Breaking Jonson Apart

In my last post (Breaking Shakespeare Apart) I showed how one of the most important and monumental literary books in the world--the Shakespeare first folio--is anything but monumental, and is, indeed, perhaps not even a book. Rather than a definitive and complete whole, it is better thought of as a collection of removable parts--both within the printing house, where the contingencies of business impacted its contents, and in its subsequent life, where copies have suffered the vagaries of time (and of owners keen to sell off their copy bit by bit). In this post I want to look at the book that is often seen as the crucial model for the Shakespeare folio--Ben Jonson's Workes (first published in 1616), a book that is quite literally Jonson's own monument to himself. However, even though Jonson presents his book as a definitive, whole object--the embodiment of (his idea of) his complete works--it, too, is easily broken apart.

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!