University of Virginia Library

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]