University of Virginia Library

THE DISSEMINATION OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS CIRCA 1714

HOW readily available to readers were Shakespeare's plays early in the
eighteenth century? Students of Shakespeare's dissemination and reception
have generally agreed that the six-volume octavo edition published
by Jacob Tonson in 1709 was crucially important in making the whole canon
widely available. Most seem further to agree that Tonson's eight-volume
duodecimo edition of 1714 brought the price within the reach of ordinary
bookbuyers.[1] Public response to these editions, however, was curiously minimal,
and their impact on production in the theatre was virtually nil—facts
that scholars have largely ignored. Trying to improve our understanding of
what was happening in the realms of Shakespeare distribution and reception
around the time of the 1714 Tonson edition, we want to ask three questions.
Did Tonson issue most of Shakespeare's plays as separates in 1714? (This
claim was made a generation ago and has never yet been challenged, so far
as we are aware.) How affordable were Tonson's editions? (Almost all scholars
have ignored their price.) And if—as we maintain—most of Shakespeare's
plays were not issued separately until the 1730s, why not? The idea of marketing
Shakespeare separates as early as circa 1714 was by no means implausible
in the theatrical and bookselling contexts of the day, and we shall offer evidence
that the publisher William Mears had every intention of doing just
that, though his hitherto unnoticed scheme came to nothing.

Were Shakespeare's Plays Separately Published in 1714?

This question may seem surprising. H. L. Ford's Shakespeare bibliography
lists only a few scattered instances of unadapted plays being issued in
separate editions between 1700 and the 1730s.[2] Shakespeare bibliographers
have for more than half a century emphasized the importance of the Tonson-Walker
competition of 1734-35 in generating systematic separate publication
of the whole canon, a battle that apparently brought the retail price of

a Shakespeare play as low as two or three pennies.[3] Why then does any question
arise?

Writing a quarter-century ago in what is still an important account of
Jacob Tonson, Harry M. Geduld says flatly that "During 1714, he [Tonson]
issued twenty-five of the plays in separate octavo volumes," and lists them in
a footnote.[4] If this statement has been challenged, we are not aware of it.
The implication is that at this time Tonson published single editions of all
the plays he considered important or attractive. Geduld appears to be the
direct source of Jonathan Bate's statement concerning Tonson's 1714 edition
that "individual plays were sold separately, so the popular ones could be
obtained extremely cheaply."[5]

If individual plays were made available in 1714, this fact is of great importance:
the inaccessibility of most of Shakespeare's plays in single editions
prior to the 1730s has long been a given among students of his reputation.
Granting that one cannot prove negatives, we doubt the existence of these
"separates," and we shall attempt to demonstrate the extreme unlikelihood
of Tonson having published them. Geduld says further that these were a
" `stage edition,'—produced especially for sale at the theatres," and this claim
we will also dispute. We can find no evidence that the books actually existed,
but we will show that even if they had existed most of them could not have
been intended as "stage editions."

Taking them in alphabetical order, the plays Geduld claims were issued
in separate, octavo editions in 1714 are All's Well that Ends Well, Antony
and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Hamlet, Julius Caesar,
1 Henry IV, Henry VIII, King John, King Lear, Richard II, Richard III,
Love's Labour's Lost, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer
Night's Dream, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Timon
of Athens, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, and The
Winter's Tale (224, n. 10). If this group of plays had indeed come into

print in 1714 as individually available titles, then their collective appearance
would constitute one of the major events in the history of the publication of
Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, the evidence against the existence of this batch of octavos
is overwhelming. Ford found none of these twenty-five titles. (Geduld evidently
did not think to check this obvious reference source.) No one has ever
reported newspaper advertisements for any of these single-title editions of
the plays. Neither the detailed catalogue that constitutes the bulk of Hale
Sturges's bibliography of the output of Jacob Tonson, Senior, nor the bibliography
in G. F. Papali's biography of Tonson lists a single exemplar (in any
format) of any of the Shakespeare plays Geduld asserts were published in
1714.[6] No other scholar has found them, and they are not listed in the ESTC,
which at this late date we must take as powerful evidence against the existence
of any such editions. Yet Geduld's claim is a troubling error. He was not a
bibliographical scholar, but he has left us with a very exact list of titles as well
as the specific format of the alleged editions, not just a general assertion.
What made Geduld imagine that Tonson had issued these plays separately?

We can offer two suggestions as to how this gross error came about. First
and most obviously, the Tonson eight-volume edition of 1714 prints each
play with its own title-page, giving the title, an ornament, and the information
"Printed in the Year MDCCXIV." At that time or at any later date, an
owner of the edition could have its volumes chopped up into the constituent
plays and get them bound that way. If Geduld encountered such separately-bound
titles and recognized them as Tonson's, he may simply have assumed
that this was their original condition as they came from the publisher. We
point out, however, that each volume of the 1714 edition is continuously
paginated, so that with the exception of the first play in each volume, the
pagination would be a dead giveaway to the non-separate nature of the
printing.[7] We must also observe that the 1714 edition was published in
duodecimo, not octavo.

Our second suggestion as to the origin of Geduld's blunder is that he may
have derived four of the titles he lists from a more problematic source than
those we have already mentioned. William Jaggard's Shakespeare Bibliography
reports the existence of "single editions" of four Shakespeare plays
that appear in Geduld's list.[8] Specifically, Jaggard records a 1714 duodecimo
of All's Well that Ends Well, though he states no publisher or source (281).
He records a 1714 duodecimo of Macbeth published by Tonson, the text of

which "varies from that in Tonson's edition of Shakespeare's works issued
that year" (381). Jaggard cites as his evidence a copy in the Shakespeare Memorial
Library, Stratford-upon-Avon (now the Shakespeare Centre Library
of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust). That library does own a curious (and
apparently unique) copy of a separate edition of Macbeth produced for Tonson
in 1714 that seems to have been used as the printer's copy for the Macbeth
found in the 1714 collected dramatic works.[9] Jaggard records an octavo of
The Taming of the Shrew excerpted from Tonson's 1714 edition (457).[10]
Finally, Jaggard announces his discovery of a 1714 octavo of Twelfth Night,
"Until now an unrecorded issue, offprinted from Tonson's anonymous edition
of Sh—'s works, for the use of playgoers" (479). Yet again, Jaggard
cites no source nor does he explain why he believes this play was offprinted
for playgoers. (In these last two instances, Jaggard seems not to have considered
the unlikelihood of octavo plays being excerpted from a duodecimo
play-collection.) Only one of the four 1714 "single editions" recorded by
Jaggard now appears actually to have been produced as a separate edition:
Macbeth. The extreme rarity of that edition and the likelihood that it was
used as the printer's copy for the Macbeth in the 1714 collected dramatic
works suggest it was printed for use as a trial edition, not for publication.

Geduld seems to have imagined that the rationale behind the (ghost) edition
he reported was a desire to sell the plays at the theatre when they were
performed. As we have noted, he states that the group of separates "was the
first `stage edition,'—produced especially for sale at the theatres and for disposal
by running booksellers, who retailed the plays in rural districts" (138).
In the abstract, the idea makes sense, but it does not stand up under scrutiny.
By implication, these plays were performed circa 1714 and Tonson published
single editions of them in order to profit from performance-generated interest.
Performance records for London prior to 1705 are extremely sketchy, but
they are essentially complete after that, when all theatre companies started
putting advertisements in daily newspapers. One need spend only a few

minutes with Volume 1 of Hogan's Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1701-1800 or
Part 2 of The London Stage (both of which were available to Geduld by
1960) to see that the plays he lists do not correspond well to known performance
history.[11]

Surviving evidence records performances of twenty-one Shakespeare plays
or adaptations of Shakespeare plays in the fifteen years from January 1700
through 1714. Just seven of the plays were performed "straight": Cymbeline,
Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, and
Henry VIII. Six of these are in Geduld's list (the exception being Merry
Wives)—but Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, and Othello were readily
available in recent, separate quarto editions, so there was probably no urgent
need to issue them in 1714. (There is no evidence of a separate edition of
Henry VIII until Tonson published one in 1732.) The fourteen adaptations
performed in these years were Caius Marius (Otway's Romeo and Juliet),
The Comical Gallant (Dennis's The Merry Wives of Windsor), The Injured
Princess (Durfey's Cymbeline), Granville's The Jew of Venice, Tate's King
Lear, Love Betray'd (Burnaby's Twelfth Night), Davenant's Macbeth, Gildon's
Measure for Measure, Cibber's Richard III, Sauny the Scott (Lacy's
The Taming of the Shrew), Davenant, Dryden, and Shadwell's operatic
Tempest of 1674, Shadwell's Timon of Athens, Ravenscroft's Titus Andronicus,
and Dryden's Troilus and Cressida. All fourteen were readily available
in their own quarto editions and twelve of them are duly listed in Mears's
play catalogue of 1713 (discussed below).[12] Publishing the original Shakespeare
text by way of comparison might make sense, but probably not for
sale in the theatres—though eleven of them are in Geduld's list.

Six of the plays Geduld includes are not known to have been performed
at all between 1660 and 1714, either straight or adapted: All's Well that Ends
Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, King John, Love's Labour's
Lost, and The Winter's Tale. [13] The idea that Tonson would have "produced
especially for sale at the theatres" stage editions of plays that had not been
performed since before the theatres were closed in 1642 is ludicrous. A seventh
play, Romeo and Juliet, was performed in both straight and adapted form
circa 1663 but found no real favor on the stage until Otway used it in 1679
as the basis for his Caius Marius, a highly popular play that went through
eight separate London editions before the source play enjoyed separate publication
in 1734.

One glaring omission from Geduld's list is The Tempest. Shakespeare's
play was adapted by Davenant and Dryden in 1667 (pub. 1670) and then
further revamped (probably by Thomas Shadwell) as a semi-opera in 1674.
In this form it proved one of the most popular theatrical entertainments of
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Indeed, Judith Milhous
and Robert D. Hume conclude that, based on "fragmentary performance
records, The Tempest was the most popular work on the London stage prior
to The Beggar's Opera in 1728."[14] The Tempest would have been very near—
if not at—the top of the "must include" list of anyone wishing to publish
"stage versions" of Shakespeare plays in order to profit from performance-generated
interest, though of course Shakespeare's play was very different
from what was being performed in the theatre. Thomas Johnson, a publisher
of English books in The Hague, recognized the appeal of The Tempest and
understood that he could profit by publishing an edition of the adaptation,
which he did in 1710. Unlike Johnson, Tonson actually owned the copyright
to this work and had published an edition of it in 1701.

If we inquire into the logic of a publisher wanting to issue separate editions
of single "Shakespeare" plays, we will do well to start by remembering
that booksellers published plays to make money. However foreign the idea
is to modern scholars, in the early eighteenth century many of "Shakespeare's"
most popular plays were in fact adaptations (many of them radical adaptations),
a fact proved beyond argument by the performance calendar. To capitalize
on the theatrical success of those plays with stage editions of the sort
that Geduld claimed Tonson issued in 1714, a publisher would do far better
to issue a mixture of unaltered and adapted plays rather than exclusively to
publish straight Shakespeare texts.

This is, in fact, exactly what one progressive publisher chose to do. Between
1711 and 1718, Thomas Johnson produced the first ever "greatest hits"
collection of English plays, a twelve-volume set that included forty-eight
plays.[15] Volumes 1 and 2 of Johnson's A Collection of the Best English Plays
were devoted to Shakespeare plays and adaptations. The first volume (1711)
contains four unaltered Shakespeare tragedies: Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet,
and Othello. The second (1712) contains a mixture of straight and
adapted Shakespeare comedies: 1 Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor,
the Davenant-Dryden-Shadwell Tempest (of 1674) and Granville's The Jew
of Venice (a 1701 version of The Merchant of Venice). Johnson also published
a fifth Shakespeare adaptation, Shadwell's Timon of Athens, in the
eleventh volume (1712). Operating in Holland, Johnson was not subject to
English copyright law and was free to publish any play he could get his hands
on. While genre considerations seem to have been on Johnson's mind, he also
appears to have been aware of the importance of publishing plays that were
popular in the theatres—a consideration that outweighed any concern he

may have had regarding the importance of publishing "pure" Shakespeare.
Some of his books are noteworthy for their textual accuracy, but in all likelihood,
he had no concern whatever for attributional purity.

That Tonson did not issue twenty-five Shakespeare "separates" in any
format in 1714 now seems clear beyond reasonable doubt. We may usefully
ask, however, whether he could legally have done so even if he had wanted to
—an issue that Geduld never raises. Tonson was, technically at least, bound
by English copyright law and the rules of his trade, and consequently he
could not legally publish works he did not own. And as surprising as this
assertion may be, Tonson did not own the publication rights to some of
Shakespeare's most important and popular plays. In the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries, the right to publish Shakespeare's collected dramatic
works seems to have derived from ownership of a preponderance of
Shakespeare's individual plays. (Scholars have yet to determine how many
plays constituted a "preponderance" in this context.) In what remains the
standard discussion of Shakespeare copyright during this period, Giles E.
Dawson concludes that while "Separate plays and groups of plays passed from
hand to hand by sale and bequest . . . only the ownership of a large number
of these entitled a man to initiate the publication of a collected edition."[16]
The Tonson firm owned the copyright to enough of Shakespeare's plays to
publish the 1709 collected edition and its successors throughout the first half
of the eighteenth century. But in 1714 Tonson did not own the copyrights to
some important and extremely popular Shakespeare plays, including Hamlet,
Julius Caesar, and Othello. Tonson did hold the rights to the adaptations of
Macbeth and The Tempest—certainly the ones to own in the early eighteenth
century from the point-of-view of turning a profit—but not to the original
versions.

Tonson's ownership of many of the copyrights aside, he did not, in fact,
publish a single unaltered Shakespeare play during the fifteen-year period
under consideration. Indeed, the only single Shakespeare editions he published
from 1700 through 1714 were of theatrically successful adaptations.
Ford records fourteen unaltered and altered Shakespeare plays published
in twenty-one single editions in London in this span of years.[17] Of these
twenty-one editions, Tonson published only three: one of the 1670 DavenantDrvden
version of The Tempest in 1701 and two of the Davenant version
of Macbeth in 1710.[18] Tonson published all three editions in quarto.

More prominent than Tonson among publishers of single Shakespeare
plays and adaptations during this period was Richard Wellington, who published
eight of the twenty-one editions listed in note 17.[19] Wellington was a
long-time friend and associate of Tonson who owned outright the copyright
to Hamlet and Othello, and who owned at least a controlling interest in
1 Henry IV. He published three editions of Hamlet in 1703; one of 1 Henry
IV in 1700, and one of Othello in 1705.[20] He also owned the copyright to Otway's
Caius Marius and to Tate's King Lear, publishing a single edition of
the former in 1703 and two editions of the latter circa 1702 and in 1712. All
eight editions were published in quarto, not octavo. For reasons of legality,
professionalism, and friendship, Tonson is extremely unlikely to have violated
Wellington's rights in these plays. The apparent non-existence of the
alleged separates seems to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Tonson
neither pirated the books nor leased the rights to them.

This conclusion prompts us to correct another series of erroneous assertions
by Geduld. Near the end of his chapter on Tonson and Shakespeare,
Geduld claims that the publisher

The four "others" Geduld identifies in a note as "Love's Labour's Lost, 1714
and 1735, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1692, 1693, 1714, 1734, Much Ado
About Nothing, 1734, Pericles, 1734." As we have demonstrated, however,
Henry VIII, The Winter's Tale, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's
Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and Pericles were not separately published
in 1714. We must also point out that the 1692 and 1693 single editions
of A Midsummer Night's Dream Geduld refers to are actually editions of
The Fairy-Queen, the anonymous operatic adaptation of Shakespeare's original
with music by Henry Purcell. Even more troubling is Geduld's statement
in his note 38: "Seven of the apocryphal plays taken over from the Chetwynd
Folio, 1664, were published separately in 1709 and 1728, and in collected
form, one volume duodecimo, in 1728" (226). In 1664, the London bookseller
Philip Chetwind reissued the Third Folio with seven additional "Shakespeare"
plays: The History of Sir John Oldcastle, The Life of Thomas Lord
Cromwell, The London Prodigal, Locrine, The Puritan, Pericles, and A

Yorkshire Tragedy. [21] Only Pericles is now considered to be Shakespeare's.
Geduld asserts that Tonson published single editions of these plays in 1709
and 1728. Not only does this oddly contradict Geduld's usual insistence on
1714, but it reveals a staggering indifference to the logic of commerce. These
were obscure, nearly forgotten plays. Pericles was performed with some success
in 1660,[22] but no record of performance after the first decade of the
seventeenth century survives for any of the others, and neither had any of
them been adapted for performance after the reopening of the theatres in
1660. None of these alleged 1709 or 1728 separates can be found in Sturges,
Ford, or Papali. The ESTC records three copies of The Puritan excerpted
from an unidentified play collection published in 1709. These were not,
however, published singly and neither were they published by Tonson.
Geduld is correct in saying that the apocrypha were published in a collected,
duodecimo edition in 1728. This was issued as a ninth, supplemental volume
to the second Alexander Pope edition of The Works of Shakespeare, published
as an eight-volume set by Tonson. Tonson, along with J. Darby, A.
Bettesworth, and F. Clay, published the apocrypha "in Trust for Richard,
James, and Bethel Wellington"—the heirs of Richard Wellington, who died
in 1715. The Tonson firm did not publish single editions of the apocrypha
until 1734-1735.

The Price of the Tonson Editions

If we stop to think about the matter, publishing single editions of Shakespeare
plays in 1714 would have been a very odd thing for Tonson to do.
Tonson was a great and cultured publisher, but also a hard-headed businessman.
Why would he publish a multi-volume edition of the complete
works and then undercut its sales by issuing numerous individual titles in
direct competition with himself? All the most popular plays were already
available in quarto editions, whether straight or adapted. Publishing separate
editions of unpopular plays would have done the sales of the collected edition
of 1714 no good at all. But if logic tells us that Tonson would have been a
fool to issue whatever single plays he had (or could get) rights to, it also tells
us that another publisher might have seen possibilities in this situation.
Granting the complexities of rights to books at this time, one might expect
some attempt to capitalize on Shakespeare.[23]

At this juncture we need to confront a serious and longstanding misconception.

Writing in 1971 Kathleen M. Lynch stated that "The Fourth Folio
text was rare and expensive, and it was highly desirable that readers should
be able to purchase all of the plays in more convenient volumes and at
moderate cost."[24] Tonson unquestionably increased the ready availability of
Shakespeare's plays, but he did not make Shakespeare available cheaply in
either of the two 1709 editions or the 1714 edition.[25] Skimpy records suggest
that the First Folio cost 15s to £1 (depending on binding) when it appeared
in 1623. The retail prices of its successors are not (so far as we are
aware) known, but other seventeenth-century folio prices and auction records
imply a price normally in the vicinity of £1. A First Folio sold as low
as 8s 6d in 1687, and a Third as high as £1 8s 6d in 1678. Fourth Folios sold
between 16s and 18s in the late 1680s. Sale prices in the first two decades of
the eighteenth century are reported at £1 6s (First) and £1 2s 6d (Fourth).[26]
How readily a would-be buyer could locate a folio copy for sale we do not
know, but in comparison with these prices the two 1709 octavo editions do
not seem "moderate" in cost. The advertised price was 30s, or 50% more than
the average cost of a folio.[27] These editions were not intended to bring
Shakespeare to the masses.

The idea that the 1714 duodecimo edition was a cheap popular reprint
is likewise fallacious. Ford, followed by many scholars (among them Geduld,
Bate, and Murphy), presumed that this edition was inexpensive, and hence
that it reached "a wide reading public" (as Bate phrases the point): "Tonson,
possibly taking into account the Shakespeare plays published at The Hague
in 1710 which found their way here, and recognizing a further outlet for the
sale of the works in a more convenient and less expensive form to a play-going
and reading clientele, thereon produced a second [really third] edition
in duodecimo in 1714" (Ford, 3). It seems, however, to have sold for about
27s, which is 3s less than the 1709 editions, but still 35% more than the average
cost of a folio.[28] Edmund Curll's A Catalogue of Books "For the Year
1714" lists under "Books printed with an Elzevir Letter in Pocket Volumes"
an entry for "Shakespear's Works complete, 9 Volumes, 1 10 0."[29] The nine-volume

version of the edition (the third issue in Ford's enumeration) comprises
Tonson's eight-volume edition of 1714 to which are added the poems
and critical essays by Gildon that constitute the additional "Volume 7" of the
1709 edition of plays produced by Curll in a uniform format and published
in 1710. With the supplementary material the price had returned to 30
shillings.

The 1714 multi-volume set seems unlikely to have found its way into a
lot of bourgeois homes. At this time the average income of educated people
was little more than 20s a week.[30] Ford says in an oft-quoted phrase that
"some copies . . . turn up marked specifically for `The Housekeeper's Room' "
(4), but we doubt that many of the gentry indulged their servants with such
a purchase. Even at 27s we are looking at a sum well above the average weekly
income of a bourgeois household—a bargain price per play for forty-three
plays (apocrypha included), but still a very costly purchase. The idea that
Tonson had brought Shakespeare to the masses is simply fallacious. Single
plays were normally priced at 1s or occasionally 1s 6d and hence much more
readily affordable. An enterprising publisher with no stake in keeping the
price of the collected edition inflated might well have seen a potential
market for Shakespeare issued in single play form.

Mears's Advertisement of 1715

Evidence that such a possibility did not go unremarked does exist, though
to date scholars have overlooked its significance. Investigation of this evidence
will help us understand why Shakespeare's plays were not systematically
issued in separate editions until the 1730s. In 1713 William Mears issued
a sixteen-page quarto playlist: A True and Exact Catalogue of All the Plays
That Were Ever Yet Printed in the English Tongue ([London:] Printed for
W. Mears, 1713).[31] The first page specifies that the list is "with the Authors
Names against each Play (Alphabetically Digested) and continued down to
October, 1713." Mears was to publish major continuations and elaborations
of his catalogue in 1719 and 1726. Both lists have been widely used by bibliographers.[32]
What is germane to our subject here, however, is a single printed
leaf continuing the 16-page version of the 1713 catalogue "to October, 1715."[33]

The recto continues the catalogue to October 1715, marking with an asterisk
those "omitted in the other Catalogues; the others have been since Publish'd."
The verso advertises ninety-one titles available at Mears's shop, including
some thirty-eight plays then thought to be by Shakespeare. (See figures 1 and
2.) They are described as "Plays Printed in 12mo in a neat Elzevir Letter, and
Sold by W. Mears." Some had come into print or were about to do so. Mears
published The Apparition; or The Sham Wedding ("by a gentleman of Ch.
Ch. Oxon.") in 1714 and with others "Electra from the Greek" the same year.
A number of the works listed were simply new plays from 1712-15 (e.g., Addison's
Cato, the Cid translation, Philips's Distressed Mother, Hamilton's Doating
Lovers, Rowe's Jane Shore and The Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey) routinely
issued after their premières by various publishers, among them Tonson, Lintott,
Burleigh, Brown, and Curll. Some titles represent recent duodecimo
reprints of plays whose original quarto editions had duly been listed in the
1713 Catalogue (e.g., Betterton's The Amorous Widow, reprinted in the more
modern format in 1714). The non-Shakespearean titles seem essentially unproblematical.
The Shakespeare-related titles, in sharp contradistinction, are
almost all extremely surprising and anything but unproblematical because
with the exception of three well-known separates already published in quarto,
none of the thirty-eight titles came into existence at this time.

Table 1. "Shakespearean" plays listed in the Mears catalogue addendum of 1715.
Plays are listed in the order he gives them; titles are given exactly as he presents
them, but are printed in italics. A dagger (†) indicates a play not previously published
as a separate title since 1660. Publication dates of earlier separate editions published
in London are given in parentheses; earlier publication dates of adaptations are given
in brackets.

                           

†Antony and Cleopatra	†King Lear [Tate version 1681]
†All's Well that ends Well	†Love's Labour's lost
†As you like it	†Life of Thomas Lord Cromwell
†Coriolanus	†London Prodigal
†Cymbeline	†Lockrine Eldest Son of Brutus
†Comedy of Errors	Mackbeth (1673) [Davenant version seven editions 1674-1710]
Henry 4th, 1st part (1700)
†—2d part	†Merry Wives of Windsor [Dennis version 1702]
†Henry 5th
†Henry 6th, 1st part [Crowne version 1681]	†Measure for Measure [Gildon version 1700]
†—2d part [Crowne version 1680]	†Merchant of Venice [Granville version 1701]
†—3d part
†History of Sir John Oldcastle	†Much ado about nothing
†King John	†Midsummer's Nights Dream [a]

FIGURE 1. Page 1 of Mears's Continuation of the following Catalogue of Plays to October,
1715 (reduced 37%). British Library shelfmark 11903.f.24. By permission of
The British Library.

FIGURE 2. Page 2 of Mears's Continuation of the following Catalogue of Plays to
October, 1715 (reduced 37%). British Library shelfmark 11903.f.24. By permission
of The British Library.

                   

Othello (four quartos 1681-1705)	†Troilus and Cressida [Dryden version 1679]
†Puritan
†Pericles	†Taming of the Shrew
†Romeo and Juliet [Otway version 1679, pub. 1680]	†Two Gentlemen of Verona
	†Titus Andronicus [Ravenscroft version ca. 1679, pub. 1687]
†Richard the 2d [Tate version 1680, pub. 1681]
	†Twelfth Night, or what you will [Burnaby version 1703]
†Timon of Athens [Shadwell version 1678]
	†Winters Tale
	†Yorkshire Tragedy

The ninety-one plays listed on this page of Mears's addendum include the
Shakespearean titles listed in table 1. Insofar as one can determine from title
alone, he was indicating original texts, not adaptations where they existed.
This is a startling list. Mears includes thirty-eight "Shakespeare" titles (including
the seven plays added to the 1664 re-issue of the Third Folio), thirty-four
of which had never been separately published since 1660 (if ever) in anything
like an authentic text.[34] Only thirteen had appeared in adapted form,
some of them almost unrecognizable in their new guises. The five non-apocryphal
titles Mears omitted are Hamlet, Julius Caesar, The Tempest,
Richard III, and Henry VIII. We have been unable to fathom the logic (if
any) of the omissions. Neither copyright ownership nor current availability
in original or adapted form makes sense of them. The first three plays were
extremely popular and regularly reprinted (the third in radically adapted
form). Richard III was readily available in print in Cibber's 1699 adaptation.
Why Henry VIII was omitted we have no idea, since it had been performed
with success but had never been separately printed. Of the thirty-eight plays
in Mears's list, only Othello was readily available in straight form (having
been many times reprinted, most recently in London in 1705).[35] 1 Henry IV
was made available in 1700 in a version reflecting some performance cuts.
Macbeth had been published in straight form in 1673 (without an attributed
author) but was regularly reprinted in the Davenant adaptation. Johnson
published a straight edition of Merry Wives in The Hague in 1710, but how
available that edition was in London is hard to guess.

Given Mears's interest in drama and the wording of the advertisement on
the verso of the 1715 addendum, one might infer he had published or intended
to publish (or perhaps merely that he expected to distribute) the ninety-one
titles listed. He was greatly interested in publishing and selling plays, and
evidently featured drama in his shop. The 1715 catalogue continuation reads
"Sold by W. Mears at the Lamb without Temple-Bar. Of whom may be had
above five hundred several Sorts of Plays, in 4to and 12mo." Many of the

plays he had for sale were old quartos, as a look at the catalogue itself confirms.
Most of the extant plays listed in the addendum were published by
other booksellers, and analysis of Mears's output does not suggest that he
could have put out thirty-eight plays in short order. Combing the ESTC for
Mears's activity between 1710 (his first year as a journeyman) and 1730
we find that he published or was associated as seller with 385 titles, an average
of some eighteen per annum. But over twenty-one years he published or
co-published only about a quarter of that number, including forty-five plays.

What then is the meaning of the 1715 addendum? The exact phrasing is
"Plays Printed in 12mo in a neat Elzevir Letter, and Sold by W. Mears." This
is open to misinterpretation because "Printed and sold by" was commonly
employed on title-pages to designate a book's publisher(s).[36] But in this instance
what is meant seems to be something like "Plays Printed [by W. Mears
and Others] . . . and Sold by W. Mears."

Where then did Mears imagine he was going to find the thirty-eight
separates he apparently though he would be able to sell? Two possible hypotheses
occur to us. Conceivably Mears, or someone else, or a consortium,
believed that the requisite permissions could be obtained and separates published.
These hypothetical venturers might have obtained some of the permissions,
or thought they could, and then discovered that Wellington or
Tonson (or the two together) had enough clout to get the permissions withheld
or withdrawn. A variation on this scenario is that Mears might have
thought he could circumvent the copyright/permission problem by collaborating
with Thomas Johnson, who could legally do the printing. A London
bookseller with the initials "B. L." may already have been selling some of
Johnson's titles.[37] Whether Mears could also have sold imported books in
defiance of his colleagues' rights in them is not clear, but we presume that
if this was the strategy, Tonson and Wellington persuaded, threatened, or
coerced Mears into dropping the scheme. Mears was (or was to become) a
highly respectable bookseller, and there is a fair probability that he thought
he could cut a deal with Tonson and other copyright holders and then discovered
that in fact he could not.

Alternatively, we wonder if Mears's plan was to acquire copies of Tonson's
1714 collected edition, break each volume up into its constituent plays,
and then sell them as "separates"? Mears was not among the numerous booksellers
named on various versions of the 1714 title-page and neither did he

hold (so far as we know) interest in any of the Shakespeare copyrights. Such
a scheme, however, would have had nothing to do with copyright since Mears
would merely have been reselling bits of Tonson's edition of Shakespeare's
plays.

One can see why a publisher and bookseller would have wanted to get in
on the Shakespeare bonanza circa 1715. Tonson had published two (actually
three) editions of the playwright's collected dramatic works in just six years,
and he changed the name of his shop, his sign, and the device printed on the
title-pages of some of the books he published to "Shakespear's Head." Lintott,
and Curll and Sanger brought out editions of Shakespeare's poems in parallel
with Tonson's three editions of the plays. And in 1712 John Dennis published
the first separately issued pamphlet-length work of criticism specifically
devoted to Shakespeare, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespear.
Interest in Shakespeare was running high.[38]

Could Mears have made money by carving up copies of the 1714 Tonson
edition? We doubt it. Tonson was selling forty-three plays for 27s at a time
when single plays usually retailed for 1s or 1/6. But how many of those plays
would have enjoyed good sales as single editions? By our reckoning, most
book-buying play-goers in 1714 would have been interested in just five unaltered
Shakespeare plays (Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar,
and Othello) and seven popular adaptations whose titles were close enough
to Shakespeare's originals to make corresponding identification easy (King
Lear, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard III,
The Tempest, and Timon of Athens). For whatever reasons, as we have noted,
Mears's list excludes five of these twelve (Hamlet, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar,
Richard III, and The Tempest), leaving him with seven attractive titles and
thirty-one rather obscure ones. Cherrypicking the saleable plays would probably
have left him a depressing surplus of detritus in the form of All's Well
that Ends Well, Locrine, and other drugs on the market. What Mears would
have had to pay for copies of Tonson's edition to cannibalize we do not
know, but unequal demand for the disjecta membra would almost undoubtedly
have rendered such a scheme unprofitable. Did Mears actually attempt
to carry out such a plan? We suspect not. The small number of surviving
"extracts" from the 1714 collected edition suggests that no such scheme was
ever put into effect.

We must emphasize that almost all of the Shakespeare titles in Mears's
list are chimerical. No such separate printings have ever turned up, and if the
plan was to strip off bits of Tonson's 1714 edition, then we must presume that
it was never carried out. Mears clearly saw an opportunity he was unable to

capitalize on. What happened? We will probably never know for certain,
but the books did not get published.[39] The House of Tonson was a major
publisher with many important books, but the ferocity with which the firm
waged its war against Walker's attempt to print separate editions of the
Shakespeare plays in the 1730s is notorious.[40] Whatever Mears's plan was
in 1715, it came to naught.

Tonson's editions of 1709 and 1714 did not make Shakespeare widely accessible
to the general public. Copies were indeed readily available for sale,
but at a price substantially higher than people had been paying for the
seventeenth-century folios. The text was conveniently packaged, and Rowe
had made the plays far more readable by regularizing and modernizing
Shakespeare's spelling; by adding scene divisions and location indicators; by
adding dramatis personae to the more than thirty plays that lacked them;
by regularizing, correcting, and completing the dramatis personae of plays
that did not; and by uniformly identifying characters within plays.[41] But
Tonson was charging a premium price for these improvements, as well as
for the "cuts" (a portrait of Shakespeare and one engraving per play) he
commissioned for the 1709 and 1714 editions. Ford's and Lynch's presumption
that Tonson's editions were inexpensive and Geduld's erroneous assertion
that most of the plays were made available as separates in 1714 (which
has long gone unchallenged) no doubt contributed to the mistaken belief
that the plays could be had cheaply. Separates would probably have sold
decently, but Tonson clearly had no desire to undercut the sales of his pricey
collected edition by making individual titles available in competition with
himself. We may assume that he had even less desire to allow anyone else to
do so. Tonson evidently saw Shakespeare as a premium product, saleable as a
luxury rather than a popular item. His next such venture, the six-volume
The Works of Shakespear edited by Pope (1723-25), was priced at a staggering
six guineas (126 shillings) per set, which amounts to substantially more
than a month's total income for Gregory King's average "persons" educated
in the "Sciences and Liberal arts." Diluting the market for his 1714 edition
with any more single titles than were already available was no part of Tonson's
strategy. He did not issue a lot of separates until competition from
Walker forced him to do so in the 1730s; when Mears got the bright idea of
making individual titles available, Tonson (perhaps with cooperation from
Wellington) must have put a stop to the scheme. The result was that much

of the Shakespeare canon was to remain expensive and decidedly inaccessible
to the general public for nearly two more decades. Scholars have failed to pay
attention to the price of Tonson's 1709 and 1714 editions, and in consequence
they have seriously misunderstood the nature of the first "modern"
edition of Shakespeare, its circulation to the public, and its cultural impact.[42]