Breaking Shakespeare Apart

Remember when my students broke Shakespeare?  If you recall, during a class session in special collections, my students broke off the front board of the binding of our most important Shakespeare book, a copy of the Second Folio (1632), a moment which I reveled in, since it allowed me to teach a few valuable lessons about the Shakespeare folio--which is commonly called the most important book ever in the history of the English language ever and even the most important book ever in the whole entire history of the world ever. (Except maybe the bible; and I'm not exaggerating as much as you  might think). That moment of minor vandalism took the folio down a few notches, at least for my students, for a few reasons: 1) it's not even a copy of the First Folio, it's "just" a Second Folio; 2) part of the preliminary matter, including the title-page, are later facsimiles inserted to make up a complete copy; and 3) it showed, with great immediacy, that a folio--any Shakespeare folio, and by extension any important symbol of literary or cultural value--is a material object made up of many different physical elements, a fact which calls into question not only its status as a literary icon, but as an actual bounded and complete book. That is, it asks two central questions: what is (our idea of) Shakespeare? And what, exactly, is a book?

This page is a sacrilegious facsimile!

Re-membering Shakespeare

The endpapers of a manuscript in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University may -- or may not -- contain an early quotation of Shakespeare. I first encountered this manuscript in the Remembering Shakespeare exhibition that formed part of a series of events called Shakespeare at Yale. The exhibit was curated by David Scott Kastan and Kathryn James, and they produced a lovely exhibition catalog. The image below is taken from the Beinecke copy of Peter Idle's Instructions to his son, which once belonged to Thomas Dowse, who transcribed two lines that can be found in Shakespeare's poem Lucrece, first published in 1594. But it is unlikely that Dowse was thinking of Shakespeare when he copied these lines into his book.