University of Virginia Library

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.