Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book; John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language.

Abstract

THE 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death was marked by an unusually high volume of publications and other festive events. The academic community, more attuned than ever to the importance of ‘impact’ was no exception, but Emma Smith’s Shakespeare’s First Folio, and John Kerrigan’s Shakespeare’s Binding Language, though timely, and different in their objectives, are the fruits of an accumulation of scholarly research and deliberation. Both combine a commitment to an ‘historical’ Shakespeare with a confident awareness of current intellectual debates. Smith sets out to produce what she calls ‘a cultural biography’ that involves a linking of ‘the interest in the material lives of books as objects’ with ‘more interpretative histories of literary reception’ (20). The book as object is, as Smith rightly observes, a commodity, and she invokes the Maussian theory of the gift to explain marks in particular copies as evidence of that process. The result is a history of the political process of fetishization of an iconic object whose passage through time she proceeds to ‘anatomise’. Her aim ‘is always to contextualise the material Shakespeare’ (23) and this necessarily involves teasing out its passage through its four-century cultural history of quirky readers of particular copies. In addition to her five important themes of ‘owning, reading, decoding, performing and perfecting’ (21) that form the substance of Chapters 2–5, Smith also begins with the puzzle over ‘the many ways in which an object that is not particularly rare came to be so uniquely important to individuals, institutions, and nations’ (23). Her lively introductory chapter, ‘Sir Edward Dering Goes Shopping’, offers the first of a series of exemplary owner/readers whose documented bibliophilic interests and commitment to theatre performance make him an ideal starting point. His purchase of a First Folio ‘makes a statement about his intellectual, cultural, and political priorities, the networks he aspired to join, the person he wanted to become’, demonstrating from its earliest existence ‘a text in animated conversation with a range of adjacent ideological concerns’ (7).