Imagining the Book: Literary Folios in the Book Trade of Early Modern London

Imagining the Book offers a history of English Renaissance literature from the perspective of authors, editors and publishers concerned with the impact of the relatively new media of the printing press and the public theatre, as well as the commercial mechanisms that underwrote these media. My study's specific focus, as I trace the complicated relationship between literary history and book history in the early modern period, is upon folio publication. Looking very closely at a format often associated with literary canonicity allows me to examine a suggestive range of texts by Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare and others as I demonstrate how some very various writers exploited folio publication to shape and challenge an already emerging historiography of the book. The editors of the 1598 folio editions of Sidney and Geoffrey Chaucer establish continuities between manuscript and print cultures and refashion both authors as advocates for literature in print. Building on these precedents, the self-designed folios of Jonson and Samuel Daniel, both titled Work[e]s, bibliographically embody and defend the idea of the book that emerges in their literary work: for Daniel, books are unfinished objects whose completion requires the collaboration of readers; for Jonson, books should be magisterially complete and stable texts, which can transmit the author's intentions in as pure a state as possible. Later Jacobean and Caroline folios, including the Heminge and Condell first folio imprint of Shakespeare's plays, responded to the surging popularity of newspapers and other printed ephemera by resisting the bibliographical experimentation of Jonson and Daniel, instead distinguishing the commercial value of the book from the cultural value of the work represented in the book. Early modern readers and publishers would not necessarily have seen folio publication as the elite format assumed by many contemporary scholars; indeed, I will argue that by the Interregnum the format generally served as a barometer of popular taste.