Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619; Bibliography in the Longue Durée. Zachary Lesser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. x+198.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewGhosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619; Bibliography in the Longue Durée. Zachary Lesser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. x+198.Emma SmithEmma SmithHertford College, Oxford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt’s not often an academic book review starts with a spoiler alert, but Zachary Lesser’s Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619; Bibliography in the Longue Durée unfolds so like a golden-age detective story that it feels unfair to fillet it to present readers of Modern Philology with its conclusions. New Bibliographers drew, sometimes consciously, on the forensic methods and narrative reconstructions popularized by contemporary crime writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Edmund Crispin. W. W. Greg’s foundational 1908 essay, “On Certain False Dates in Shakespearean Quartos,” is to the bibliographic field what Sherlock Holmes’s famous monograph on identifying cigar ash was to the world of Victorian crime fighting: an intervention that signaled by its dogged detail, a newly empirical, coolly professional approach. In turn, fiction writers of the period were fascinated by early modern texts and emerging scholarship around them. Ellery Queen’s 1933 story “Drury Lane’s Last Case,” which turns on a lost letter by Shakespeare, is symptomatic of the reciprocal relationship between textual scholarship and crime fiction between the wars.Lesser’s thorough reinvestigation of one of the New Bibliography’s causes célèbres, the mysterious “Pavier Quartos” published in 1619, is likewise a work of detection. The Pavier Quartos are not an absolutely cold case, but as Lesser points out, much recent revisionist scholarship has nevertheless drawn on the same limited evidence as Greg himself. Lesser revisits this group of texts, and Greg’s assumptions about their provenance, and brings to bear two new and revelatory techniques. First, he interrogates many more witnesses: three hundred copies of the plays have been consulted with forensic attention. Second, he has consolidated the technologies of the New Bibliographers with extensive use of multispectral imaging techniques and large-format magnification to see the documents that make up the case in an entirely new light. The results significantly redirect narratives of Shakespeare in print in the immediate period after his death, but they also reflect on the ideological and practical critical biases that make certain solutions acceptable or inevitable at certain times. Lesser’s work thus contributes to the larger project of revisiting New Bibliography and its assumptions: like “bad quartos,” “memorial reconstruction,” and the commitment to the lost manuscript as the source of authorial intention, the Pavier Quartos are now ripe for reassessment. This study is thus both bibliographical theory and practice.Part of that reassessment includes nomenclature. Around halfway through the book, Lesser renames this sequence of play books “the Jaggard Quartos” (78), placing the burden of responsibility more squarely with the established stationer William Jaggard than with Thomas Pavier. Lesser suggests that making Pavier the fall guy for this series of obscurely illicit publications did important work for Greg’s wider critical agenda. Keeping Jaggard on the margins of these dodgy 1619 imprints allowed him to emerge as the savior of Shakespeare’s print reputation with the First Folio four years later, and helped maintain the boundary between good and bad texts. And if Pavier is decentered in this new account, so, to some extent, is Shakespeare himself. A compelling investigation into the place of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness in several extant or reconstructed anthologies of 1619 texts shows that the assumption that this venture was all about an authorial canon that needs to be modified.Lesser’s investigation into collections of Jaggard Quartos is fascinating. He recovers ghost contact prints that reveal now lost adjacencies, and he looks for the marks of stab stitching and analyzes survival rates to clarify whether the texts were sold singly or in anthologies. His eye catches on numerous examples of scuffing or patching around the date imprints, and his expansive survey suggests that many copies have been doctored, probably in the printing house, and probably to confuse this murky print episode still further. This exciting, hands-on bibliography produces challenging new evidence about print, marketing, and Shakespeare’s reputation.The golden-age detective novel typically concluded with a neat exposition that arranged the facts into a compelling narrative. Lesser’s final chapter does not quite gather us together in the library for this Hercule Poirot moment of revelation; the model of detection here is existential rather than positivist, and what is left are a series of questions. This may well be Lesser’s most important methodological contribution to the discipline of book history in which he is such a leading light. Professing a radical open-endedness resists, rather than merely replaces or updates, the ossified fictions we tell ourselves about Shakespeare’s texts. For, as he is the first to admit, just like Greg’s foundational essay on the false dates of the 1619 texts more than a century ago, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes is also of its time. Lesser points out that the unit of critical analysis for the New Bibliographers was the edition, so that one copy could stand in for the rest of the run. Greg’s own work drew on a handful of accessible exemplars. For modern historians of the book, that unit of analysis is the specific copy.The questions Lesser asks of his texts will seldom have been anticipated by even the best special collections digital imaging: they require physical encounters with books across the United States and Europe. This is a bibliography enabled by cheap, routine air travel and the modern scholarly apparatus of library fellowships and research budgets. Perhaps the period just before 2020 will turn out to have been the last moment for this kind of research. Post-COVID bibliography during the advanced period of the Anthropocene may need again to modify its procedures, consider its footprint, and consider the barriers to participation. But it is hard to imagine a better scholarly justification than Zachary Lesser’s terrific book for this deceptively simple method: looking, and looking again. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 119, Number 3February 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717658 Views: 883 HistoryPublished online November 23, 2021 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.