impossible to know whom to credit as the first author of a comment or criticism, or to say who influenced whom. This essay attempts from various kinds of evidence to reconstruct the order and timetable of printing of five of the most important serially issued Shakespeares, four of them popular illustrated editions and one of them sold privately by limited subscription.
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