The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0026 Wednesday, 16 January 2008
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Date: Wednesday, 09 Jan 2008 14:09:23 +0000 (GMT)
Subj: Re: SHK 19.0015 The Popularity of Playbooks
[2] From: Gerald E. Downs <
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Date: Wednesday, 16 Jan 2008 01:13:28 EST
Subj: Re: SHK 19.0015 The Popularity of Playbooks
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From:
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Date: Wednesday, 09 Jan 2008 14:09:23 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: 19.0015 The Popularity of Playbooks
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0015 The Popularity of Playbooks
Not even Farmer and Lesser are prepared to say, as Gabriel Egan does,
that 'his [Peter Blayney's] counts were wrong'. They write: 'Blayney's
figures are accurate, although they will differ somewhat from our own
because of methodological differences outlined in our Methodological
Notes, "Reprint Parameters" (18). Blayney's point is not simply that
'godly' literature outsold playbooks but that Farmer and Lesser's
arguments in fact demonstrate the reverse of their conclusion. This
point turns on how percentages of reprint rates are interpreted.
Studying a sample from 1576-1625, including reprints up to 1660, Farmer
and Lesser hold that while almost 40% of playbooks were reprinted within
20 years, a meagre 19.3% of sermons were reprinted within 20 years.
Since playbooks were 'reprinted more than twice as often as speculative
books in general and sermons in particular', they conclude, we should
'recognize the popularity of playbooks' (28).
Blayney's sample is slightly different, covering all playbooks and
sermons printed in 1583-1640. He ends up with a similar picture
regarding percentages. In his sample, 32.5% of playbooks were reprinted
before 1641, while only 17.5% of sermons were reprinted before 1641. But
here's the rub. Crucial to these figures, Blayney writes, is 'an
elementary arithmetical truism that completely vitiates their main
conclusion. Simply put, a small percentage of a large number can be much
bigger than a large percentage of a small number' (43). The impressive
32.5% is in fact equivalent only to 112 reprinted playbooks, while the
meagre 17.5% is equivalent to 232 reprinted sermons.
At the risk of trying readers' patience, I quote a key paragraph of
Blayney's reply to Farmer and Lesser:
'Having used real-world data to calculate their results, the authors are
perfectly well aware of the facts and acknowledge that, "judging by
market share, sermons do indeed appear to have been more popular than
playbooks" (21). I am at a loss therefore to understand how they
nevertheless concluded that "sermons were reprinted much less frequently
than were professional plays" (21) when the reverse is so irrefutably
obvious; how they persuaded themselves that outselling playbooks by more
than three to one constitutes only an illusion of popularity while their
percentages tell a higher truth. Of the playbooks of Edward Sharpham and
of Thomas Tomkis, 100 percent reached third editions inside twenty
years, but only 35 percent of Shakespeare's fared as well. By the
author's logic, Sharpham and Tomkis must have been far more popular -
even though each man's 100 percent (two out of two) was greatly outsold
by Shakespeare's 35 percent (eight out of twenty-three). Counting
percentages without regard to the quantities they represent can lead to
absurd conclusions.' (44)
I regard it as greatly to Farmer and Lesser's credit that they have
ploughed up an important field in so thought-provoking a way, and also
to Gabriel's credit that he should raise the debate in this forum. But
while there are areas of agreement between the parties, I'd be surprised
if Profs. Farmer and Lesser are under the impression that Blayney has
conceded any part of their argument.
Duncan Salkeld
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From: Gerald E. Downs <
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Date: Wednesday, 16 Jan 2008 01:13:28 EST
Subject: 19.0015 The Popularity of Playbooks
Comment: Re: SHK 19.0015 The Popularity of Playbooks
I have revisited "The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited," by Zachary
Lesser and Alan Farmer; Peter Blayney's response; and the subsequent
"Structures of Popularity." I am still wondering how Blayney's article
came to be in the same issue of The Shakespeare Quarterly. He did make a
number of reasonable objections to "Revisited" that one supposes would
have been made available to the authors had they been part of the peer
review process. If that was the case, wouldn't an attempt have been made
to reconcile the differences before publication? As it is, the reader
gets the impression that the journal itself approves of the lambasting
and its tone. Perhaps Professor Lesser will provide a "narrative."
In my opinion, the popularity of playbooks is more complicated a topic
than is indicated by these articles. However, I don't see much need to
improve on the simple presumptions that more than one kind of book was
printed to make money, that plays were printed primarily for that
reason, and that retailers and readers purchased enough of them to keep
the process going.
Zachary Lesser quotes from their first article "that about three times
as many sermons were published as plays," but I believe Blayney fairly
responds by taking into account the sermon and play collections: "while
the playbooks contain a total of 719 separate printings of individual
plays, the sermon-books contain 6,852 printings of individual sermons.
Numbers like those dictate their own conclusions" (44). That is more
than nine times as many sermons as plays and the collections explain in
part why individual sermons were not reprinted as much as plays
(percentage-wise). Though other considerations make these classes of
books hard to compare, it seems undeniable that sermons greatly outsold
plays.
But again, plays were printed at a fair clip and I can see how low
supply may have sometimes reduced the rate. After all, their numbers
were significantly augmented by bad quartos, reprints of bad quartos,
and corrected reprints of bad quartos; few of which would have appeared
had better copy been readily had. "Revisited's" mention of "the forty
new playbooks printed from 1589 to 1597" could have noted that nineteen
of them were "suspect texts." This is the part of the story that
interests me, and I don't see how it can be neglected. For example, I
follow Thomas Heywood (who should know better than we do) and accept
that of his plays "some Actors" thought "it against their peculiar
[private property] profit to have them come in Print" (English Traveler,
1633). Would it be so peculiar to find that demand encouraged stolen and
surreptitious texts?
Lesser and Farmer do not discuss this possibility beyond reference to
Blayney, accepting that "Through his detailed investigation of the
workings of the Stationers' Company and the process of prepublication
allowance, license, and entrance in the Register, Blayney finally puts
to rest the narrative of piracy that has maintained such a hold on the
imaginations of twentieth-century Shakespeareans" (Revisited, 3). I've
read a number of similar statements since 1997, but I've never quite
understood how Blayney's paper has so affected the imaginations of
new-century scholars. "Put to rest" is not synonymous with "buried
alive," which is how I might describe the 'piracy' hypothesis. What
Blayney seems to describe is an environment that would have been
conducive to and protective of piracy, but his argument against any such
practice is inadequate. Consider the following excerpts:
1) Blayney's first page, speaking of Pollard's imagination: "It remains
true that the five quartos he described as Bad resemble each other more
than they resemble any of the fourteen he called Good" (383).
2) "What keeps the story [Pollard's piracy theory] alive is, I suspect,
a reluctance to question the principal fallacy on which it depends"
(384). One should differentiate "principal fallacy" and "principal
evidence." The evidence is the bad quarto. That keeps the story going.
3) "It is rarely appropriate to hold the machine responsible for the
supposed origins of the text it reproduced" (389). Blayney rightly
absolves the printers, but publishers were also part of the Stationers'
machine, and they didn't originate the texts, either.
4) "If the manuscript had been illicitly obtained, or if any rules of
the Stationers' Company were evaded or broken, the responsibility lay
with the publisher . . . (391). I believe Blayney successfully shows
that the Company took care of its own. But what prevented a manuscript
from being illicitly obtained?
5) "The nature of the manuscript offered to the press would depend
largely on its source" (392).
6) "Sometimes, though, the person who tried to sell a play to a
publisher might have no direct connection with the playhouse at all (393).
7) ." . . any kind of manuscript playbook that can conceivably have
existed could conceivably have found its way into print" (393).
8) "Modern notions of literary property simply would not apply . . . "
(394).
9) ." . . it was not unknown for a stationer to admit quite openly that
a book was being published without its author's knowledge or consent"
(395). That is, with impunity.
10) ." . . no stationer is known to have been punished for failing to
have an inoffensive text perused and allowed. The purpose of the
regulations was to prevent the publication of unacceptable material . .
. . If an unauthorized book caused offense, the perpetrator could be
punished for failing to have it properly allow, but noncompliance seems
otherwise not to have mattered" (397).
11) "Alternatively, they [master and wardens] might license it [a
manuscript without governmental 'authority'] on condition that if any
trouble arose, the publisher would take full responsibility. Or they
could agree with the publisher that the book could offend nobody, and
license it without authority" (398).
12) "When Millington and Busby tried to license Shakespeare's Henry V in
1600, therefore, the wardens would not have cared about either the
authorship or the 'Badness' of the text - but they would have required
the consent of Thomas Creede, who had published (and printed) The
Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth in 1598. Creede presumably did
consent, on condition that he be hired (and therefore paid) to print the
rival play" (399).
Maguire rules on Famous Victories: 'probably MR' (suspect texts, 252).
She quotes H T Price, 'a bad quarto, if there ever was one'; and yet
this play conferred ownership (and money) onto the publisher, who beat
his bad quarto rival to the punch. No matter where these awful texts
came from, the rules were there to protect; first come, first served.
The origins of the texts were apparently not relevant to the Company
policies.
13) "And if the publisher of a suspected text [that is, a text suspected
of piracy by amateur scholars] was unsporting enough to register it
anyway [instead of hiding the piracy], the entry is likely to be
scrutinized for signs of supposed 'irregularity' - which are easy
enough to imagine if one knows nothing about the range and idiosyncrasy
of the records" (404).
Blayney is undoubtedly right to argue that evidence of registry,
authority, or license does not help to prove playbook piracy. But
neither do they disprove piracy, as so many have concluded; only
manuscript source-evidence is capable of such proof. But Blayney's essay
indicates that a publisher participating in any manner in the printing
of a piracy would be protected and encouraged by the system; as would be
the pirates themselves. The evidence that has been debated historically
is the bad quarto genre. But after all, Blayney has something to say
about their sources, and one must conclude that Farmer and Lesser found
this argument convincing also. However, his few words on the topic are
not that forceful.
Blayney addresses the possibility of derivation of manuscripts by means
other than direct descent from authorial copy (by which Kirschbaum
defines the 'bad quarto'). His new take treats the address to readers by
Humphrey Mosley on publication of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio in 1647:
"One thing I must answer before it bee objected; 'tis this: When these
Comedies and Tragedies were presented on the Stage, the Actours omitted
some Scenes and Passages (with the Author's consent) as occasion led
them; and when private friends desir'd a Copy, they then (and justly
too) transcribed what they Acted." (Greg, Bibliography, 3:1233)
Greg assumed that Mosley implied the players "made a fair copy of the
promptbook." This to Blayney seems "to be a forced and legalistic
reading . . . " (394). He understands the passage instead to refer to
"performance texts written down by actors who took part in them." And
these, he believes Humphrey was saying, were of the "kind of text that
Pollard called a Bad Quarto . . . "(394). Now Blayney is placing his
and Mosley's stamp of approval on (innocent, not piratical) 'Memorial
Reconstruction' as explanation of dozens of published texts during the
era we 'revisit.' I happen to agree with Greg that actors would have
transcribed from a written text in the circumstance Mosley describes.
Heywood's _The Captives_ (which I described in a recent post to this
list) is a text shortened with the approval of the author that could
have been recovered in its longer state. And it would have been
perfectly natural to have transcribed a copy 'dutifully omitting the
omissions.' However, issues are not resolved by arguable wording like
Mosley's.
Lesser and Farmer appreciate that "critics need no longer search for
fictional pirates, thanks to Blayney and such scholars as Paul Werstine,
Laurie E. Maguire, and Roslyn L. Knudson," (Revisited, 3). While I too
will not recommend searching for fictional pirates, the possibility of
real pirates intrigues me. Although neither Werstine nor Maguire deny
the concept or possibility of memorial reconstruction outright, their
critiques have cast a long shadow over specific arguments of such
theorizing. Blayney's lumping of the bad quartos into a single
hypothesis of 'innocent group' memorial recovery of plays that found
their way into print must address these criticisms of similar cases or
they must be taken as denying his suggestion.
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