University of Virginia Library

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.