Shakespeare Unbound NOBLE FRAGMENTS: EARLY PRINTING FROM GUTENBERG TO SHAKESPEARE KINNEY CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RENAISSANCE STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST 2023-2024
INTRODUCTION
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio of William Shakespeare’s plays (1623) At the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, the Shakespeare Unbound exhibit asks: what happens when Shakespeare appears in fragments or as momentary flashes in history? With selections from the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, the works of WEB Du Bois, Phillis Wheatley, and others are joined in conversation with William Shakespeare.
At the Kinney Center, A Noble Fragment is the first of many exhibits that will rotate throughout the academic year. It tells the story of the print revolution in Renaissance Europe and the emergence of the book in its modern form. The exhibit’s title derives from publications in the 1920s that marketed leaves from damaged and disbound copies of the Gutenberg Bible (1454-1455) and Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), iconic artifacts in the history of printing, under the
title A Noble Fragment. The “noble fragments” exhibited here remind us that books are unmade as well as made: they come apart over time, but they are also often reassembled and repurposed in ways that leave traces of that history on their pages The exhibition concludes with a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632), an important version of the most iconic gathering of “noble fragments” in English literature.
This exhibit showcases selected items from an extraordinary private collection of rare books on loan to the Kinney Center and the W.E.B. Du Bois Library in honor of lifelong friend of the collector and University of Massachusetts Professor, Pieter Elgers, Isenberg School of Management.
1. The Gutenberg Bible (Mainz: J. Gutenberg, 1454-1455) is not only the earliest substantial book printed in Europe, it is also a masterpiece of typesetting and printing Johannes Gutenberg’s print shop set standards in quality of type, paper, ink, page design, and sheer professional skill that printers of any later generation have found difficult to match. That Gutenberg was able to produce a book of this quality while solving a multitude of technical problems is astonishing.
2. Gutenberg’s innovative solutions created a long-lived technology: workmen from his shop would be familiar with every element of the type making and printing processes depicted in the mid-eighteenth-century illustrations.
3. The Gutenberg Bible launched a “print revolution,” but as far as book design was concerned, the revolution was slow moving. Early printed books looked identical to the manuscripts they would eventually supplant Notice the double columns of tightly set black letter type with numerous abbreviations on a leaf from a Latin Bible copied in Paris, c.1220
Up Close: How different do you think the manuscript Bible page looks from the Gutenberg Bible page, printed over 200 years later? Imagine 200 years from now: how different might our books look from the way they do today? It took decades for printers to introduce the reader-friendly features we now take for granted: title-pages, page numbers, cross-references, line-numbering in poetry, for example
By 1500, printers had introduced our familiar Roman and Italic type fonts, and successfully integrated illustrations, maps, charts, and tables into their texts
L a t i n B i b l e c 1 2 2 0
4. A leaf from Petrarch, Opera (Basle: J. Amerbach, 1496) displays the Roman type developed and perfected in the later decades of the fifteenth century. Many fonts in computer menus today are based on or named after type designers working in the first century after Gutenberg
5. A leaf from a commentary on the Roman poet Martial (Venice: Aldine Press, 1513). The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius introduced italic type in 1500. Its elegance and efficiency of space soon made it very popular and defined the look of the best-selling humanist editions of classical writers Aldus produced.
6. The Aldine press developed a similarly elegant font for printing in Greek, exemplified here in a leaf from an edition of Lucian (Basle, 1545).
7. A leaf from an early sixteenth-century antiphonal featuring two-color music printing. The large format was designed to enable use by several members of the choir at once.
8. Up Close: Notice the ways in which a leaf of Augustine (Strasbourg: J. Mentelin, 1470) resembles the Gutenberg leaf but with generous margins and spacing that allow the text to breathe. Do you see the wormholes throughout this leaf? This is where we get the phrase “bookworms.” They are one of the many perils that faced early books.
9. The “print revolution” also played a major role in standardizing vernacular languages. William Caxton was England’s first printer, as well as a translator and author himself. By adopting the London dialect in his widely marketed books, Caxton is credited with regularizing and homogenizing the English language. This leaf is from the first printed edition of Chaucer (Canterbury Tales, 1476).
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10. Martin Luther did for the German language what Caxton did for English, through his enormously influential translation of the Bible (leaf from a German Bible, c.1520s).
11. This leaf from a rare breviary (Strasbourg, 1478) is printed on vellum, a material more expensive than paper and difficult to print on. Only a few copies of this book would have been printed on vellum, either for presentation or for elite buyers willing to pay a premium price. This copy was taken apart and its durable vellum used to make bindings of other books, probably in the sixteenth century.
12. The Parisian bookseller and printer Antoine Verard (leaf from a printed Book of Hours, c.1495) was the first in France to popularize both illustrated books and, like William Caxton, the use of the vernacular. In addition, Verard published printed Books of Hours like this one A book of prayers designed for personal use, Books of Hours were one of the most popular forms of medieval books, and over the centuries they played a major role in the history of women’s reading. Manuscript Books of Hours were also often elaborately decorated and
embellished. Working only a few decades after Gutenberg, Verard showed that printed books could reproduce the look of even the most beautifully decorated medieval manuscripts
13. An illustrated world history, the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) is one of the earliest printed books to successfully combine illustrations and text, thereby opening up the early modern visual imagination. Publications like the Nuremberg Chronicle proved that print could be as successful as manuscript in producing lavishly illustrated books such as the histories, chronicles, atlases, and books of travel that followed in its wake
N u r e m b e r g C h r o n i c l e ( 1 4 9 3 )
books.
Up Close: An octavo sheet, like this one, is folded three times to produce a page that in size and rectangular shape is the ancestor of the modern paperback format. Here at the Kinney Center we have a printing press. We welcome you to learn more about early print practices with a short lesson on the press.
T h e W h o l e B o o k e o f P s a l m s ( c 1 6 1 0 )
The First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected Comedies
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R o m e o & J u l i e t ( 1 6 2 3 )
16. Published less than a decade after the First Folio, the Second Folio (1632) launches the ongoing project to update, repackage, protect, save, and “bind” Shakespeare It is, by and large, a page-by-page reprint of the First Folio: the main addition is a new poem by the young John Milton, future author of Paradise Lost, praising the “livelong monument” of Shakespeare’s folio works. The Second Folio is the product of a group of investors working in syndicate, and their collective effort tells a story in itself.
Comparison of the two folios reveals about 1700 deliberate textual changes. The Second Folio reflects careful editorial attention, and represents the first systematic edit of Shakespeare’s plays. About half of these changes are still accepted by modern editors, making the Second Folio a key source for all modern versions
Up Close: Take a look at the First Folio and Second Folio What differences do you notice upon first glance?
The subsequent history of these plays is one of constant dialogue between binding and unbinding: binding the plays together, binding their meaning through emendation, binding the rights to publish and market the plays
S e c o n d F o l i o ( 1 6 3 2 )
17. The idea of gathering scattered fragments into a collected whole exerted a powerful pull on the Renaissance imagination “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume” writes John Donne in his Devotions (London, 1624), in the same meditation on human connectedness in which he proclaimed that “No man is an island, entire of itself”
Up Close: This copy of Donne’s Devotions raises an immediate question: what has happened to this book? Do you notice the blackened, uneven edges? Reading Donne by candlelight, one reader held the book too close to the flame and set the book on fire. The scorched pages signal the perils to which early books were subject.
To Donne, Paradise is a library in which the divine gathers and rebinds the noble fragments of the scattered self: “when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; … God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”
Books are lively objects that connect us: to the books themselves, to ourselves, and to one another Each of the books, leaves, and printed pages on display in this exhibit scattered, fragmented, torn, eaten by mice, even scorched by a candle’s flame invite us to reimagine the resilience of the printed word, never more fully in force than when it has been unbound
D e v o t i o n s ( 1 6 2 4 )
CURATORS
JosephBlack
KirstinKay
MarjorieRubright
SPECIALTHANKSTOOURADVISORYBOARDMEMBERS
LizFox,PhD
Arts&AcademicProgramsCoordinator
KinneyCenter
JeffGoodhind Librarian
KinneyCenter
EvanMacCarthy
FiveCollegeVisitingAssociateProfessor
DepartmentofMusicandDance,UMass
SarahPatterson AssistantProfessor
DepartmentofEnglish,UMass
AaronRubinstein
HeadofSpecialCollections&UniversityArchives
DuBoisLibrary
DebapriyaSarkar AssistantProfessor
DepartmentofEnglish,UConn
JustinShaw
AssistantProfessor
DepartmentofEnglish,ClarkUniversity
JimmyWorthy
AssistantProfessor
DepartmentofEnglish,UMass
AdamZucker
AssociateProfessor
DepartmentofEnglish,UMass
GLOSSARY
antiphonalbookofliturgicalchantsusedintheCatholicservice bindingoutercoversofabook,inearlybooksusuallyleather,vellum,orboards madeofwoodorcoarsepaperpastedtogetherbutpotentiallyavarietyof othermaterials.
breviarybookcontainingpsalms,hymns,lessons,prayers,etc.usedinthe Catholicservice
blackletterEnglishtermfor“gothic”scriptandtypefonts.
facsimilereproduction.Incompletecopiesofearlybooksoftencontain replacementleavesmadebyprocessessuchasphotocopying,photography,or typesetting.Somecontainreproductionleavesdrawnbyhandthatare surprisinglydifficulttodistinguishfromtheprintedoriginals.
foliobookwithpagescreatedbyfoldingaprintedsheetonce,toproducea large-formatbookusuallyreservedforworksofreferenceorothersubstantial orseriousworks.
gatheringgroupofleaves(pages)allprintedononesheetofprintingpaper beforeitisfoldedandcut:2leaves(4pages)inafoliogathering,4leaves(8 pages)inaquartogathering,etc
leafsinglepieceofpaper:oneleafcomprisestwopages,front(“recto”)and back(“verso”).
manuscriptbookortextwrittenbyhand,asopposedtoprintedmechanically octavobookwithpagescreatedbyfoldingprintedsheetsthreetimes,to produceasmallishrectangularformatwhich,inshapeandsize,istheancestor ofthemodernpaperback
quartobookwithpagescreatedbyfoldingaprintedsheettwice,toproducea medium-formatbookwhich,inshapeandsize,istheancestorofmodern hardcovers.
Romantypethefamiliarfontinwhichthisbrochureisprinted.Derivedfrom thecapitallettersusedinancientRomaninscriptions,hencethename stationerumbrellatermformembersoftheearlymodernbooktrade, includingprinters,publishers,andbooksellers
typesettingor“composition”:theartofsettingindividualpiecesofmolded metaltype(printcharacters)byhandinpreparationforinkingthenprintingon thepress Typeissetupsidedownandinmirrorimagetotheprintedsheet, andittakesenormousskilltosettypewell,elegantlyspacedandwithno errors.Onereasonwhyspellinginearlymodernbooksissovariableisthat typesetters(compositors)oftenhadtoalterwordlengthtofittypeintoa predeterminedspace.
vellumcalfskin,treatedandscrapedbutnottanned:aflexibleyetdurable materialoftenusedinbookbindingsandforlegaldocumentsbutoccasionally alsoasasurfacetoprinton
vernacularnativelanguagespeoplespoke,suchasEnglishorFrench,rather thanLatin.
Throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, additional books from this collection will be on display at the Kinney Center and in the Du Bois Library as part of the Shakespeare Unbound campuswide exhibit. Future exhibitions at the Kinney Center will focus on a wide variety of themes, including: Shakespeare and the Renaissance of the Earth (Fall 2023) and Shakespeare in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Spring 2024).
For more information, please visit the Shakespeare Unbound website:
