"To buy, or not to buy": Hamlet and Consumer culture.

Smith, Emma

BEN JONSON'S THEATRICAL PAEAN TO SHOPPING, his 1609 Entertainment at Britain's Burse composed for the opening of the New Exchange in the presence of James I, opens with a shopboy calling out the standard patter of the early modern vendor: "what doe you lacke? What is't you buy?" A mouthwatering list of shopping opportunities to tempt the spectators follows, cataloguing some forty-six consumer items from billiard balls to umbrellas to Indian mice. Books are only glanced at: the sales spiel alludes to Pliny and the lavishly illustrated Topsell, but seems most delighted by the curio "booke to tickle the best head of England"--a disguised comb. (1) Despite the fact that John Budge was running a bookshop at the Burse by the following year--as attested by the title pages of works by Samuel Daniel and others in 1610--books are marginal to this copia of desirables. Similarly, although the New Exchange's wares are here being celebrated and advertised through drama, the entertainment itself remained unpublished, carefully excised from Jonson's own self-marketing in his folio collection of his Workes (1616). Neither this particular theatrical entertainment nor playbooks in general are included in this festival of consumer gratification. This essay considers the relationship between consumer culture and play printing, in the early modern period and in our own, discussing in particular the implications of the recent proliferation of editions of Hamlet. The increased number of editions of Shakespeare will be shown to have more to do with modern consumer gratification than with substantial motivating changes in editorial practice.

Early modern England clearly was, as historians such as Joan Thirsk, Ian Archer, and Linda Levy Peck have explored, a nascent capitalist market. An anonymous 1584 pamphlet A breefe discourse.... of the laudable customes of London acknowledged that "London standeth chiefely upon the traffique and intercourse of merchants and the use of buying and selling of their sundrie commodities." (2) Imports of luxury goods, including cloth, sugar, glass, porcelain, and watches, increased throughout the sixteenth century. There were many opportunities and locations for "bravura consumerism." (3) Peter Erondelle's French/English language manual, The French Garden (1605), scripts a shopping trip to the Royal Exchange, where the Lady haggles over the price of "the fayrest linnen cloath in London." (4) On a shopping spree in the autumn of 1608, Lady Francis Cecil bought "seven pairs of shoes including three of orange tawny and two of marigold," while her brother William preferred gloves, buying twelve pairs long perfumed, two pairs long cordovan perfumed, and two pairs perfumed fringed with crimson and silver. There are many such examples of an aristocratic early modern economy of excessive and duplicated consumption among the upper classes, often funded by credit. (5) Luxury goods, as their historian Linda Levy Peck acknowledges, "offered all individuals the means to project political and economic power, to veil, to shape, and draw attention to the body, to redefine their identity, and to construct their sense of self" (22).

Early modern book ownership, however, does not seem to echo these patterns of duplicated consumerist excess. There were, of course, marketing techniques that attempted the attractive repackaging of works previously printed. It is common in sixteenth-century publishing to find on title pages of various genres words such as "corrected," "enlarged," and "newly," signifying a difference from, and improvement on, previous versions. Thomas Tusser's book of household advice grew from the relatively modest A hundreth good pointes of husbandrie in 1557 to the expansive Five hundreth points of good husbandry united to as many of good huswiferie (1573); John Stew's Survey of London was first printed in 1598, and reprinted with the title pages stating "by the same author increased" (1603), "continued, corrected and much enlarged, with many rare and worthy notes" (1618), and "now newly added" and "now compleatly finished" (1633); posthumous editions of sermons by Henry Smith claim "published by a more perfect copie than heretofore" (1594 and 1596). (6) Techniques of playbook marketing, however, do not seem to suggest a market in which the same buyers were encouraged to purchase supplementary editions of the same work.

Around half the plays printed in the period 1583-1622 were reprinted within twenty-five years, and only around 20 percent achieved a second edition within nine years. (7) These serial editions do not appear to represent an active attempt to distinguish the item from previous publications. Two popular and much reprinted plays of the period, Mucedorus and The Spanish Tragedy, can be taken as examples. Mucedorus was first printed for William Jones in 1598 with the marketing phrase "newly set foorth"--a phrase repeated in Jones's virtually identical title page some eight years later (Q2, 1606). In 1610 Jones published a third quarto, which proclaimed on the title page "Amplified with new additions, as it was acted before the Kings Majestie at White-hall," a phrase repeated in his 1611, 1613, and 1615 editions (Q4), in John Wright's editions of 1618, 1619, 1629, 1630, 1631, and 1634, and in Francis Coles's 1650, 1663, and 1668 editions. The meaning of "new additions" becomes more and more illusory as the distance from the performance at Whitehall grows, and seems to lose any marketing power it originally carried. In marketing the quartos of Mucedorus, continuity rather than newness seems to be key: each of these fifteen editions carries a distinctive decorative border on their title page, and the effect is of brand recognition rather than differentiation. A bookstall browser in 1610 might well overlook the information about the third quarto's new material because the overall visual impression of the title page is so familiar: far from attempting, over the long lifetime of the play in print, to market any edition as substantially different from its predecessors, the Mucedorus brand stresses the continuity of serial repetition. Notwithstanding its repeated claims to be "amplified with new additions," the marketing strategy for Mucedorus seems almost to discourage repeat or duplicate purchases, by so clearly reiterating the familiarity of its title mise-en-page, and bringing its multiple editions under a single recognizable design.

The case of The Spanish Tragedy is slightly different, not least because of the contested rights to the play's early publication. A presumed lost first edition is alluded to in the marketing of the earliest extant, undated quarto (circa 1592), published by Edward White, which advertises itself as "newly corrected and amended of such grosse faults as passed in the first impression": behind this condemnation is probably the dispute over the rights to the play between White and Abel Jeffes in late 1592, with White's title page alluding to an earlier, unauthorized quarto by Jeffes that has been destroyed. (8) The phrasing remains, however, in the Jeffes / White edition of 1594, where its immediate target would now appear to be White's own quarto rather than the lost predecessor. By the third quarto of 1599, published by William White, the phrasing has slightly altered: "newly corrected and amended of such gross faults as passed in the former impression." The rights to the play are transferred to Thomas Pavier in 1600, but when, in 1602, Pavier and White publish the play with the additional passages, perhaps by Ben Jonson, the title page acknowledgment is rather subdued. The 1599 and 1602 title pages share a decorative border at the top, White's pelican device, and the same layout for the play's long title. Only the information that the later text is "Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late been divers times acted" visually distinguishes this substantially different text from its predecessor. Perhaps White finds himself in a position similar to that of Nicholas Ling who had published both Q1 and Q2 of Hamlet and who therefore had an interest in marketing both the older and the newer copies. Like Ling's Hamlets, White's Spanish Tragedy editions have title pages that "do far more to liken them than to distinguish them": only "a book buyer with enough interest in Hamlet to pay close attention will be alerted to the newer edition's superiority over the old--which, after all, such an interested reader could already have bought in 1603." (9) Not until 1615 does an edition of The Spanish Tragedy appear that is substantially visually distinct: the woodcut presumably commissioned by White which depicts the murder of Horatio in Hieronimo's garden. This edition continues to promise that the play is "newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new Additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late been divers times performed." Subsequent editions by Augustine Matthews in 1618, 1623, and 1633 amend the claim slightly: "newly corrected, amended and enlarged with new Additions as hath of late been divers times Acted," but we can see that the reiterated "newly" and "new" must have lost some of their marketing allure through repetition.

Writing of the marketing of Q1 and Q2 Hamlet, Lesser and Stallybrass suggest that the interested owner of the Q1 text may have been willing also to buy the supplementary text advertised as "newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie": "This reader will thus be urged to buy the new version (as well)" (373). Hamlet is unusual in having two substantially different quarto texts published by the same publisher in subsequent years, and "since a publisher's decision to reprint can usually be assumed to indicate both that the previous edition had sold out (or was about to sell out) and that the publisher anticipated continued demand for the book," it was probably unusual for a publisher to hold stocks of two editions simultaneously. (10) Certainly, the famous hard sell by John Heminge and Henry Condell in the "Epistle to the Readers" of the Shakespeare Folio in 1623 seems designed to preempt the resistant buyer's claim that he already owns some of these playtexts, perhaps as a direct challenge to Thomas Pavier's recent attempt at serial publication: "we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office of their care, and paine, to have collected & publish'd them; and so to have publish'd them, as where (before) you were abus'd with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies , maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters, that expos'd them: even those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them." (11)

But did any of what Cyndia Susan Clegg calls the "quirky few who read plays" buy serial editions of the same play? (12) Whether playbooks were, or were not, commercially popular, there does not seem any evidence that they did. Preliminaries to the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio repeatedly emphasize that this is a collection of unprinted works: the title page boasts "Never printed before"; the dedicatory epistle to the Earl of Pembroke promises "all the Treasure we had contracted in the whole Age of Poesie (some few Poems of their owne excepted, which already published, command their entertainement, with all lovers of Art and Language)"; and publisher Humphrey Moseley, addressing "the Readers," asserts scornfully "A Collection of Playes is commonly but a new Impression, the scattered pieces which were printed single, being then onely Republished together: 'Tis otherwise here":

   Some Playes (you know) written by these Authors were heretofore
   Printed: I thought it not convenient to mixe them with this Volume,
   which of it selfe is entirely New. And indeed it would have rendred
   the Booke so Voluminous, that Ladies and Gentlewomen would have
   found it scarce manageable, who in Workes of this nature must first
   be remembred. Besides, I considered those former Pieces had been so
   long printed and re-printed, that many Gentlemen were already
   furnished; and I would have none say, they pay twice for the same
   Booke.

He continues that "Heretofore when Gentlemen desired but a Copy of these P]ayes ... [one] cost them more then foure times the price you pay for the whole volume." (13)

Moseley's view that readers would not want to "pay twice for the same book" is telling. Indeed, it is hard to find any examples in early modern library catalogues and book lists where a reader possesses multiple editions of the same text, or any evidence that the kind of multiple or parallel reading favored by modern editorial practices in relation to, for example, the A and B text of Dr Faustus, or Q and F King Lear, has an equivalent in Elizabethan or Jacobean culture. John Harington, for instance, who has the largest collection of playbooks evidenced in any early modern library and who devoted considerable amounts of energy to individualizing presentation copies of his own works as gifts, nevertheless does not seem to have shown any interest in acquiring, for example, copies of the two distinct versions of The Spanish Tragedy. Where his extant playlists show duplicate Shakespeare texts, they are not of plays that have substantially different early modern editions during his lifetime. (14) Henry Oxinden's acquisition of playbooks for his library shows a distinct preference for first editions--"a modern form of bibliomania, hardly to be looked for in the seventeenth century"--with the only apparent duplicates two copies of The Spanish Tragedy, one dated 1615 (the first edition with the woodcut illustration) and the other undated. He does not, however, seemed to have sought to purchase any of the later quartos of Hamlet to supplement his 1603 edition, nor more than one copy of Mucedorus. (15) Among his many purchases of playbooks in the early seventeenth century, Sir Edward Dering bought "six playbookes of Band Ruff and Cuff" (copies of A Merrie Dialogue, betweene Band, Cuffe, and Ruffe [1615])--and since he also paid for other theatrical accoutrements it has been suggested he was organizing private amateur theatricals. In any case, these were presumably identical copies, not different editions. Elsewhere, Dering does not list the titles or authors of his playbooks except for the Folio collections of Jonson and Shakespeare, preferring instead entries such as "9 playbookes" and thereby suggesting their different, lesser status than the rest of his library. (16) William Drummond possessed serial editions only of his own works, although he did own a quarto of Volpone along with a Jonson Folio. (17) Ben Jonson's own library contained both the 1614 Leiden edition of Lucan's Pharsalia and Thomas Farnaby's edition of 1618, but it seems from the heavy annotation of the former copy and the dedication from the editor on the otherwise unmarked latter that this duplication is inadvertent, the result of a--perhaps unwanted-gift. (18) It also seems likely that some of the books sold off as duplicates by St John's College Oxford in 1612 were copies of the same work, rather than the same edition. (19) The oft-cited example of the Bodleian library haplessly selling off a First Folio on acquiring a Third Folio in 1664 suggests that interest in textual variants and multiple editions is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon we can date to the flurry of eighteenth-century editorial activity and controversy. (20)

That consumerism was developing rapidly in early modern England is not in doubt, therefore, but there is no evidence that book marketing and book ownership participated in this economy of duplicated and excessive consumption. All this, then, is to suggest that our modern interest in early texts as versions of the text in different coherent states and with different provenances works well to recuperate early printed books but does nothing to recuperate early book buying or reading habits. It speaks to our own present agendas and not to those of the early modern period. For early modern play readers, their printed text was effectively singular, although occasional printers' lists of errata (in, for example, Dekker's Satiromastix of 1602), and the sometimes defensive tone of prefatory material (as in Jonson's Every Man Out of his Humour (1600), where the stated motivation for publication is neither to "traduce the Authour, or to make vulgar and cheape") must have been a reminder that this singular text was a contingent one. (21) Asserting this material singularity is in no way to deny that early modern readers were capable of apprehending ambiguity, simultaneous meanings, or interpretative uncertainty: of course, humanist teaching made these hallmarks of educated reading, and many playbooks explicitly address their readers to solicit that kind of differential interpretation. Thomas Walkley introduces his 1622 edition of Othello by "leaving every one to the liberty of judgement"; Richard Jones anticipates the "learned censures" of readers of his edition of Marlowe's Tamburlaine; the "generall Reader" of Marston's Sophonisba (1606) is requested by the author to "peruse me with no prepared dislike, and if ought shall displease thee thanke thy selfe." (22) That early readers were adept at interpreting plays, and that those texts acknowledged or encouraged active interpretation is not in question, but the text itself on which such hermeneutic attention was lavished was literally singular: neither patterns of playbook marketing, nor of playbook ownership, indicate that there is any early modern parallel to our recent interest in textual variants and multiple, destabilised texts.

If early modern experiences of play reading were, therefore, singular, modern approaches have increasingly favored multiple texts. Current interest in "texts" over "text," and in the text as multiple, takes its apparent theoretical underpinnings from two quite distinct fields. One is poststructuralism's radical suggestion that "the text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural." (23) Textual theory in the later twentieth century found that, as Andrew Murphy has observed, "these somewhat abstruse philosophical postulates had a clear practical resonance," and this practicality has been achieved by an unexpected collision of poststructuralism with the new histories of the book. (24) Bibliography's improved understanding of early modern printing has identified the ways in which more or less every copy of an early modern book was unique. (25) The institutional value of this material multiplicity has increased substantially in recent years, with collation of variants, necessitating the consultation of far-flung copies of the text, now standard editorial practice. As a sign of these changing editorial priorities, a sampling of Malone Society reprints may be indicative. For his edition of King Leir (1605) published by the Society in 1908, W. W. Greg consulted the two copies of the 1605 quarto in the British Library. The STC lists 5 further unconsulted copies in the United States (in all his editorial labors, Greg never visited the country). In 1955 the edition of Arden of Faversham (1592) prepared by Hugh MacDonald made use of photostats of copies in the Huntington and Folger libraries, in addition to the two copies in the Bodleian. In 2005, for the Society's reprint of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), G. R. Proudfoot and Eric Rasmussen identified and collated sixty-two copies of the edition from institutional and private libraries in the United Kingdom, United States, and Japan. (26)

Obviously, editorial practice is influenced by the relative availability of technologies of reproduction, of international travel, and of library catalogues, but these practicalities have coincided with, as well as caused, the shift towards multiplicity. In fact the recent interest in a multiple, destabilixed Shakespeare and in "texts" over the formerly singular "text" seems to owe as much to late capitalism's fetishization of the commodity and the blandishments of consumer choice as it does to textual criticism's flirtation with poststructuralism and its doctrines of the multiple, the incomplete, and the fragmentary. That readers of Shakespeare might possess, or at least access, multiple versions of a previously singular play has its proper conceptual analogies as much in Walmart or Tesco selling dozens of different types and brands of breakfast cereal as it has in the demise of the grand recit and English literature's traditional disciplinary protocols of "compare and contrast." (27) Peter Shillingsburg has influentially identified the five formal orientations of editing as "documentary, aesthetic, authorial, sociological, and bibliographic," but the processes of editing Shakespeare over the last three decades suggests a sixth orientation should be added to this taxonomy: consumerist. (28)

Editorial cycles have certainly accelerated during the twentieth century. The process is self-evident if we look at the Arden imprint as an example. The first Arden series, under the general editorship of Edward Dowden and then W. J. Craig and R. H. Case, was in progress from 1899 to 1931. The publishers, Methuen, reassured Dowden after disappointing early sales of the first play in the series that there was "no reason why it should not go on selling for a long time, and you must remember that each volume of the series that appears will give a fillip to the preceding volumes." (29) Those serial fillips meant that it was not until 1951 that a second edition of the Arden Shakespeare was begun, with Una Ellis-Fermor, Harold F. Brooks, Harold Jenkins, and Brian Morris as general editors. The second series began twenty years after the completion of the first, and continued until 1982. The third series, with general editors David Scott Kastan, Richard Proudfoot, and Ann Thompson, began thirteen years later in 1995, and had published twenty-eight titles within fifteen years. To capture the movement in a different way, Dowden's Arden 1 Hamlet was published in 1899 and had an extended shelf life of eighty-three years, until the publication of the Arden 2 edition by Harold Jenkins in 1982. Jenkins's edition, by contrast, had barely twenty-five years before it was superseded by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor's Arden 3 edition of 2006. Other UK publishers mirrored this pattern. Cambridge University Press worked with noticeably reduced "rest periods" between series: Cambridge Shakespeare 1863-66, The New Shakespeare 1921-66, New Cambridge Shakespeare 1984 onwards. Oxford University Press struggled and failed to publish a complete edition of Shakespeare following R. B. McKerrow's Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare: A Study in Editorial Method (1939). The Oxford Shakespeare was finally published in 1986, with a second edition in 2005, during which period the individual plays were also reissued in at least three different cover designs. In 2009 an entirely new edition, with a projected publication date of 2016, was announced. Michael Dobson's laconic observation that "edited and published as it was during the Thatcher decade, the Oxford Shakespeare may run the risk of being tagged the Yuppie Shakespeare, to be exhibited in museums of the future alongside compact disc players and British Telecom share certificates" will thus have been quickly realized: the scholarly edition is as susceptible to the consumer market as any other commodity. (30)

It is hard to avoid the impression that editing Shakespeare is now a permanent publishing and scholarly activity. Not only did the cycles of scholarly editing under the Arden and Cambridge imprints speed up, but their schedules interwove with each other and with other, rival editorial imprints. The 1899 Hamlet had no real competitors, and the procedures of the new Arden series of individual plays were the most significant editorial development since the important Cambridge Shakespeare edition in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1982 Arden 2 text had the New Cambridge (edited by Philip Edwards in 1985) and the Oxford (edited by G. R. Hibbard in 1987) editions as immediate, substantive challengers, and each of these three editors produced a textually different version. Arden 2 was a conflated text amalgamating Q2 and F, with a few corrections from Q1; the New Cambridge text was "an eclectic text," "a compromise.... somewhere between" Q2 and F, with Q2 only passages marked in square brackets; (31) the Oxford edition printed F with Q2 only passages in appendixes. Further editions of the play in series by Penguin, Bantam, New Folger, Evervman, Applause, and Norton appeared during the 1980s and 1990s. (32) By the time of Arden 3, there were numerous competing editions of the play, both in print and in digital form. The parallels with growth elsewhere in the consumer economy are instructive: according to Gary Cross, average supermarkets carried about nine thousand different lines in the mid 1970s, a figure that had risen to 17,500 in 1986 and to 30,000 in 1996. (33) In response to this array of choice, the volume Which Shakespeare? A User's Guide to Editions self-consciously adopted the format of buyers' guides popularised by the British consumer magazine Which?, and road-tested competing editions in order to "give guidance to the user or 'consumer' of Shakespeare editions." Inevitably, the marketplace meant that, just as the consumer guides to electronic goods on which it was modeled, the book was almost immediately outdated. The hope that "it will be possible to update the present guide to editions from time to time," and with that the hope of keeping up with the output of editions, appears to have been a forlorn one. (34)

In the context of this consumerist multiplication of Shakespeare texts, therefore, we can see a reversal of R. A. Foakes's influential paradigm of the shift in popularity between Shakespeare's two dominant tragedies during the twentieth century. Foakes identifies an important historical disjunction. Following the ecstatic and sympathetic readings of the Romantics, Hamlet "remained the central, and for many, the greatest, work of Shakespeare until the 1950s. About 1960, however, an intriguing double shift took place": "King Lear regained its ascendancy in critical esteem (... and) became Shakespeare's bleakest and more despairing vision of suffering." (35) The high literary and philosophical status of King Lear elevated discussions of Shakespeare as reviser during the 1970s and 1980s. Describing the excitement of a Shakespeare Association of America seminar in 1980 at which prominent proponents of the theory of authorial revision, including himself, presented their arguments, Gary Taylor appropriates the genre of tragedy: the conversions of previously sceptical scholars presents a "peripeteia," "a compelling model of anagnorisis; suddenly, the scales fall from my eyes and I can see the light." (36) Working over the play's, or plays', intricacies thus became an activity scholars could believe they shared with the revising playwright himself, and their excitement was authorized and commodified in the possibility of producing new, multiple editions of the play/s. (37)

The canonization of the two-text theory of King Lear in the Oxford Shakespeare in 1986 confirmed its apparent (double) uniqueness, as the only play to be de-conflated in the edition. The new textual studies thus endorsed, for different reasons, the overturned tragic priority of Lear over Hamlet. But since the publication of the Oxford Shakespeare, its editors and other scholars have discussed the case for other of the plays as case studies in authorial revision. First among these has been Hamlet. As Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor admitted, "It now seems obvious that we should have included two versions of Hamlet, as we did of King Lear: a Folio-based version (as at present), and also a version based upon Q2." (38) If early interest in Shakespeare as a reviser took King Lear as its exemplary instance, editing in the wake of this revolution has opted instead for Hamlet. The publication in 2006 of the two-volume Arden 3 edition of Hamlet, with edited texts of Q1, Q2, and F, is presented by its editors as "making up for" Wells and Taylor's self-confessed weariness as they completed the Oxford Shakespeare. (39)

The new textuality has thus been driven by a dynamic as much economic as intellectual. That is not to say that publishing Shakespeare is disproportionately profitable, nor to assume that all consumption of Shakespeare involves spending money. Rather, the editorial decision to print the three-text Hamlet is figured in terms of consumer choice. Thompson and Taylor propose that their editorial "choice of text (or in our case the refusal to choose)" means that their readers "can choose" to read any of the three versions. (40) Choice becomes the prerogative of the reader-consumer, and not, as under previous editorial dispensations, the editor-producer. Their editorial method is thus allied with the logic of late twentieth-century capitalism, in which the toppling of state monopolies and consumer choice of multiple products have become an absolute index of a developed economy. Laurie Maguire, via Stephen Booth and Olivier's film prologue, wittily dubbed Hamlet "the tragedy of an editor who cannot make up his mind": we might feel that recently this has become less a tragedy and more a shopping opportunity. (41) And as many social scientists have observed, in modern industrialised societies including the dominant Shakespeare markets of the United States and the UK, "choice defines the self because choice is both the engine of independence and the mark of independence." (42) Celia Lury identifies "the fundamental axiom of contemporary consumer culture: that identify is defined through the exchange, possession and use of goods," and suggests that the concurrent rise of individualism and the development of a mass consumer society means that "modern Euro-American societies are characterized by the strongly rooted belief that 'to have is to be' [...] related to the privileging of a relationship between individuals and things in terms of possession." (43)

That editorial labor and the edited text might be material objects in this consumerist model is challenging to our forms of scholarly self-definition: locating the dominant economic metaphor of planned obsolescence in considering his own work on the Oxford Shakespeare, Stanley Wells avoids the association of the scrapheap in favor of a more comforting and organic hope "that my own editorial work will dwindle into obsolescence, forming one thin layer in the coral reef of editorial effort, like that of my predecessors." (44) But "the higher learning" was always a crucial branch of Thorstein Veblen's influential theory of conspicuous consumption, first published in 1899 as The Theory of the Leisure Class:

   The conventional insistence on a modicum of conspicuous waste as an
   incident of all reputable scholarship has affected our canons of
   taste and of serviceability in matters of scholarship in much the
   same way as the same principle has influenced our judgment of the
   serviceability of manufactured goods.

Veblen identifies the ways in which conspicuous consumption disguises its voracious appetite by appealing to intellectual or aesthetic criteria, when in fact consumerism is so interimplicated with these other factors that "we frequently interpret as aesthetic or intellectual a difference which in substance is pecuniary only." (45) As with other consumer items, that is to say, pecuniary or exchange value--consumerism and the market--is what is largely at stake in competing editions of Shakespeare. As Michael Bristol observes, "to convert a limited stock of cultural capital into a generous cash flow requires complicated forms of leverage. Shakespeare must be carefully positioned within a complex network of cultural assets and investments" (91). And like other aspects of advanced consumerism, the production of new Shakespeare editions gains a perverse value from its creation of so much "conspicuous waste." It's no accident that one of the two most commonly cited case studies for economic theories of planned obsolescence is the market in textbooks. (46)

In this textual marketplace, it is striking to see how Hamlet has come to the fore, newly multiple as the epitome of consumer choice. Web editions supplement printed texts: on the Enfolded Hamlet, a Web site combining or "enfolding" both Q2 and F texts of Hamlet through the use of curly and pointed brackets, Bernice W. Kliman acknowledges it alongside other versions: "when other purposes dictate, readers will consult other texts. The enfolded text, I hope, will find its niche--perhaps as a reference alongside a modern edited text, perhaps in conjunction with facsimiles of the early editions or with The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio." (47) The Enfolded Hamlet is thus an additional or supplementary version of the play: having just one Hamlet is implicitly unthinkable, and while this acknowledgement of textual consumer choice avoids the exchange economics of the market--the Enfolded Hamlet is freely available on the Internet--it cannot evade the cultural logic of the market--it is structured around consumerist desires for choice and multiplicity. The development of the Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a similar example. This important digital collaboration of British and American institutions with large holdings of early playtexts has used Hamlet as its inevitable prototype:

   Here you can view full cover-to-cover digital reproductions and
   transcriptions of thirty-two copies of the five earliest editions
   of the play Hamlet. You can view quartos separately, or alongside
   any number of copies. You can search, annotate, make public or
   private sets of annotations, create exhibits or character cue line
   lists, and download and print text and images. (48)

The fantasy here is of a unique, Web-enabled engagement with this multiple play. The repetition of the promissory "you can" suggests the ultimate consumer luxury: a personalised or bespoke Hamlet, customised to the individual. It echoes contemporary commendations of interactivity as the means to create uniqueness out of mass consumerism: the GPS navigation system promising "a personal navigation experience by learning your driving habits and navigat[ing] you according to your style," or the global sportswear giant offering shoes for which the color and fabric of each component can be chosen from a drop-down menu. (49) As the Shakespeare Quartos Archive project bid for National Endowment for the Humanities support concludes, "the first full online set of all pre-1641 editions of the plays in quarto will be joined with a state-of-the-art interface providing access to every copy of each Hamlet edition held by participating institutions. These resources will place these rarest of Shakespearean treasures in the hands of a world-wide community of scholars, teachers, and students." (50) The much-appreciated fact that access to the archive is free does not obviate the fact that it speaks to acquisitive textual desires for those "rarest treasures," desires that we can recognise as consumerist.

That Hamlet has had the unique property of anticipating modernity, is, of course, a cliche of its reception, from Victor Hugo's view that "Hamlet expresses a permanent condition of man" to Marjorie Garber's "Hamlet's story has become, for every audience, its own." (51) If, by the mid-nineteenth century, Hamlet had become "a mirror in which the bourgeois subject saw himself or herself reflected as intellectual, aesthete or artist, and as ineffectual or politically marginalised" (Foakes 78), that reflection at the beginning of the twenty-first century is significantly different. Now the editorial multiplication of Hamlets both reflects and constructs a new, late capitalist subject, homo consumericus. (52) Again, "Hamlet remains proleptically in tune with the latest present. Since 1800 he has proven capable of accommodating each new modification of inwardness." (53) Thus the individualism Hamlet speaks to is no longer the shared experience of mourning or of interiority or of consciousness, but the distinct, privatised, modern self of "an increasingly self-isolating and fantastic culture of consumption" (Cross 251). The irony of Margreta de Grazia's radical reading of Hamlet's tragedy as the tragedy of dispossession is clear: "Hamlet's disengagement from the land-driven plot is the very precondition of the modernity ascribed to him after 1800" (4): this time around, the tragedy is the tragedy of the possessive individual, defined not through possessing but being possessed (the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that the ghostly and the proprietorial meanings of the word have developed concurrently). (54) The forms of Hamlet, the material Hamlets, are now the way the play means by and for us, as the epitome of a choice-driven, consumable, and multiple Shakespeare. Hamlet's contemporary value is in its multiplicity. Critical investment in the detail of textual variants has been driven at least as much by a kind of consumer connoisseurship and the marketplace comfort of built-in obsolescence as by the bibliographic principles acknowledged by Shakespeare editors: the materialist turns out to be materialistic.

Given the appeal of the newly multiple Hamlets to patterns of identity based on consumption, perhaps one of the latest iterations of the plays' most famous lines is inevitable. As Douglas Bruster has pointed out, "the 'to be or not to be' soliloquy has become a version-in-miniature of this most celebrated writer's most celebrated play and character." (55) It has also become the locus classicus of arguments about the multiple text, because, of course, in its familiar version from Q2 and F the question is followed by "that is the question," whereas in Q1 the phrase is completed "I there's the point." (56) Recent adaptations of this most malleable of straplines allies it ineluctably with consumerism. "To buy or not to buy" has been used in countless recent headlines and advertising taglines: "To Buy or Not to Buy, that is the question" (Times Business on bank shares); "To buy or not to buy: Chinese house buyers' dilemma" (China Daily, on Beijing house prices); "To Buy or Not to Buy the iPhone" (advertising Web site). (57) The World Wildlife Fund environmental charity uses the phrase to urge consumers to buy less, and a more developed version of this application provides the title for April Lane Benson's self-help book subtitled Why We Overshop and How to Stop. (58) Benson's book opens: "To Buy or Not to Buy--for overshoppers, that is the question" and goes on to detail a rescue plan for the estimated seventeen million United States sufferers from a "shopping problem" in which shopping is "impacting on your life in a negative way" as an "important source of emotional, social, occupational, financial, and spiritual misery for a great many individuals and families." (59) Not to buy is for late capitalism not to be: Hamlet's radical gesture of self-cancellation becomes the strapline either for consumer indecision or for a manifesto of anti-consumerism.

This is not an elegy for a pre-consumerist time, nor a jeremiad against consumerism, although Gary Cross's reminder that a history of consumerism has seen "a gradual shift of goods from the community to family and finally to the individual" (250) reveals our willing scholarly participation in a culture of privatizing plays from their origins in the public theater to their latest incarnation on an individual laptop screen. A recent assessment of electronic texts "deny[ing] their common status as public objects" speaks to a more general anxiety that the multiplying texts of Hamlet engender in consumers the same narcissistic isolation suffered by their eponymous hero. (60) But nor is this a lament for a text of Shakespeare inoculated against the distorting power of the free market: as studies of early modern play printing, and as the emphatic "read him, but buy it first" of Heminge and Condell's epistle to readers of the Folio evidence, this is a fantasy. And as Michael Bristol has pointed out, "The body of works we refer to as Shakespeare was initially composed, performed and appreciated as merchandise for an emerging market in leisure and cultural services. The secular authority of these works is, practically speaking, entirely independent of the institutions of high literature, since it continues to operate very effectively through the alternative channels of the culture industry." (61) Shakespeare, in print and in the theater, is not merely distributed via consumer culture but constituted by that culture. Rather, my aim is to remind us that academic enterprise participates in, even while it attempts to mystify, the systems of speculation, exchange, and consumption. Bibliographic fashions are closer to the early modern market for gloves and other consumer items than to the early modern market for books. Peter Shillingsburg observes austerely in his analysis of scholarly editing that editing and entrepreneurship are quite different things:

   if the purpose is to make presentable, agreeable and attractive a
   work of current interest or artistic merit or pretension, then the
   editor may well be considered a commercial editor, copyediting the
   text and altering it to accommodate the predilections of the
   supposed audience. This is not scholarly editing; it is
   entrepreneurship. As members of a laissez-faire society, we shall
   say nothing against entrepreneurship, but we need not therefore
   confuse one thing with another. (62)

This model of editing uncontaminated by the market is, however, unsustainable for Shakespeare publishing: as scholars, our investment in the "new" is, as on those early modern title pages, always entrepreneurial; and as readers, it is always possessive and consumerist. Where the singular, stabilised texts of the new bibliographers instituted lasting textual monuments, the newfound textual multiplicity of Hamlet has enabled it to speak anew to our consumerist culture in which editions proliferate like other commodities, and in which the ultimate luxury item is the textual self-selection invited by electronic texts. This is a long way from those early modern plays such as The Spanish Tragedy or Mucedorus, which encouraged single rather than multiple purchases and which stressed the similarity between serial editions rather than their differences. The first edition of Hamlet was marketed through an appeal to communal performance, boasting that "it hath beene diverse times acted by his Highnesse servants in the cittie of London: as also in the two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and else-where"; Hamlet's twenty-first-century address to its readers is to allow us the privatized fantasy that the individuality of the reader can be reflected and rewarded with a personalised, bespoke Shakespearean text: myHamlet[TM].

Notes

(1.) James Knowles, "Jonson's Entertainment at Britain's Burse," in Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance ed. Martin Butler (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 134; 136.

(2.) Anon, A breefe discourse .. of the laudable customes of London (London: 1584), 21. Quoted in Michael D. Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare (London: Routledge,, 1986), 33.

(3.) Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996), 34.

(4.) Peter Erondelle, The French Garden: For English ladyes and gentlewomen to walke in (London:1605), sig I6vo.

(5.) Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Spendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press OK?YES, 2005), 42. See also Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1996).

(6.) See for example Sixe sermons preached by Maister Henry Smith at Clement Danes Church without Temple barre And published by a more perfect copie than heretofore. With two prayers of the same author hereunto annexed (London, 1594).

(7.) Peter Blayney, "The Publication of Playbooks," in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383-422; 387-89.

(8.) See Lukas Erne, Beyond "The Spanish Tragedy": A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 59-67.

(9.) Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass, "The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays," Shakespeare Quarterly 59:4 (2008) 371-420, 373.

(10.) Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, "The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited," Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 1-32, 5.

(11.) Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. (London, 1623), sig. A3. On Pavier, see Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 106-38.

(12.) Cyndia Susan Clegg, "Renaissance Play-Readers, Ordinary and Extraordinary," in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 23-38; 34.

(13.) Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen (London:1647), sig A2vo; sig A4; sig A4vo.

(14.) On Harington's own presentation copies, see Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford, 2001). On Harington's playlists, see F. J. Furnivall, "Sir John Harington's Shakespeare Quartos," Notes and Queries IX, 7th series (May 1890): 382-83.

(15.) Giles E. Dawson, "An Early List of Elizabethan Plays," The Library 4th ser., 15 (1935): 445-56; 446.

(16.) Nati H. Krivatsy and Laetitia Yeandle, "Sir Edward Dering," in Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Early Stuart BookLists, vol. 1, ed. R. J. Fehrenbach and E.S. Leedham-Green (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), 137-269: 255; 141; 255. Bodley's Library's management of a number of playtexts from Robert Burton's library in 1640 suggests a similar attitude: whereas volumes in other genres are listed, the titles of the playbooks acquired were not catalogued until 1843 (Ian Philip, The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1983), 33.

(17.) Robert MacDonald, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1971), 191-92; 197.

(18.) David McPherson, "Ben Jonson's Library and Marginalia: An Annotated Catalogue," Studies in Philology: Texts and Studies 71 (1974): 3-106, 62-63.

(19.) Sears Jayne, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 69.

(20.) In The Original Bodleian Copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare (The Turbutt Shakespeare) (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1905), F. Madan speculates that the First Folio was among 24 [pounds sterling]-worth of "superfluous Library Books sold by order of the Curators" to an Oxford bookseller in 1663-64, while acknowledging that it is not listed as such, nor mentioned subsequently in the accounts or extant trade catalogues of the bookseller (5-6).

(21.) Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of his Humour (London, 1600), sig A4vo.

(22.) William Shakespeare, The Tragaedy of Othello, The Moore of Venice (London, 1622), sig A2; Christopher Marlowe, Tambudaine the Great (London, 1593), sig A2 vo; John Marston, The Wonder of Women Or The Tragedie of Sophonsiba (London, 1606), sig A2. See also Clegg.

(23.) Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text," in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana 1977), 159.

(24.) Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 269.

(25.) On stop-press corrections, see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), esp. 353-54.

(26.) Anon, King Leir ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: The Malone Society Reprints, 1907); Anon, Arden of Faversham ed. Hugh Macdonald (Oxford: The Malone Society Reprints, 1940 [1947]); John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen (Oxford: The Malone Society Reprints, 2005).

(27.) On the economics of consumer choice, see Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (New York: Ecco 2004); on comparison as crucial to the formation of English Studies, see Ben Knights, "Intelligence and Interrogation: The Identity of the English Student," Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 4 (2005): 33-52.

(28.) Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing & the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed., (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 16.

(29.) Quoted by Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 206-7.

(30.) Michael Dobson, "The Design of the Oxford Shakespeare: An Ever Writer to a Never Reader," Analytic and Enumerative Bibliography n.s.4 (1990): 91-97; 97.

(31.) Philip Edwards, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 32.

(32.) See Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 381-86.

(33.) Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 214.

(34.) Ann Thompson et al., Which Shakespeare? A User's Guide to Editions (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992), 1; 11.

(35.) R.A. Foakes, Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3-4.

(36.) Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Hogarth Press, 1990), 358.

(37.) See, for example, editions of King Lear by Michael Warren (The Complete King Lear, 1608-1623, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and by Rene Weis (King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition, London: Longman Press, 1993), as well as the Oxford Shakespeare.

(38.) Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, "The Oxford Shakespeare Re-Viewed by the General Editors," Analytic and Enumerative Bibliography n.s. 4 (1990): 6-20; 16.

(39.) Ann Thompson and Nell Taylor, eds., Hamlet: The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning Publisher, 2006), 11.

(40.) Ibid., 11-12.

(41.) Laurie Maguire, ""Actions that a man might play': Mourning, Memory, Editing," Performance Research 7 (2002): 66-76; 72.

(42.) Hazel Rose Markus and Barry Schwartz,"Does Choice Mean Freedom and Well-Being?," Journal of Consumer Research 37 (2010): 344-355; 344.

(43.) Celia Lury, Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 238; 7.

(44.) Stanley Wells, Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 3. It is interesting to read in a later interview Wells explaining that his remark had "a touch of modesty ... of trying to amuse people by means of self-denigration." See Edward Ragg, "The Oxford Shakespeare ReVisited: An Interview with Professor Stanley Wells," Analytic and Enumerative Bibliography n.s.12 (2001): 73-101; 91.

(45.) Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, ed. Martha Bantu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 257; 67.

(46.) See Toshiaki Iizuka, "An Empirical Analysis of Planned Obsolescence," Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 16 (2007): 191-226. The other dominant example is the car industry, which gives additional piquancy to Camille Paglia's denunciation of academia as "as busily all-American as the Detroit auto trade. New! Improved! See next year's model today!" The subsequent collapse of the Detroit motor industry gives the comparison a millenarian feel. See Camille Paglia, "Junk bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf" in her Sex, Art and American Culture (London: Viking, 1992), 170-248; 220.

(47.) The Enfolded Hamlet http://www.leoyan.com/global-language.com/EN FOLDED/enfolded.intro.html

(48.) The Shakespeare Quartos Archive http://www.quartos.org

(49.) http://www.garmin.com; http://store.nike.com

(50.) http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/pdf/JISC_NEH_Folger.pdf

(51.) Hugo quoted in Foakes, Hamlet Versus Lear, 14; Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 470.

(52.) This term is used in the final paragraph of Gad Saad, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erblaum Associates, 2007), 267.

(53.) Margreta de Grazia, "Hamlet" without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22.

(54.) Helga Dittmar, The Social Psychology of Material Possessions: To Have is To Be (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), esp. 205-6. I am conscious of echoing C. B. Macpherson's phrase from his The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), but whereas for Macpherson the possessive individual is "the proprietor of his own person or capacities," where 'the human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others" (3), my term here suggests the individual possesses his or her person through the ownership of stuff.

(55.) Douglas Bruster, To Be or Not To Be (London: Continuum Books, 2007), 8.

(56.) Variant reading of this soliloquy are presented as part of the case for the individual interest of the Shakespeare quartos and therefore for the funding of the Shakespeare Quartos Archive: it is the only quotation offered from Shakespeare in the document. See Q2 sig G2 and Q1 sig I4vo.

(57.) Sources are as follows: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/col umnists/article 6945355.ece; http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-11/27/ content_9062591.htm; http://www.pcworld.com/article/133576/to_buy_or_not to_buy_the_iphone_pc_worlders_clash.html.

(58.) http://www.wwf.org.uk/how_you_can_help/change_how_you_elive/to_ buy_or not to buy.

(59.) April Lane Benson, To Buy Or Not To Buy: Why We Overshop and How to Stop (New York: Trumpeter Books, 2009), 1-4.

(60.) Kathryn Sutherland and Marilyn Deegan, Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), viii.

(61.) Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare, 49.

(62.) Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, 2-3.