Near-Oblivion

THE GENESIS OF SHAKESPEARE'S dramatic oeuvre is rooted in the materials of history and—as with the Iliad—in the tastes of his first audiences; but the material circumstances of its production meant that much of it might never have survived to become history itself. For a long time, Shakespeare's amazing nonchalance about the fate of his plays left the final phase of fixing the texts in print to chance, with the consequence that some were never printed in his lifetime at all. There is no sign that he did anything to further publication. Since he left no record of his actions or omissions, his motives can only be guessed at.

Direct traces of Shakespeare's writing career are few. Signatures apart, only one small piece of text thought to be in his hand is preserved, a section of the drama Sir Thomas More on which he is known to have collaborated: three pages, only a part, albeit a vital part: More’s speech to xenophobe rioters appealing for a humane response to political refugees.

There exists, though, a striking account of how Shakespeare wrote, from men who knew whereof they spoke. The actors Henry Condell and John Heminge, who in 1623 put together the First Folio after Shakespeare's death, had been for years his fellow-shareholders and collaborators in the troupe for which he both acted and did virtually all his writing, the Chamberlain's (later the King’s) Men. The two editors were concerned “to procure [for] his Orphans, Guardians,” a variation on the metaphor of paternity common in writers, in this case remedying a neglectful kind. Condell and Heminge laid the foundations of Shakespeare's later fame by rescuing the half of his dramatic production that had never yet been printed—eighteen plays, including several of his finest, which would otherwise certainly have been lost—and by republishing the others, which had earlier appeared in haphazard sequence, some of them in a form not designed to last. The already published titles did at least include all but one of the histories (discounting the minor King John and Henry VIII). They were his significant early successes, although not yet labelled as “histories” to distinguish them from any other genre.