Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies

A man's work does not always outlive him by its own force. More often it survives because two friends, neither of them famous, neither of them men of letters, decide on a wet afternoon that it will. The decision is made quietly, in a room above a print shop, by people whom history would otherwise have forgotten. They are not preserving a monument. They are keeping a promise.

THE MEN IN THE WILL

William Shakespeare died at New Place in Stratford on the twenty-third of April, 1616. His will, drawn in his last months, set aside twenty-six shillings and eightpence apiece for three of his fellows of the King's Men, to buy mourning rings: Richard Burbage, John Heminges, Henry Condell. Burbage died in 1619 and the legacy fell to two. Heminges, sixty in the year of the will, had been with the company since its founding in 1594; a grocer of Aldermanbury by trade, an actor of comic parts by company, treasurer and book-keeper because he could count. Condell, ten years younger, played the courtiers and the smooth villains, and kept the accounts of St Mary Aldermanbury as churchwarden. They were not scholars. They were the men Shakespeare had stood beside on a stage for twenty years.

By 1622 eighteen of his thirty-six plays had never been printed in any form. They lived as the company's prompt-books and as the drafts the playhouse called the foul papers: paper, ink, the King's Men's only copies. A single fire at the Globe, a single careless coach, and Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It would go out of the world. The two grocers' executors of the dead poet's posterity had been working at the Jaggard print shop in Barbican for sixteen months, and the book was not yet done.

THE UPPER ROOM AT BARBICAN

The eleventh of November, 1622. Rain on the tiles. The upper room above the press is narrow and smells of lampblack and damp paper and the tallow from the candles they have lit early because the light off the south window is already failing. Heminges has the prompt-book of Macbeth spread before him, in the secretary hand he learned at the Theatre in '94, the cuts and the doublings inked into the margins in his own hand and Burbage's. Condell at the side-table has The Tempest and the Master of the Revels' fair copy of Twelfth Night. From the courtyard below comes the slow rocking of the press, two pulls to the sheet, and the voice of old William Jaggard, blind these three years, calling instruction to a compositor who cannot read secretary hand. Isaac Jaggard, the son, runs the floor.

On the table by Heminges's elbow lie the manuscripts in the order they have at last agreed upon: comedies, histories, tragedies. The Tempest first, because Condell loves it. Cymbeline last, because no one could decide where else to put it. Eighteen of these have never been printed. Eighteen exist on this table and nowhere else in the world.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A PRINT SHOP

Isaac comes up the stair with the proof of the first sheet of Macbeth. He sets it on the table between them. Heminges reads. The compositor has set dunnest as dimmest, has dropped a line of the porter, has caught two of the witches' rhymes and lost a third. Condell reads over his shoulder. Outside, the rain steadies into a hiss against the lead.

Here is the second. He is sixty-six years old, a grocer of Aldermanbury, a player of comic parts, and the only copy of Macbeth in the world is on the table under his hand. There is no fair copy. There is no quarto. There is no author to ask. Will would have caught the porter's line at a glance, would have known whether dimmest or dunnest was what he had written in the foul papers a decade and a half ago at the Globe, and Will is in the chancel at Stratford under a slab that warns the curious not to move his bones. The decision is Heminges's, and Condell's, and no one else's, and it must be made before Isaac carries the proof back down the stair to the forme. He thinks of the mourning ring on his right hand, twenty-six shillings and eightpence of plain gold, and of how Ben Jonson, who corrected the Latin of the dedication and would not let his name go on it, said the address ought to be from the men Will wrote for and not from a peer or a scholar. Ben was at home this afternoon. Ben always was, when it mattered. The choice is a grocer's and a churchwarden's. He has been making choices for the company for twenty-eight years, the choice of what to cut for a court performance, the choice of who would double the messenger and the soldier, the choice of which boy would play Viola; he has never thought of these as editorial choices, but that is what they have always been, and the work now is only the work he has always done, set down in ink instead of in performance. The room is very quiet. Condell looks at him. He picks up the red pen.

THE CORRECTIONS

They mark four corrections in red ink on the sheet. Dunnest, restored. The porter's line, restored from the prompt-book against Condell's memory of how Robert Armin had spoken it. Two of the witches' rhymes, set against each other and against the foul-paper draft. Isaac takes the proof down the stair. The press begins again in the courtyard, the slow two-pull rhythm of the wooden frame, and the sheet of Macbeth is reset and pulled and proved again before the candles are snuffed.

They worked on like that for another ten months. Through the winter of 1622 and the spring and summer of 1623 they read every sheet of every play against the manuscripts on the table, in the upper room at Barbican, while old William Jaggard died in October and Isaac finished the run alone. The compositors miscounted pagination in the Histories and had to begin Troilus over. The Folio went up to nine hundred pages and then past nine hundred. They wrote the address themselves, in their own names, and signed the dedication to the brothers William and Philip Herbert, Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery. We have but collected them, the address said, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians: without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame: onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare. They asked the reader to reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe.

AN INTERLUDE AT WESTMINSTER

On a clear afternoon in the summer of 1623, Ben Jonson came down from Westminster to read the gathered sheets in the upper room. He read for two hours without speaking. When he had done he set the last sheet on the table and looked at the two men who had made the book, the grocer and the churchwarden, and said only that they had done it, and that what he would write to set in front of it would have to be enough, because Will was past the reach of any other praise. He went home that night and wrote the verses that called Shakespeare the Soule of the Age and the Sweet Swan of Avon, and concluded that he was not of an age, but for all time. He signed them Ben Jonson and would not be persuaded to put his name on anything else in the book. The dedication, he said again, was theirs.

THE BOOK

The book came off the press in November 1623, in a run of perhaps seven hundred and fifty copies, priced at about fifteen shillings unbound, a pound bound in calf, roughly a man's monthly wage. The full title was Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Eighteen of the thirty-six plays in it had never been printed before. Without the volume there would be no Macbeth, no Twelfth Night, no The Tempest, no Julius Caesar, no Antony and Cleopatra, no As You Like It; the English language would be a smaller country and would not know it.

THE RETURN

Henry Condell died in 1627, in his house at Aldermanbury, four years after the Folio. John Heminges died in 1630 and was buried beside him in the churchyard of St Mary Aldermanbury, where they had been churchwardens together. About two hundred and thirty-five copies of the seven hundred and fifty survive in libraries and private collections; one sold at auction in 2020 for ten million dollars. The church at Aldermanbury was gutted in the Blitz in 1940 and its stones were taken across the Atlantic in 1965 and rebuilt at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, as a memorial to Winston Churchill, who had given his Iron Curtain speech there. What remains on the City of London site is a garden, and in the garden a bronze plaque on a low plinth, raised in 1896, with the names of the two men and the words the friends and fellow-actors of William Shakespeare. To them, the inscription says, we owe all that we possess of his dramatic works.

The great hour that calls a man to its work does not always call him to a battlefield, and does not always call a man who is ready for it. Sometimes it calls a grocer and a churchwarden to an upper room above a print shop in Barbican, on a wet afternoon in November, and asks them to keep a promise made to a friend in his will. The plays of Shakespeare survived because two men, neither of them famous, neither of them lettered, sat at a table with the prompt-books and a red pen, and did the work in front of them, sheet by sheet, until it was done. In the garden at Aldermanbury the bronze plaque is small enough that a passer-by may miss it, and weathered enough that the names need a hand laid across them to be read.