TY - JOUR
AU - Poland, Matthew
AB - Abstract This essay concerns Victorian debates about how best to commemorate Shakespeare at the tercentenary of his birth in 1864. Victorian enthusiasm for Shakespeare was all but ubiquitous, but it evolved in unpredictable ways. The National Shakespeare Committee’s proposal for a Shakespeare statue, for instance, ended in controversy and failure. By contrast, alternative forms of commemoration enjoyed notable success, such as Howard Staunton’s serialized facsimile of the First Folio (1864–66). Both the controversy and its potential resolution in Staunton’s Folio are revealed in essays published in the Reader, a short-lived literary weekly. Staunton’s facsimile came to be regarded by the Reader and commentators in other periodicals as the most apposite of tercentenary monuments. It remade the First Folio for middle-class Victorian readers, trading on the prestige of the First Folio and remaking a high-end book version of Shakespeare in the image of ‘shilling monthly’ serial literature. Taken together, the Tercentenary monument controversies and the Staunton Folio show the Victorian relationship to Shakespeare to be less settled than we have previously appreciated. 1. THE HISTORICAL WORK OF AUTHORIAL COMMEMORATION ‘Why must we go see the Shakespeare monument in Leicester Square?’ This might be a plea from a travelling companion, but it is also a question about the historical processes by which literary figures become canonical and about the forms cultural memory takes. Perhaps we are travelling with the shade of Raymond Williams, who reminds us that emergent phenomena are distinguishable within dominant culture ‘if we develop modes of analysis which instead of reducing works to finished products, and activities to fixed positions, are capable of discerning, in good faith, the finite but significant openness of many actual activities and contributions’.1 The journey is not, then, a dutiful procession past our forebears’ earnest fantasies: attending to the residue of activities past reveals the open, processual negotiation of cultural legacies. Shakespeare’s Victorian monuments – statues certainly, but also periodical essays and editions of his works – are scenes of contested memory. What are these monuments even for, your friend might ask, in a more philosophical frame of mind. Authorial monuments are paradoxical: they are supplementary to an author’s works, and are recognized as such – yet they are made anyway, and they perform historical work. It is a truism that these monuments tell us more about their makers than about the author. But commemorative monuments re-historicize readers’ relationships with authors. They are not merely a return to the past, but rather a making new. Giovanni Fontana’s 1874 fountain in Leicester Square bespeaks a certain stolid reverence, but – perhaps more suggestively – its belated construction also speaks to controversy over how mid-Victorians sought to commemorate Shakespeare (Figure 1). The Shakespeare Fountain is an artefact of the failure 10 years earlier, during the 1864 tercentenary celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth, of self-appointed literary officialdom to agree on the proper form of commemoration. As we shall see, it was a surprisingly charged episode: reputations were slighted, large sums made and lost, and by the end at least one key figure was dead. This controversy, and the various forms of serialized print that mediated it, attest to the complexity of mid-Victorians’ relationships to Shakespeare and publishers’ renegotiation of literature’s material forms in the 1860s. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘The Shakespeare Fountain’: photograph of Fontana’s 1874 Shakespeare monument in Leicester Square. London: c. 1890s. Art 260226. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘The Shakespeare Fountain’: photograph of Fontana’s 1874 Shakespeare monument in Leicester Square. London: c. 1890s. Art 260226. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. In what follows, I take special interest in the Reader – a short-lived weekly review of the arts, literature, and science – as an index to the Shakespeare controversy of 1864. The Reader was published during ‘the golden age of serialization’, in Lauren Goodlad’s phrase, when new monthly journals like the Cornhill Magazine capitalized on decades of successful literary serials by transforming serialization into a high-quality mode of cultural production.2 In the 1860s, serialization was even fit for the national poet, and not just in inexpensive reprints. While providing blow-by-blow coverage of the Tercentenary debates, the Reader and other periodicals argued that the monument to Shakespeare best befitting the moment was not a statue at all, but Howard Staunton’s facsimile of the First Folio, published serially over the course of 1864. Staunton’s First Folio was a composite print monument which synchronized Shakespeare with Victorian literary modernity, adapting the bibliographical form of early modern literary prestige to Victorian periodical time while maintaining some of the material and temporal signatures of both. After briefly rehearsing the history of Shakespearean commemoration so as to frame the distinctiveness of Victorian Shakespeareanism, I outline the Tercentenary from the perspective of the Reader, a periodical within the network of serialized print commenting on and shaping the commemoration controversy. The Reader reveals the discursive stakes for the Staunton Folio as a commemorative monument and how it materialized the Shakespearean text in the context of 1860s ‘shilling monthly’ periodical literature. 2. THE 1864 TERCENTENARY IN THE HISTORY OF SHAKESPEARE COMMEMORATION What can a monument do that a poem cannot? The question has animated Shakespearean commemoration from the start. Shakespeare insisted in his sonnets that ‘not marble nor the gilded monuments | Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme’.3 Milton followed his subject in figuring the relationship between text and monument negatively. Imagining Shakespeare’s ‘relics’ hidden beneath a ‘star-ypointing pyramid’, Milton’s speaker wonders ‘what needs thou such dull witness of thy name?’4 Milton locates Shakespeare’s achievement in his works and, hence, in his readers: ‘Thou in our wonder and astonishment | Hast built thyself a lasting monument’.5 In articulating how Shakespeare’s memory reposes in individual experiences, Milton captures the virtuality of authorial commemoration, its affective repetition and yet its openness to innovation, both typical features of textual and sculpted monuments alike. For, like a party invitation insisting on no gifts, the self-sufficient rhetoric of these poems did not prevent statues from being erected. Authorial monuments are always defamiliarized from their subjects, composites which are removed from their origin but assume suggestive forms of their own. Over time these various composite monuments become a ‘multimedia layering’ of memorial forms.6 Scholars of nineteenth-century European authorial commemoration argue that memorial practices in diverse national contexts share a genealogical origin in Shakespeare and Stratford. Ann Rigney and Joep Leerssen describe how, inspired by Samuel Johnson’s 1765 edition of the plays and David Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee celebration, those who cultivated Shakespeare as a symbol first for British and then for world literature created rhetorical space for ‘an international hyper-canon – a champion’s league of European classics’.7 All this grand, loud, expensive commemoration marked a shift from the attitudes of Shakespeare’s direct heirs. In Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church, the bust erected circa 1623 resembles less a hero than a ‘self-satisfied schoolmaster’, as Nikolaus Pevsner quipped.8 Although diachronic patterns can be observed, the history of Shakespearean commemoration did not proceed teleologically – sedimenting nineteenth-century statues atop seventeenth-century books – but fitfully, with an eye on the present as much as the past. Raymond Williams’s instances of synchronic openness accumulate into diachronic unevenness: in the case of authorial commemoration, this is seen in fiercely contended positions which are the emergence of new responses to the residue of past cultural processes.9 The first civic monument to Shakespeare, built in Westminster Abbey by public subscription in 1741, was invested with the particular rhetorical stakes of contemporary politics. In a rebuke to the Walpole government, opposition politicians and periodicals positioned Shakespeare as a ‘foe to tyranny . . . above the reach of bribery or invidious patronage’.10 Scholars tend to weave this and subsequent authorial monuments into a narrative of continuity in memorial practices in an increasingly secular society. According to this narrative, in the era after Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee, Shakespeare fervour intensified into nineteenth-century European ‘centenary fever’, filling the void of sacred religious festivals with statues, paintings, performances, and books. This narrative oversimplifies the histories of both secularization and Shakespeare commemoration.11 Victorian discourse about Shakespeare was distinctively robust and often religious in its orientation, reimagining Shakespeare’s oeuvre as a sort of new English Bible. During the middle decades of the century, Biblical criticism and the physical sciences served to make a literal reading of the Bible untenable for the first time for much of the literate public. Conversely, this hermeneutic shift raised the stakes for what secular literature might be or do. As Charles LaPorte remarks, Shakespeare’s quasi-religious canonization ‘could only occur when the Bible was at the center of a hermeneutic and religious crisis’ in response to the Higher Criticism.12 Still, it would be incorrect to imagine Victorians’ relationships to Shakespeare as any more uniform or uncomplicated than was their relationship to the Bible. By the Tercentenary, the Shakespearean text was itself in crisis, following the exposure of John Payne Collier’s manuscript forgeries and the persistence of authorship controversialists such as Delia Bacon.13 The need for unity expressed in 1864 by the National Shakespeare Committee, and its subsequent interrogation by the Reader and other periodicals, implicitly responded to the textual and authorship uncertainties of the 1850s. My purpose in discussing the Reader and Staunton’s Folio, two largely unremembered nineteenth-century texts, is to curate rather than to recover.14 The Reader brings into focus the relationship between discourses about commemoration and print production, its lead articles about the Tercentenary networking other periodicals together by endorsing or interrogating their claims. In the columns of the Reader, subversive ‘anti-commemorationists’ argued that a new Shakespeare statue was an unnecessary waste of money. As the anniversary drew near, anti-commemorationists found a compromise in Howard Staunton’s serialized First Folio facsimile. This edition, they argued, was monumental in ways the Committee’s proposed statue could not be. The Staunton Folio afforded a possible middle ground between pro- and anti-commemorationists by representing a monument that was both impressive and light on the civic purse. This monument’s serialized form makes it distinctively Victorian: it performs the complex historical operation of synchronizing the First Folio with Victorian literary modernity. The contemporary significance of Staunton’s Folio is too often left out of modern accounts of mid-Victorian Shakespearean print culture, which focus on the ‘shilling Shakespeare’ phenomenon. My aim in what follows is not to demystify the ideological workings of the Tercentenary, nor to heroize Staunton as particularly forward-looking. Instead, I examine the consequences for literary and media history of this unusual serialized monument, which unbinds the First Folio and, by turning it into a time-extended process, imagines new futures for the author it commemorates. 3. SQUABBLING OVER SHAKESPEARE IN THE READER The Reader provides a distinct perspective on the Tercentenary debates because we can trace its coverage directly from the controversy’s peak through to its endorsement of Staunton’s First Folio as the commemoration Shakespeare deserved in 1864. Significantly, the Reader’s view is distanced from that in the Athenaeum, that ‘mirror of Victorian culture’, which had a vested interest in the celebrations.15 By some measures, the Reader was regarded as an equal to the Athenaeum. Both weekly periodicals solicited an audience of politically liberal, educated non-specialist middle-class readers. In 1863, the Annual Review noted ‘the Athenaeum and the Reader are the two journals now representing literature, art, and popular science’.16 The Reader’s success was short-lived but most evident in 1863–65, the period of the Shakespeare anniversary. Possessed of an independent editorial spirit, the Reader was ‘unconnected with any publishing firm’.17 Historians of Victorian popular science make passing reference to the journal because it was a venue for science writing in the years before Nature debuted in 1869, featuring writing by Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley.18 At its conception, though, the Reader was, in the words of its prospectus, ‘an attempt to “supply the long-felt want of a first-class literary newspaper”’.19 Yet its links to literature have seldom been appreciated by scholars. The Shakespeare Tercentenary fracas began when two rival committees when two rival committees started planning celebrations in Stratford and London in 1863.20 The metropolitan National Shakespeare Committee was founded by James Halliwell, later Halliwell-Phillipps, doyen of British Shakespeareans. This Committee had a direct link to periodical journalism: its co-chair was W. Hepworth Dixon, then editor of the Athenaeum which was granted the honour of announcing the London celebrations on 30 May 1863.21 Noting ‘a strong desire that something worthy of Shakspeare and of his countrymen should be done’, the Athenaeum argued that London should be the centre of activity, condescendingly referring to the Stratford Committee and its planned events as a ‘local movement’. The Athenaeum positioned the National Committee as a bridge between social classes, art and politics, popular and intellectual culture, even between urban and rural interests.22 But the National Committee and its promoters were presumptuous: the Stratford celebrations would be regarded by contemporaneous periodical commentators and later by historians as far more creditable than those in London. Both committees struggled with fundraising and assembling an overall programme of memorial performances and events. Part of the problem was distinguishing Tercentenary events from the annual dinners and performances held across the Shakespeare-obsessed nation. Stratford met the Athenaeum’s challenge by raising funds for a statue. Not to be outdone, the National Committee announced that the London celebrations would culminate in the laying of the foundation of its own statue. Referring to the extensive programme of theatrical and musical performances organized for London audiences, Richard Foulkes quips, ‘such was the spirit of utilitarianism abroad . . . that no-one involved in Tercentenary celebrations considered that they might be an end in themselves’.23 In the event, neither monument was built. In London the only Tercentenary memorial was an oak sapling planted on Primrose Hill by the Working Men’s Shakespeare Jubilee, after an address that jabbed at the National Committee’s ‘utter indifference’.24 Inadequate fundraising doomed both committees’ projects, but the National Committee was the more beleaguered of the two.25 Its appeals for royal patronage were rebuffed; a request to have 23 April 1864 declared a bank holiday was denied. Hepworth Dixon and Halliwell recruited Tennyson, Dickens, and Bulwer-Lytton as vice presidents of the National Committee, but the chairmen struggled to elicit cohesive participation from a membership the Reader numbered at over 400.26 As 1863 came to an end, bickering between the National Committee and the Stratford Committee over the proper locus of national celebrations reached a stalemate, as internecine conflict within the National Committee came to the fore. One must have these events in mind in order to follow the Reader’s intervention in the following months. In December, a pro forma motion to nominate Thackeray as a vice president was struck down. Thackeray had been antagonistic toward the Athenaeum since it printed Geraldine Jewsbury’s savage review of his daughter Anne Ritchie’s novel, The Story of Elizabeth.27 Fittingly, Thackeray publicly fell out with Hepworth Dixon at a Shakespeare birthday dinner on the day the review was released. As the invited speaker – and suspecting that the unsigned review had been written by John Cordy Jeaffreson, his now former friend and National Committee member – Thackeray delivered a speech lingering on the ‘atmosphere of rivalry and contention in which Shakespeare breathed’.28 He finished and left the table abruptly, bowing to Jeaffreson ‘slightly and stiffly’ as he went.29 Thackeray subsequently extended his hostility toward the National Committee – and Hepworth Dixon reciprocated. At the 8 December meeting, with the chair about to declare Thackeray’s nomination passed, Hepworth Dixon interjected to cite a technicality, resulting in the majority voting against. This slight earned the Committee widespread condemnation in the press.30 In what must have seemed a dark coincidence, Thackeray died suddenly on Christmas Eve. National newspapers reporting on the controversy were found among his papers, ‘the great man’s last reading matter’.31 His funeral became a public occasion, but appropriate mourning was apparently over by the next week, when the Reader took up the Tercentenary preparations substantially for the first time in its lead article.32 The author was Edward Dicey, himself a member of the National Committee.33 He positioned the Reader as neutral, just skirting conflicting interests: the Committee, organized ‘especially for making arrangements for the erection of a monument to Shakespeare in London, is as complete and suitable . . . as any such organization can be’.34 Readers were assured that those who voted against Thackeray did so for procedural reasons, ‘on mere grounds of form’.35 A week later, the Reader dug into the chaos enveloping the National Committee, arguing that its lackadaisical fundraising and the Thackeray controversy meant that plans for an expensive new statue should be abandoned.36 This leader based its anti-commemorationist case on literary-critical grounds, offering an interpretation of Milton’s ‘On Shakespeare’ specific to the periodical’s stance in the Tercentenary debates. The Reader imagines, somewhat improbably, the undergraduate Milton with a copy of the First Folio in his possession, scribbling the sonnet on a flyleaf. The totemic regard for the First Folio, characteristic of nineteenth-century Shakespeareanism, is on display: ‘If only Milton’s copy of the First Folio should still be in existence, and Mr. Collier should stumble on it at a book-stall!’37 The Reader goes on to use Milton (‘what needs thou such dull witness of thy name?’) to critique the Committee’s monumental aims: the Cambridge student wrote the lines we have spoken of exactly as if there had been some kind of proposal of a grand national monument to Shakespeare, and he had been asked to join the committee for superintending the arrangements.38 This is presentist Victorian literary criticism. Milton is reimagined as a modern literary committee-man, assuming a dual role rather like the one Tennyson played as poet laureate and vice president of the National Committee. The argument is admittedly anachronistic. But this leader is valuable both for tracing the history of the Tercentenary debates and for insight into a critical perspective particular to the kairos of 1864.39 The Reader follows a thread through shifts in incommensurate political and aesthetic systems in the centuries between Milton and Tennyson, discovering an historical continuity we still find distasteful: the genius as bureaucrat. Anti-commemorationist rumblings were not exclusive to the Reader, nor was their presentist bent. Periodical essays continued to cite Milton’s poem as evidence that the planned statue should be abandoned. Within the National Committee itself, Thackeray loyalists bruited that both the statue and the celebrations should be sabotaged from within. Jeaffreson’s account of committee members’ petty presentism is remarkable: The question whether there should be a grand celebration . . . seemed to be closely associated in [the minds of committee members] with the question, whether Miss Jewsbury’s article on The Story of Elizabeth was a piece of fair criticism. One of them even told me outright, that the National Shakespeare Committee ought to be wrecked, in order to punish the editor of the Athenaeum for inserting the article in the paper.40 Jeaffreson’s personal experience with Thackeray may have coloured his perspective. But the total interpenetration of Shakespearean commemoration with periodical-based literary squabbles echoes the Reader and the novelist’s own Shakespeare after-dinner speech. Anti-commemorationism was voiced more prominently on 20 January, when The Times condemned ‘what is elegantly called the National Shakespeare Committee of London’ as badly managed and incapable of winning the public’s confidence.41 Again invoking Milton, The Times argued that the Committee was fundamentally misguided in its aim to build a Shakespeare statue. Though candidly arguing against the National Committee’s aims, The Times ultimately demurred, insisting ‘we cannot take part in the feuds which distract’ the committee. But they created the opportunity for the Reader to do just that. The Reader’s most piquant commentary appeared the following Saturday in direct response to The Times (Figure 2).42 ‘The Shakespeare Tercentenary Commemoration movement’, the leader begins, ‘is now as pretty a kettle of fish as Pantaloon himself would like to see’: Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail from ‘The Times on the Shakespeare Tercentenary’, Reader, 23 January 1864, p. 95. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Image produced by ProQuest as part of British Periodicals. www.proquest.com Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail from ‘The Times on the Shakespeare Tercentenary’, Reader, 23 January 1864, p. 95. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Image produced by ProQuest as part of British Periodicals. www.proquest.com The polarization is strongest in London, but it is extending through the country. Tories and Whigs – pshaw! no one understands the meaning of that distinction at this present moment; but Commemorationists and Anti-Commemorationists – ah! if there were a general election at hand, would you not see real emotion, real warfare, caused by this antagonism on the hustings?43 The Reader slyly depicts Shakespearean commemoration as a question of the highest democratic import, implicating the nation through the national poet. In the following weeks, members of the National Committee voted with their feet. Several published their resignations from the committee – including Tom Hood, the editor of Fun – as letters to the editor of the Reader.44 He joined the prominent editors and writers whose resignations were printed in The Times on the same page as its anti-commemorationist article.45 They blamed the National Committee’s ‘irregular and unbusiness-like’ proceedings and uncertainty, less than four months before the anniversary, over where the proposed monument would be built.46 The Reader stepped into the rhetorical space created by The Times, its colourful arguments creating mischievous resistance to the National Shakespeare Committee’s unitary narrative as printed in the Athenaeum. Thackeray might have approved. 4. THE STAUNTON FOLIO REMAKES SHAKESPEARE So far as commemoration goes, one could dismiss the Reader and The Times as opportunistic. In their arguments against a new statue, were not they themselves guilty of barnacling onto Shakespeare’s authority? Were not these essays using a superannuated trope, the author’s oeuvre as a monument in itself, just as the National Shakespeare Committee had done? But answering these questions with a simple affirmative misses the ‘radical conventionality’, in Mark McGurl’s phrase, of authorial commemoration, which entails practices that are historically distinct but develop partly through figural repetition.47 In its refusal of the idea of a physical monument, the ‘author’s text as author’s legacy’ trope paradoxically accumulates into the ‘pilèd stones’ (in Milton’s phrase) of anti-commemorationist Shakespearean commemoration. The renewal of the trope in the 1860s is an example of the ‘soft machinery’ which formed Shakespeare as a literary institution.48 I turn now to the ‘hard machinery’ that remade Shakespeare during the Tercentenary. The cumulative effect of the anti-commemorationist arguments in the Reader, The Times, and other periodicals was to exert rhetorical pressure on contemporary books to serve as Shakespeare’s monument, filling the gap left by ineffective lobbying for the Tercentenary celebrations. Commemorating Shakespeare became tied up with contemporary rivalries and interests; as we shall see, at the same time it took on the formal affordances of the serial. For this reason, Shakespearean commemoration partook of, and mattered to, the wider history of nineteenth-century print culture. Serialized facsimiles of the First Folio, especially that edited by Howard Staunton, not only sublated many of the problems of commemoration, but facilitated Shakespeare’s transition into modern print culture, when the imperatives of inexpensive mass publication and widespread access to historical literature came into alignment. By April 1864, the number of Shakespearean editions printed to coincide with the anniversary had reached such a magnitude that the Reader felt compelled to name the phenomenon ‘The Tercentenary Movement Among the Publishers’.49 A review of 21 recent Shakespeare editions nodded to the National Committee’s difficulties and the periodical’s own anti-commemorationism: ‘The real Tercentenary Monument to Shakespeare is gradually assuming such colossal proportions as to remove it out of the hands of any commemoration committee’.50 Commemoration had exceeded the Committee’s grasp, but the publishers had responded appropriately, if copiously. Staunton’s edition was first among them: ‘The first place is due to Messrs. Day and Son’s photo-lithographic fac-simile of the first folio’.51 Novelty distinguished Staunton’s Folio. Photolithography was a relatively new method for printing photographic transfers, usually reserved for maps and reproductions of art.52 Other facsimiles were reviewed, but the Reader and The Times described Staunton’s as a marvel of science. Its fidelity to the textual idiosyncrasies of this most monumental edition lofted it above the other books printed in 1864, making Staunton’s Folio a ‘monument at once national and lasting’.53 The First Folio, reproduced for the masses through Victorian ingenuity, was the monument most befitting the national poet, the tribute the National Shakespeare Committee had failed to achieve. There remains a sense of monumentality about Staunton’s facsimile. One copy at the University of Washington, for instance, features gilt fore-edges and heraldic binding decorations (Figure 3).54 To be sure, these eye-catching details are an after-market feature. But bindings, like other collecting practices, are nonetheless acts of interpretation that gesture to the value of the object, and the author, thereby accentuating those of the book’s makers.55 The facsimile’s size is the most striking of those choices. The blank border around the already large folio-format images makes Staunton’s facsimile weighty and imposing. Nor was this enormous bibliographical format a foregone conclusion. The other First Folio facsimile published during the Tercentenary year, edited by Lionel Booth, replaced the original lettering with easier-to-read modern type and shrunk the Folio to quarto size.56 With Staunton’s facsimile in hand – or preferably on a desk – a middle-class reader could fancy herself admitted to the bright circle of collectors and scholars with access to the prized First Folio. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide A bound copy of the First Folio facsimile edited by Howard Staunton (London: Day & Sons, 1864–66). Photographs Matthew Poland. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, 822.33 Ihe. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide A bound copy of the First Folio facsimile edited by Howard Staunton (London: Day & Sons, 1864–66). Photographs Matthew Poland. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, 822.33 Ihe. But at least 120 editions of Shakespeare’s works were published between 1860 and 1866, not including single plays or poetry.57 Apart from its size and photolithographic plates, what could distinguish Staunton’s Folio in the torrent of Shakespearean editions published around the Tercentenary? In a Dickensian flourish, Marvin Spevack enumerates their bewildering diversity: Competition was extreme and publishers responded by offering printed, reprinted, corrected, revised, stereotyped, rubricated editions in plain paper, thick paper, India paper, and vellum, embellished with biographies, memoirs, facsimiles, portraits, engravings, illustrations, ornaments, annotations, quotations, glossaries.58 Spevack’s list does not even touch on the considerable amount of Shakespeareana produced and subsequently advertised on entire folio-size pages of the Reader and other periodicals (Figure 4). Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Advertisements of Shakespeareana in the Reader from the day of the Tercentenary, 23 April 1864, p. 540. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Image produced by ProQuest as part of British Periodicals. www.proquest.com Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Advertisements of Shakespeareana in the Reader from the day of the Tercentenary, 23 April 1864, p. 540. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Image produced by ProQuest as part of British Periodicals. www.proquest.com Staunton’s Folio, a production which combined high-gloss reproductions with a regular monthly publication model favoured by publishers, is best understood as a contrast with the resolutely cheap and cheerful ‘shilling Shakespeares’. Widening access to Shakespeare’s works was the professed mission underwriting these cheap reprints, enjoined by Halliwell’s call to ‘Shakespeareanize’ the nation. In the tones of a well-intentioned educationalist, Halliwell called for inexpensive new editions in part to generate interest in the festivities he was planning with Hepworth Dixon: ‘Unless some steps are at once taken to increase the knowledge of the writings of Shakespeare amongst the great mass of the people, it may well be feared that the announcement of next year’s celebration will fall listlessly on the ears of an important and the largest section of the community’.59 We can add to the National Shakespeare Committee’s list of failures Halliwell’s own abortive attempt to produce a ‘Shakespeare for the Working Classes’.60 Nevertheless, savvier publishers were remarkably successful Shakespeareanizers, especially Charles Knight and John Dicks. In 1868, Dicks told the Bookseller he had sold around a million copies since the Tercentenary first inspired him.61 But widening access to Shakespeare’s works was not the primary purpose of Staunton’s Folio. Instead, it offered access to the particularly significant text of the First Folio. The discussion of the Tercentenary in contemporaneous periodicals suggests that recent print and reception histories of Victorian Shakespeare editions may have been wrong to discount First Folio facsimiles. If the serial transformation characteristic of some of these editions is key to understanding how Victorian readers experienced Shakespeare, this is especially so in the case of the Staunton Folio. The special significance of the First Folio during the Tercentenary, exemplified by the Staunton Folio, is continuous with developments in nineteenth-century Shakespearean editing, which evinced a ‘radical return to the text of the First Folio’ after heavy emendation in earlier eighteenth-century editions.62 Beginning with the editions of Capell (1768) and Malone (1790), the First Folio had become the most important text in scholarly and cultural understandings of Shakespeare.63 In the Tercentenary year, Alexander Dyce wrote that ‘an exact reprint of the old text, with its multifarious errors, forms a more valuable contribution to literature than a semi-corrected’ one, illustrating the significance of the First Folio to contemporary Shakespeareanism and adumbrating modern critiques of eclectic textual editing in the process.64 But in its bound form, the Staunton Folio performs a sleight-of-hand analogous to the Leicester Square monument: it too is a composite rather than an organic whole. The Leicester Square statue displays British culture as unified and unperturbed in its continuous progression from Elizabethans to Victorians; it is in fact a belated commercial response to civic bickering and failed lobbying in 1864. So, too, does the Staunton Folio’s serial form project unity and continuity where there is fragmentariness and contingency. The photolithographic transfers permit the illusion of unmediated access to a single book from 1623, when it is (as the title page attests) collated from copies at the British Museum and in the private Bridgewater family library. Further, its volume form exerts ‘bibliographic control’ by de-serializing the text, foregrounding and preserving the work at the expense of the facsimile’s serial features.65 Like Dicks’s and Knight’s cheap editions, Staunton’s facsimile was issued serially before being released again as a complete volume in 1866 (Figure 5). Each part cost a substantial 10s. 6d. But in the Reader and The Times, Staunton was elevated above cheaper ‘shilling’ editions: the significance of commemoration was distinct from access to cheap reprints. Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Staunton First Folio facsimile in original monthly serial parts (incomplete set), 1864–66. Flat PR2752 1866n1 Sh.Col. Photograph Matthew Poland, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Staunton First Folio facsimile in original monthly serial parts (incomplete set), 1864–66. Flat PR2752 1866n1 Sh.Col. Photograph Matthew Poland, from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library. There is a homology between the monumental forms of the Leicester Square statue and the Staunton Folio, but the latter’s serial form is even more revealing of Victorian cultural dynamics. In a copy still in serial parts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, cheap dun-coloured wrappers protect the still-vibrant photolithographic prints.66 It is handled sparingly, and with good reason: the wrappers’ edges crumbled and were methodically gathered into an envelope by the curator as we examined it. Of course, this is by design. Readers who removed and discarded the wrappers were fulfilling the promise of the edition’s prospectus (Figure 6), itself printed on the back of each wrapper: Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail of the prospectus for the Staunton First Folio facsimile, printed on the back of the wrapper of each individual part. Flat PR2752 1866n1 Sh.Col. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Detail of the prospectus for the Staunton First Folio facsimile, printed on the back of the wrapper of each individual part. Flat PR2752 1866n1 Sh.Col. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. It will be issued in parts, at a price to render it attainable by most Shakespearian scholars; and when completed, will form, it is believed, one of the most remarkable and appropriate monuments yet devised to the memory of England’s greatest poet.67 The Reader, as we have seen, located monumentality broadly in the dispersed totality of new Shakespearean print, and particularly in the Staunton Folio. I have described the authorial commemoration performed in monuments as a re-historicization of the relationship between readers and authors. The Staunton Folio’s serial features permit us to examine the temporal dynamics of this remaking of Victorian readers’ relationships with Shakespeare in action. Of course, the use of available print technology in combination with the attractive fidelity of photolithographic transfer was a pragmatic publishing choice, as was issuing the book according to a monthly schedule familiar in the print marketplace. Nevertheless, the ways this novel, and distinctively Victorian, Shakespearean text registers seriality has significant historical implications. The ‘Tercentenary Movement among the Publishers’ was not just material and commercial, but also temporal. If serial media provide ‘the rhythm of modernity’, what is at stake in this commemorative object is not only a resolution of the Tercentenary debates, but the modernization of Shakespeare in material form.68 5. A SERIALIZED MONUMENT: THE FIRST FOLIO IN PERIODICAL TIME Stacked one number on top of another, the complete book is still impressively massive, though the wrappers are now brittle and foxed. Though designed to be disposable, the wrappers still attest most clearly to the edition’s design, which prioritized serial production over the contents of the plays, as we shall see. This section will argue that the Staunton facsimile’s periodical features, especially the part wrappers and the way the text was divided, register how the First Folio was made to synchronize with Victorian periodical time: an innovation which has implications for our understanding of how Victorians read and commemorated Shakespeare. In the part numbers and regular page counts – those features designed to exert bibliographic control over the proliferation of serial texts by pinpointing the relationships between parts and the whole (Figure 7) – the wrappers register temporalities superadded to those of the 1623 Folio. The way these features manifest ‘periodical time’ draws attention toward each passing number as an event in itself rather than to the totality of the completed text. The issues are not date stamped, but the part numbers in the upper left-hand corner mark each as of a particular moment and yet as part of a series ‘to be completed in 16 Parts’. Each part reproduces the historical time signature of 1623 as the serial numbers also register the temporality of ‘now’ which, in Margaret Beetham’s phrase, ‘construct[s] time both as serial and as punctuated by the “now” of the publication, a succession of “present moments”’.69 Not only do the issue numbers point to the other parts of the same publication, but they also align it with other time-stamped publications, like the Reader. The issue numbers relocate the monumental Staunton Folio from within the collector’s ‘magic circle’ to a new position within the system of periodicals which comment on and construct the Shakespearean text, both in relation to the discourses of the Tercentenary debates and literary culture more generally.70 Figure 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Two individual serialized parts of the Staunton First Folio facsimile. Flat PR2752 1866n1 Sh.Col. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. Figure 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Two individual serialized parts of the Staunton First Folio facsimile. Flat PR2752 1866n1 Sh.Col. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. Each issue wrapper promises temporal regularity, the rhythm of monthly publication which was associated with the shilling monthlies, particularly in the 1860s. They also ensure dimensional regularity, noting that individual parts will alternate between 56 and 64 pages ‘so as to give the Promised Average of 60 pages’. In ‘periodical time’, the First Folio was re-materialized gradually over 16 months, a process extended throughout the Tercentenary year and into the next. The wrappers, too, encode a temporal dynamic between endurance and oblivion: they indicate this text’s precise relations in time and space, and yet are themselves ephemeral. Fittingly given its subject, the Staunton Folio is an authorial monument which is unusually self-reflexive about its own mutability. The repetition of these features between the Folio’s numbers virtually ‘posit[s] continuous forms’ which accumulate over time.71 And yet each part can only make ‘contingent claims on the truth’: the part is both self-contained and networked to the others, end-stopped while also being open-ended.72 Such material and temporal relations inhere in any nineteenth-century periodical, but their epistemological and ontological significance in the case of the First Folio merit further consideration. In 1623, a new First Folio would have been expensive and available mainly to elite readers, despite the Reader’s fantasy about Milton possessing a copy as a student.73 Staunton’s facsimile remixes early modern binaries of form and price, as well as class and access.74 This early modern object, totalized both in terms of its ontological integrity and by its position as the pinnacle of Shakespearean texts, is recreated as a virtual projection in the Staunton Folio. That it is a relatively inexpensive reproduction does not somehow make it less ‘real’ than a 1623 First Folio, but it does insist on its own nineteenth-century material particularity, as is most evident when the parts are spread out on a library table. Unlike the shilling Shakespeares, Staunton’s Folio is not so much about access to the works as it is about access to a particular monumental form of the text itself. This text opens up the First Folio, making it apprehensible in a format and at a rhythm familiar to consumers of literary culture in the 1860s. Each new edition is a new interface for readers: in this case, it is a new way to ‘use’ Shakespeare which hybridizes early-modern and Victorian material forms.75 The Staunton Folio operates across historical periods by adapting the form of seventeenth-century literary prestige to inexpensive monthly print, which, after the advent of the Cornhill and its contemporaries, became a familiar medium of serious literature. The Staunton Folio invites readers to take the time to engage with the First Folio in the way they might a Trollope serial. Reading Shakespeare’s plays in Victorian ‘periodical time’ meant experiencing them as a set of monumental sections, fitted together like a classical column. Indeed, although the Staunton Folio presented a new means of accessing the works of Shakespeare, it does not appear intended to be its readers’ primary interface with Shakespeare’s works. The absence of textual apparatus and modern typography distinguishes it from the shilling Shakespeares. The ‘Shakespeareanization’ of readers is an implicit condition of its existence. The text’s form would have at once facilitated and disrupted ‘Shakespearian scholars’ in their studies, to use the aspirational term with which the prospectus refers to readers who can now afford their own First Folio. It offered apparently unmediated access to the most important document in the Shakespearean archive, but also interrupted readers’ examinations of the text with monthly delay. The reading experience could proceed fitfully, or be laid aside: either way, time spent with the text was slightly out of joint. Because of the combination of photolithographic reproduction and serial publication, the experience of using the Staunton Folio would have been distinct from either reading a modern edition of the plays or, indeed, studying the original Folio at the British Museum. An odd aspect of this experience would have been waiting a month to finish the scene one was reading. Each issue rigidly adheres to its regular, 56 or 64-page dimensions without respect to content boundaries between plays, or even scenes. Form and content do not align cleanly in most of the Staunton Folio’s parts, illustrating how the emulsion breaks down between early modern and Victorian material forms. The first page of Part 9, for example, is the last page of Henry VI Part I. The same number ends on page 174, in the middle of Richard III Act 1, Scene 2. A part-issue reader in 1864 would see Lady Anne curse Henry VI’s murderer, but have to wait a month for her to spit in Richard’s face.76 Of course, there is little suspense immanent in this potential reading experience. Readers would be less likely to anticipate the plot being advanced, as they might with the Folio’s serialized contemporaries, The Small House at Allington or Our Mutual Friend. But they could have interpreted the text based on its middle rather than its outcome, which is a key attribute of the serial reading experience. Because it is physically enforced, the practice can be further distinguished from the feeling of looking forward to the next time one picks up a book.77 The arbitrary-seeming serial breaks are at once disruptive and suggestive, pointing to the imminence of resolution even as the next part inevitably creates another disruption. Even for readers already familiar with the play, this new, interrupted Richard III might have led to speculation about what would or should happen next. Somewhere between scholarly contemplation and reading for pleasure, the Staunton Folio invites an affiliated but distinct version of the interpretive practices which ‘born-serial’ literature engendered. In its unbound serial form, the Staunton Folio is remarkable in terms of potential reading practices and in literary-historical implications. It registers the cacophony of serial texts’ attempts to resolve a complex set of temporal and material imperatives into one continuous flow: contemplation interrupted by delay, a whole in parts.78 The contingency embodied in those parts extends and transforms the material contingency of ‘the truth’ expressed in the content of Shakespeare’s plays: that stubborn thingliness which resists transcendence and re-worlds literary works time and again.79 Considering Shakespeare in an earlier part form – the character parts used in early modern theatrical rehearsal – Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern write, stirringly, that ‘presence in Shakespeare is all about imminence, a continuing condition of “about to be”’.80 Though transposed fully into the key of Victorian print, the serial parts of the Staunton Folio nevertheless restore some of the imminence intrinsic to the plays in the First Folio. This in turn aligns with seriality’s own resistance to closure, the formal logic which here becomes the logic of commemoration. In its open-endedness, periodical time gestures toward the future. The Staunton Folio’s material form suggests how Shakespeare will continue to persist in new economic and cultural circumstances. It embodies the time of authorial commemoration, but transformed: the timeless shot through with the ephemeral and the punctuated. 6. SERIAL SHAKESPEARE The Victorians’ gift to Shakespeare on his 300th birthday was monumental, though not marmoreal. It is partly visible if one skips the statue in Leicester Square and goes to the British Library instead, where there is a rare complete set of the Reader to attest to the contentiousness of the celebration and the copiousness of print production in response to the Tercentenary. There is also a copy of the Staunton Folio: although it was modestly rebound in 1985, this copy still displays the earnest felicity of the photolithographic prints and, tacitly, the edition’s re-historicization of Shakespeare.81 The Staunton Folio trades upon the cachet of the First Folio but manifests it in the context of accessible modern literature: Barsetshire novels, sensation fiction, and periodical poetry. It is remarkable because it is so distinct from other literary monuments we think of as quintessentially Victorian, like the Kelmscott Chaucer, which integrates cultural significance with bespoke production values. Reading Shakespeare and inexpensive serial form together in 1864 permits new insights into the forms of Victorian Shakespeareanism: how readers renewed their relationships to their literary heritage with a peculiarly Victorian combination of tumultuousness and ingenuity. The open-endedness of serial form materializes a new future for Shakespearean commemoration which is closely attuned to middle-class readers’ ideological assumptions about the acquisition of culture in the 1860s. The Staunton Folio’s own advertising prospectus links two of those assumptions, the desire for cheapness and luxury, which provide a ready explanation of its appeal in terms of philistinism. The binding choices some readers made in preserving their copies of the Folio reinforce this interpretation. But simply to describe it as an artefact of a bourgeois desire to acquire culture is to miss the complexity of its temporal intervention. Repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century, publishers generated new, hybrid forms of media to adapt to the evolving desires of readers and the changing rhythms of modernity.82 Hybridized with the modern serial, the early modern folio’s monumental form is disaggregated and extended in time, not just into a new historical period, but as a new set of reading events. As Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund theorize about Victorian serials in general, Shakespeare in serial parts displays a ‘confidence that an investment (whether of time or money) in the present would reap greater rewards in the future’.83 Serial form makes the totality of Shakespeare as a cultural edifice comprehensible according to a distinctly nineteenth-century gradualist cultural logic. Periodicity allows for gradual development, but – as shown by the serial numbers’ dimensional regularity disrupting the content of the plays themselves – it also introduces a sense of instability, a wobbling between the monument’s parts. Mark W. Turner describes disruption, movement, and above all change as the characteristics ‘central to the essentially “liberal” periodical media’ which create ‘a fundamentally unstable sense of how society works’.84 Critics have repeatedly implicated Shakespeare’s works in the development of modern subjectivity.85 The Staunton Folio indicates a closer rhythmic conjunction between Shakespearean texts and the news in facilitating this development. Indeed, we might consider how periodicity created a fundamentally unstable sense of how literature works, as well: naturalizing the idea that authors’ reputations, and indeed literary history in modernity, are characterized not by immutability but by change and movement. In 1864, the Staunton Folio formed a new constellation with other serial texts, published on the same day each month. It maintained the illusion of identity with the 1623 text while actually producing diachronic distance from its original form, and also creating new, unexpected material proximity with monthly serials. This suggests a space where critics might inquire into the simultaneity of literature, new and old, in the ‘now’ of publication in new material configurations. We know works from the ‘old canon’ jostled up against new literature in advertisements and on bookstalls. But the epistemological consequences of their link via print technologies of production (and reproduction) in shaping readers’ expectations merit further consideration, as the Staunton Folio demonstrates. That this text could so prioritize serial form over content boundaries – could fragment Shakespeare’s ‘Delphic lines’, in Milton’s phrase – and yet be reassembled into a Tercentenary monument, bespeaks readers’ responsiveness to serial form and rhythm which is more deeply seated than middle-class fondness for cheap luxury. The Tercentenary debates, and their resolution in the Staunton Folio, offer a perspective on the formation of cultural legacies distinct from a far more famous Victorian one. In ‘On Heroes and Hero-Worship’, Carlyle hymned the construction of Shakespeare’s dramas, comparing them to a perfectly built house, ‘as if Nature herself had made it’.86 This simile of unmediated generation points away from historical conditions of creation and reception. In part, the argument of ‘On Heroes and Hero-Worship’ is about how the poet can take her ‘conditions’, inextricable from history, and make something so perfect it transcends time. How poets’ transcendence is maintained is harder to pin down, precisely because Carlyle is at pains to de-emphasize human agency: ‘They are canonized, though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our indestructible reverence for heroism’.87 Echoing Raymond Williams, James Mussell writes that serial media reveal ‘what other forms of cultural production tend to elide: that the finished object, which appears to speak to all time, is the work of many people at a specific moment’.88 I extend this claim by suggesting that serial media materialize the openness of historical processes such as authorial commemoration. The Tercentenary debates permit an alternative view to Carlyle’s, taking in some of the many unheroic hands that kept Shakespeare in the canons of English literature. The Reader in particular highlights the extent to which Shakespearean commemoration in 1864 can be understood not primarily as a timeless, devotional practice, but as a charged political occasion when Shakespeare’s legacy was kept alive in petty squabbles, committee procedure and, ultimately, by adapting it to the material forms of Victorian literary modernity. My intent is not to disavow Carlyle’s account of Shakespeare and the aesthetic ideals undergirding it. Rather, I suggest Carlyle should not be read as normative shorthand for Victorian Shakespeareanism. The history I have offered reproduces a version of the argument advanced by anti-commemorationists in 1864. Shakespeare is not timeless – he is timely. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank Kayleigh Somers and Charles LaPorte, who have lived with this essay for as long as I have. Special thanks to Trev Broughton for her editorial incisiveness, and to Laurel Brake, Alexis Easley, Sarah Faulkner, Emily George, and Anna Wager for their generosity at various stages of the essay’s preparation. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Matthew Poland is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Washington. His main research areas are nineteenth-century literature, print culture, and the history of libraries and archives. He is currently completing a dissertation on George Eliot and Charles Dickens, which focuses on how literary form responds to media environments and how archival collecting practices shape knowledge and inquiry. In 2018–19, he was assistant editor of MLQ. He is a contributing editor to At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901. Footnotes 1 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 114. 2 This particular formulation is from Lauren Goodlad’s presentation at the 2019 NAVSA conference, ‘Bigger Love: Financialization and Seriality Across the Longue Durée’. See also ‘The Mad Men in the Attic: Seriality and Identity in the Narrative of Capitalist Globalization’, Modern Language Quarterly, 73 (2012), 201–35. 3 William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 55’, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. by Stephen Booth, rev. edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 48, ll. 1–2. 4 Milton, ‘An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare’, ll. 4–5, in Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, and tragedies. Published according to the true originall copies. The second impression (London: by Tho. Cotes, for Robert Allot, etc., 1632), fol. A5r. I have modernized the spelling in the quotation. Modern editions shorten the poem’s title to ‘On Shakespeare’. 5 Milton, ‘An Epitaph’, ll. 7–8. 6 Ann Rigney and Joep Leerssen, ‘Introduction: Fanning out from Shakespeare’, in Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 2. 7 Rigney and Leerssen, ‘Fanning Out’, p. 3. For the history of Shakespearean commemoration in the Anglophone world from the eighteenth century on, see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Mark Thornton-Burnett, ‘Shakespeare Exhibition and Festival Culture’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. by Mark Thornton-Burnett, Adrian Street, and Ramona Wray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 446–63; Balz Engler, ‘Shakespeare, Sculpture and the Material Arts’, in The Edinburgh Companion, pp. 438–39; and Celebrating Shakespeare, ed. by Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 8 Nikolaus Pevsner and Alexandra Wedgwood, The Buildings of England: Warwickshire (London: Penguin, 1966), p. 413. The date of Shakespeare’s monument in Holy Trinity Church is uncertain; the date above follows Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 21. 9 Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 122–23. 10 Dobson, The Making, p. 138. 11 Adequate treatment of secularization in modernity is beyond this essay’s scope. The most critically acclaimed recent account is Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 12 Charles LaPorte, ‘The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question’, ELH, 74 (2007), pp. 609–628 (p. 613). 13 Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). On Delia Bacon, see James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2011), pp. 83–110. 14 I intend ‘curation’ in a literal sense: making an argument through the collocation of material objects. I also acknowledge and embrace connotations the term has taken on recently in literary studies. Rita Felski argues for an ethic of preserving texts and the institutions which safeguard them, that we must ‘question the assumption that caretaking . . . is inherently conservative in a political sense’. ‘Introduction’, New Literary History 47 (2016), pp. 215-229 (pp. 217–18). Nathan Hensley offers curation as a response to the tension between paranoid and reparative hermeneutic modes, in an etymologically close sense rooted in an ethics and politics of care, ‘restor[ing] a positive affective relation toward our objects of study while preserving the project of critique’. ‘Curatorial Reading and Endless War’, Victorian Studies, 56 (2013), pp. 59–83 (p. 60). 15 Leslie Marchand, The Athenaeum (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1941). 16 Qtd. in John F. Byrne, ‘The “Reader”: A Review of Literature, Science and the Arts, 1863–1867’ (doctoral thesis, Northwestern University, 1964), p. 8, in ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global <http://search.proquest.com/pqdtglobal> [Accessed 18 August 2020]. See also Byrne, ‘The “Reader”: A Review of Literature, Science and the Arts, 1863–67’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 2 (1969), pp. 47–50; Byrne, ‘The Reader’, in British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, ed. by Alvin Sullivan, 4 vols (London: Greenwood Press, 1983), III, 346–51. Thanks to Faye Christenberry and Elliott Stevens for help with identifying the few sources that deal primarily with the Reader. 17 ‘A Review of Current Literature’, Reader, 3 January 1863, p. 5. 18 Byrne, ‘The “Reader”’ (1964), p. 7. For the Reader and popular science, see Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, ed. by Geoffrey Cantor et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 16; Ruth Barton, ‘Just before Nature: The Purposes of Science and the Purposes of Popularization in some English Popular Science Journals of the 1860s’, Annals of Science, 55 (1998), pp. 1–33 (p. 6); and James Strick, ‘Darwinism and the Origin of Life: The Role of H. C. Bastian in the British Spontaneous Generation Debates, 1868–1873’, Journal of the History of Biology, 32 (1999), pp. 51–92 (p. 54). For broader context, see Susan Sheets-Pyenson, ‘Popular Science Periodicals in Paris and London: the Emergence of a Low Scientific Culture, 1820–1875’, Annals of Science, 542 (1985), 549–572 (pp. 552–55). 19 Qtd. in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, ed. by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (London: British Library, 2009), p. 530. Christopher Kent described the Reader as a ‘self-consciously academic literary weekly’. ‘Introduction’, in British Literary Magazines, ed. Sullivan, III, xx. 20 In addition to the periodical sources cited, my account is indebted to Richard Foulkes, The Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864 (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1984); Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare for the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and John Cordy Jeaffreson’s first-hand account as a member of the committee in A Book of Recollections (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1894). 21 Marchand, The Athenaeum, pp. 79–81. See also Marysa Demoor, Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 32–33. 22 ‘Shakspeare Celebrations’, Athenaeum, 30 May 1863, p. 715. 23 Foulkes, Shakespeare Tercentenary, p. 6. 24 Murphy, Shakespeare for the People, pp. 20–21. 25 Foulkes, Shakespeare Tercentenary, p. 49. 26 ‘The Shakespeare Tercentenary’, Reader, 9 January 1864, p. 35. 27 The Story of Elizabeth was serialized in the Cornhill after Thackeray resigned the editorship in May 1862. 28 Jeaffreson, A Book of Recollections, p. 308. 29 Jeaffreson, A Book of Recollections, p. 308. The contentious review was ‘The Story of Elizabeth. With Two Illustrations’, Athenaeum, 25 April 1863, pp. 552–53. Still hurt, in his memoirs Jeaffreson ‘outed’ Jewsbury as the review’s author (p. 310). His attribution is corroborated by The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers <http://smcse.city.ac.uk/doc/cisr/web/athenaeum/reviews/home.html> [accessed 18 August 2020]. 30 For example, see ‘Echoes of the Week’, Illustrated London News, 12 December 1863, p. 602; ‘Theatrical, Musical, Fine Art, and Literary Jottings’, Evening Standard, 12 December 1863, p. 5; ‘Table Talk’, Home News, 18 December 1863, pp. 1572–73; ‘The Shakespeare Monument Committee and Mr. Thackeray’, London Review, 26 December 1863, pp. 687–88. The Athenaeum called the condemnation a ‘misapprehension’ (‘Our Weekly Gossip’, Athenaeum, 2 January 1864, p. 24). Its response was reprinted in the Sun, the Evening Standard, and the Morning Advertiser. 31 Foulkes, Shakespeare Tercentenary, p. 19. 32 [Edward Dicey], ‘The Shakespeare Tercentenary’, Reader, 9 January 1864, pp. 35–36. Thackeray was memorialized in ‘Thackeray’, Reader, 2 January 1864, pp. 3–4. 33 Byrne, ‘The “Reader”’ (1964), p. 313. 34 ‘The Shakespeare Tercentenary’, p. 35. 35 ‘The Shakespeare Tercentenary’, p. 35. 36 ‘What Needs Our Shakespeare’, Reader, 16 January 1864, pp. 67–68. 37 ‘What Needs’, p. 67. 38 ‘What Needs’, p. 67. Emphasis original. The Times echoed the Reader’s temporal conflation four days later, noting (perhaps speciously) that Shakespeare himself died at home in Stratford ‘in his prime, one year younger than Mr. Thackeray’. ‘Shakespearean Monuments’, The Times, 20 January 1864, p. 6. 39 Victorian ‘presentism’ should not be dismissed out of hand. Nicholas Dames has demonstrated the value for critics of taking (usually periodical-based) Victorian literary criticism seriously on its own terms, pushing against the long history of dismissing it because its categories and values steadily became mismatched with our own. ‘Toward a History of Victorian Novel Theory’, in The Physiology of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1–22 and ‘On the Protocols of Victorian Citation’, Novel, 42 (2009), 326–31. 40 Jeaffreson, A Book of Recollections, p. 318. 41 ‘Shakespearean Monuments’, The Times, 20 January 1864, p. 6. In the same essay, The Times discusses a part-issue instalment of Staunton’s Folio: ‘the facsimile of these 64 pages cannot but surprise any one who looks into it; and what a treasure it is may be estimated from the fact that a copy of the original folio has sold for 250l’. 42 ‘The Times on the Shakespeare Tercentenary’, Reader, 23 January 1864, p. 95. 43 ‘The Times’, p. 95. 44 ‘The National Shakespeare Committee’, Reader, 6 February 1864, p. 171. Edward Dicey, author of the 9 January leader favourably inclined toward the National Committee, publicly resigned the week before Hood. ‘The National Shakespeare Committee’, Reader, 30 January 1864, p. 138. 45 ‘National Shakespeare Committee’, The Times 20 January 1864, p. 6. 46 ‘National Shakespeare Committee’, p. 6. 47 Mark McGurl, The Program Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 48. 48 McGurl, The Program Era, p. 3. 49 ‘The Tercentenary Movement Among the Publishers’, Reader, 9 April 1864, pp. 456–57. 50 ‘The Tercentenary Movement’, p. 456. 51 ‘The Tercentenary Movement’, p. 456. 52 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2009), p. 270. The title page of the volume version of Staunton’s Folio boasts that photolithography was a ‘newly-discovered process’. 53 ‘The Tercentenary Movement’, p. 456. In ‘Shakespearean Monuments’, The Times called Staunton’s Folio among ‘the best signs of a Monument which we can discover’. 54 The First Collected Edition of the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare: A Reproduction in Exact Facsimile of the Famous First Folio, 1623, by the Newly-Discovered Process of Photo-Lithography, ed. by Howard Staunton (London: Day & Sons, 1864–66). University of Washington Libraries Special Collections. Thanks to Sandra Kroupa and Wesley Nelson for their enthusiasm and bibliographical insight. 55 Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Zachary Lesser, ‘Hamlet’ After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 56 Shakespeare as put forth in 1623: a reprint of Mr. William Shakespeare’s comedies, histories & tragedies, published according to the true originall copies (London: for Lionel Booth, 1864). Booth’s edition was published in three volumes, another signature Victorian print form. Despite its accuracy, Booth’s facsimile did not sell as well as Staunton’s (Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, p. 192). 57 William Jaggard, Shakespeare Bibliography (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Press, 1911). For a full sense of nineteenth-century Shakespearean publishing, see also Murphy’s Shakespeare in Print and William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 692–714. 58 Marvin Spevack, ‘What Price Shakespeare?: James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps and the Shilling Shakespeares of the 1860s’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 96.1 (March 2002), pp. 23–47 (p. 37). 59 Quoted in Spevack, p. 26. 60 Spevack, pp. 35–37. 61 ‘The Shilling Shakspeares’, Bookseller, 1 July 1868, p. 451. The economic promise of these ventures aligned with cultural and socioeconomic factors which subtended nineteenth-century reprints of the English ‘old canon’ in general: see St Clair, pp. 128–37, 413–24. Reprints and new editions of the ‘old canon’ of English poetry are a structuring element of mid-century publishing that is easily overlooked. See Natalie Houston, ‘Toward a Computational Analysis of Victorian Poetics’, Victorian Studies, 56 (2014), 498–510. 62 George Yeats, ‘Shakespeare’s Victorian Legacy: Text as Monument and Emendation as Desecration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 40 (2012), pp. 469–486 (p. 472). 63 Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, p. 191. For the cultural politics of bibliographical format generally, see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 64 The Works of W. Shakespeare. The text revised by the Rev. A. Dyce (London: Chapman & Hall, 1864). 65 James Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 33. 66 The First Collected Edition of the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by Howard Staunton (London: Day & Sons, 1864–66). Flat PR2752 1866n1 Sh.Col. Folger Shakespeare Library. Thanks to Elizabeth DeBold for helping me safely examine this fragile object. 67 The prospectus is titled, ‘Photo-Lithographic Fac-similes of the Earliest Authoritative Texts’. The First Collected Edition of the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by Howard Staunton (London: Day & Sons, 1864–66). Flat PR2752 1866n1 Sh.Col. Folger Shakespeare Library. 68 Mark W. Turner, ‘Periodical Time in the Nineteenth Century’, Media History, 8 (2002), pp. 183–196 (p. 185). 69 Margaret Beetham, ‘Time: Periodicals and the Time of the Now’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48 (2015), pp. 323–342 (p. 324, 327). I follow Beetham and Turner in the usage ‘periodical time’ even though the Staunton Folio is, strictly speaking, a serial. 70 I echo Mark W. Turner’s call for periodicals studies ‘to take into account the discourses around institutions which determine the construction of the text’. Turner, Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 236. ‘Magic circle’: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 205. 71 Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press, p. 56. 72 Margaret Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 19–32 (p. 29). 73 In 1623, a new, plainly bound First Folio cost £1, a tenth of an ordinary clergyman’s annual income (Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, p. 51). 74 I adopt the ‘remix’ metaphor from Jeffrey Todd Knight. 75 Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press, p. 20. 76 In a modern scholarly edition, the page break in the First Folio, and subsequently in Staunton’s reproduction, occurs at I. 2. 37. King Richard III, ed. by James R. Siemon [Arden Shakespeare Third Series] (London: Methuen Drama, 2009), p. 151. 77 Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1991), p. 8. 78 Turner, ‘Periodical Time’, p. 192. 79 Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993), 255–83. 80 Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 153. 81 The First Collected Edition of the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, ed. by Howard Staunton (London: Day & Sons, 1864–66). General Reference Collection 1870.a.20. British Library. 82 Turner, ‘Periodical Time’, pp. 194–95. 83 Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial, p. 4. 84 Turner, ‘Periodical Time’, p. 183. 85 Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1986); Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1998). 86 Thomas Carlyle, ‘On Heroes and Hero-Worship’, in A Carlyle Reader, ed. by G. B. Tennyson (Acton, MA: Copley Publishing Group, 1999), p. 332. 87 Carlyle, ‘On Heroes’, p. 329. 88 Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press, p. 31. © 2020 Leeds Trinity University This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Commemorative Print: Serialized Monuments during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Debates
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1093/jvcult/vcaa027
DA - 2020-10-19
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/commemorative-print-serialized-monuments-during-the-shakespeare-Hbp6n1hqUN
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -