Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 1, Winter 2002: Jason Scott-Warren

Anthony James West. 2001. The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book. Vol. 1: An Account of the First Folio Based on its Sales and Prices, 1623-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 215 pp. ISBN 0-19-818769-6. ё55.

'2^o: ^BA⁶ (^BA1+1, ^BA5+1:2); A-Bb⁶ Cc²; a-g⁶ ^Pgg⁸ h-v⁶ x⁴; 'gg3:4' (╠'gg3') І-ІІ⁶ 3І1 aa-ff⁶ gg² Gg⁶ hh⁶ kk-3b⁶'. It looks like the sort of thing you see chalked up on the blackboard in films about scientists, striking fear into the soul of those who never got past basic algebra. In fact, it is the 'collational formula' which records how pieces of printed paper were folded and stitched together to make Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), aka 'the Shakespeare First Folio'. Although it scarcely figures in the study that follows √ the first in a four-volume series on one of Western culture's most revered tomes √ this alarming item is dropped nonchalantly into the prefatory 'Abbreviations and References' section, just to let you know that Shakespeare studies is now rocket science. And how: the study that follows is a patchwork of graphs and tables, plotting the fate of the Bard in the marketplace in unprecedented detail and with seemingly impeccable accuracy.
Volume One of Anthony James West's series is dominated by a 130-page section entitled 'Sales and Prices of First Folios: A History from 1623 to the Present'. Based on intensive research into book ownership and auction records, West describes the Folio's strong start in life (an edition of perhaps 750 copies selling out in less than a decade); the waning of its popularity with the decline in Shakespeare's reputation in the later seventeenth century; its rediscovery in the eighteenth century as a key textual authority for the writings of 'the King of English Poets'; and the exponential escalation in its value during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the broad outlines of the story are familiar enough from studies by the likes of Jonathan Bate, Peter Blayney, Margreta de Grazia, Michael Dobson, and Gary Taylor, it is good to have them corroborated and fleshed out in this way. The cost of a Folio is calibrated against the cost of comparable books and luxury items, and the narrative is enlivened by extensive quotation and helpful cultural contextualization. Among the pleasures along the way is that of measuring Shakespeare's reputation in loaves of bread √ the cost of a Folio rises from 44 loaves (in 1623) to 105 (1756), 900 (1790s), and 5,000 (1850s), until it reaches a staggering 96,000 in the first decade of the twentieth century (58) √ and that of finally knowing how much better is the Bard than his nearest rival Ben Jonson (well over 350 times better, according to the auction prices of their respective folios in recent decades) (54). West also does a good deal to make his information useful to those whose interest is not Shakespeare but the market, drawing attention to the multiplicity of factors that have conditioned the cost of books across the last four centuries and reminding us that, even though Shakespeare may for some have replaced God, his Folio still defers to Gutenberg's Bible in the world's auction rooms (54).
The rest of The Shakespeare First Folio, Volume One, is taken up with a ragbag of shorter sections, some of which clear the way for the second volume (to be published imminently): a census of surviving Folios, updating Sidney Lee's Census of 1902. It promises to tell a story of 'changing places'; between 1902 and 2000 the number of copies in the UK and Ireland fell from 66 to 20 per cent of the world total, while the number in the USA and Canada rose from 23 to 64 per cent of the total. It also, happily, tells of increasing accessibility; the balance of public versus private ownership went from 29/71 per cent to 93/7 per cent during the same period. The number of surviving copies of the First Folio is now set at 228, perhaps as much as 30 per cent of the original edition; of these, apparently, around 30 per cent are in 'perfect' condition.
Degrees of relative perfection or imperfection will be tackled in Volume Three, which is reserved for 'full bibliographical descriptions of all extant copies' (viii). The soaring market value of the Folio tempted owners from the eighteenth century onwards to (in George Steevens' memorable terms) 'vamp up' (24) their copies with forged or borrowed leaves. As late as 1930, Bernard Quaritch Ltd was producing facsimile reprints of the preliminary pages of the book to encourage such nefarious practices. Ubiquitous and often skilful customization means that the textual instability common to all early modern books is particularly extreme in the case of the Shakespeare Folio; and the job of exposing all those transplants and artificial limbs for what they are will be a complex one. Once it is finished, we can look forward to the fourth, collaboratively-authored volume of the series, nothing less than 'the cultural history of the First Folio and ... a biography of the book' (viii).
This is a laudable end, and I hope very much that the project will be seen through to its conclusion. I would, however, like to air some concerns about it. One is simply a nagging sense that cows less sacred might have more to tell us about the history of the book. All of the cleaning, scraping, trimming, transplanting and rebinding to which Folios have been subjected in the pursuit of a narrow ideal of bibliographic perfection represents so much expunging of the past. Might the genie of history have fled from this particular bottle? A more serious worry stems from the project's attempt to combine scholarship with celebration. Cast as an academic monument to a literary monument, this first volume occasionally seems uncertain whether to take monuments seriously; so the statue to Shakespeare and his Folio in Love Lane, London, is treated first as poetry, then as pomp (vi, 46). But more generally, there is a troubling sense that iconoclasm is out, and that the aim is to leave cultural icons safely on their pedestals.
My gripe relates in particular to the treatment here of Henry Clay Folger, whose purchasing of 'over one-third of the 228 extant copies is the most significant event in the Folio's sales history' (47). West reminds us that, without this accumulation of copies, a host of crucial bibliographical discoveries about the printing of the Folio would never have been made. But how far Folger could have foreseen those discoveries remains a moot point; and West also tells us about the collector's active attempts to obstruct the progress of scholarship elsewhere, through his refusal to contribute information about his holdings to Lee's Census. There is no systematic attempt to synthesize these facts into any kind of critical perspective on Folger's 'almost fanatical desire' for copies (49), or on collecting in general. All we get is the odd disconnected comment, such as the judgment that those modern buyers who paid record prices for the Folio at auction 'may have been extravagant or lavish, but hardly wrong-headed or undiscriminating' (62).
What are book collectors like? The funniest moment in The Shakespeare First Folio comes when West compares the twentieth-century prices of Folios with those of three other luxury items √ 'a Purdey shotgun, Russian caviar, and a Jaguar motor car'. He asserts, with legalistic emphasis, that 'the purchaser of these items is likely to have had certain characteristics in common with the purchaser of a First Folio √ such as disposable wealth, aspects of lifestyle and taste, and perhaps the wish for "the esteem and envy of his fellow men" ' (63, quoting Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class). (Worryingly, it is the profile of the Purdey shotgun which turns out to match that of the First Folio most nearly.) What this comical exercise inadvertently reveals is the folly of undertaking your 'economic' analysis before you rethink the 'cultural history' and 'biography' of a book. Treating the collectors of Folios as licensed-to-spend stereotypes obviously will not do; we need to find out who these people are before we begin to plot their activities on graphs and tables. So I hope that the last volume of this series will revisit the first, undertaking fresh quantitative research whenever the qualitative evidence warrants it. If the latter end of the project remembers the beginning, and if it follows up a fraction of the tantalizing trails that are laid in this volume, then it will certainly have been worthwhile.

JASON SCOTT-WARREN
UNIVERSITY OF YORK