Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée by Zachary Lesser

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée by Zachary Lesser Dylan Lewis Zachary Lesser. Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 232 pp. Zachary Lesser's wonderful Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée is a revisionist deep-dive into a narrow corner of Shakespeare bibliography—namely, the case of the so-called Pavier Quartos—but one that yields major implications for the field of bibliography itself. While previous scholarship on the Pavier Quartos has typically classified them as a strategic attempt by seventeenth-century publisher Thomas Pavier at collecting several plays by William Shakespeare together for the first time in a nonce volume, anticipating the upcoming First Folio, Lesser offers compelling bibliographic evidence that refutes this foundational thesis. Through both interpretive and empirical evidence, Lesser asserts that the Pavier Quartos were instead a sort of anthology of several Shakespeare plays and a stray play by Thomas Heywood put together by the printers William and Isaac Jaggard for no particular reason other than creating a profitable anthology of popular texts that many buyers could choose to buy as a bound collection. Using a variety of investigative bibliographical methodologies applied to over 300 different copies of the various Pavier Quartos currently scattered across multiple institutions and bound mostly as individual plays, Lesser's meticulous study reveals that most of what we know about their bibliographic history is at best somewhat flawed and at worst completely false. As revolutionary as some of Lesser's methodologies might seem, his guiding principles are quite fundamental: bibliographic scholarship requires the close and detailed examination of material texts in as many instantiations as possible. In his hyper-focused examination of the Pavier Quartos (or the Jaggard Quartos, as Lesser refers to them and as I will now throughout), Lesser champions what he refers to as bibliography in the longue durée. As he repeatedly points out, seventeenth-century printers, publishers, and booksellers were, of course, not aware of the canons of twentieth-century bibliography, and thus much of how we think about texts today does not conform to the historical reality of their creation and circulation, and therefore "prevent[s] us from properly seeing [End Page 127] these books" (18). Breaking from the insistence of New Bibliography to focus primarily on a text's real or intended manufacturing history—the ideal version of a text as it is created in the press house—Lesser's recontextualization of the Jaggard Quartos is not necessarily the result of new information about the texts' original printing history, but rather an attention to their transformation over time as they pass between creators, owners, and institutions and become subject to aging processes that come for us all. This framing asks us to resist bibliographic investigation that produces definitive Sherlockian conclusions based only on a few copies of a text at a static point in time, but rather considers how "our perception is culturally situated, and some things become easier or harder to see depending on the observer's historical context" (116). Bibliography in the longue durée requires an openness to looking again and hunting for ghosts no matter how definitive previous bibliographic conclusions may seem. Lesser's study of the Jaggard Quartos is comprised of an introduction, three chapters, a conclusion, and multiple informative appendices, notes, and an index. In the first section, Ghosts, Lesser explores a number of faint, ghostly impressions made as a result of an inked page being pressed up against another page over time. Title pages, as Lesser explains, are extremely likely to "ghost" the preceding, facing verso. This ghosting enables us to see how the Jaggard Quartos that are now individually bound may have once been sequenced in a bound collection of texts, as well as whether the sequencing looks consistent across all of the copies with ghost images. It is ghosting that provides the strongest evidence for Lesser's revisionist claim that the Jaggard Quartos were often sold as a bound collection with an intended sequencing that included Thomas Heywood's Woman Killed with Kindness...