Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Duree

Four years before the First Folio, London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a collected works of William Shakespeare, but the project ran into trouble. To salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. The deception worked for nearly three hundred years, until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentieth century. The discovery of these Pavier Quartos was a landmark success for the New Bibliography and played an important role in establishing the validity and authority of that method of analysis. Zachary Lesser's new study of these playbooks reveals evidence of ghosts, holes, and rips and scrapes, suggesting that the Pavier Quartos are far more mysterious and have far more consequential ramifications for book history and Shakespeare scholarship than we have thought.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 22 April 2024
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a collected works of William Shakespeare in a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. However, the project ran into trouble due to mysterious reasons, possibly involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men. To salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. This deception worked for nearly three hundred years until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentieth century. The discovery of these Pavier Quartos, as they became known, was a landmark success for the New Bibliography and played an important role in establishing the validity and authority of that method of analysis. While more recent scholars have reassessed the traditional narrative that the New Bibliographers wrote, no one has gone back to look at the primary evidence: the quartos themselves. In Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes, Zachary Lesser undertakes a completely fresh study of these playbooks. Through an intensive bibliographical analysis of over three hundred surviving quartos, Lesser reveals evidence that has gone entirely unseen before: ghosts (faint, oily impressions produced when one book is bound next to another); holes (the tiny remains of the first simple stitching that held pamphlets together); and rips and scrapes (post-production alterations of title pages). This new evidence, much of it visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic methods, suggests that the Pavier Quartos are far more mysterious, with far more consequential ramifications for book history and Shakespeare scholarship than we have thought.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781512826081