Shakespeare for the "Triers": Richard Hawkins and Q2 Othello at the Serjeants' Inn

Abstract

In 1630, the Stationer Richard Hawkins began selling an edition of Shakespeare's Othello from "his shoppe in Chancery-Lane, neere Sergeants-Inne" (Othello 1630 title page). This edition, identified by modern scholars as Q2, is remarkable as the first edition to fully conflate existent quarto and folio texts of a Shakespeare play. Scholars have remarked on the process that brought Q2 into being—but the question of why a seventeenth-century publisher/bookseller would invest the time and money to create such an edition remains to be considered. This article decenters the author to reconsider Q2's place among the people and ideas of the area in which it was published and sold: the Serjeants' Inn in the heart of the Inns of Court area of London. The article examines how Hawkins fashioned the books sold in his shop to entice this local readership. Literary and textual evidence from the Quarto is then reconsidered in the light of this new readership, providing fresh insights into the construction of this unique quarto and its place in modern editorial practice. This article also highlights the extent to which individual members of the book trade in the early seventeenth century engaged with local readerships and looks at the value of second-plus editions to that market.