Did Heminges and Condell Edit Shakespeare?

This isn’t a case against John Heminges and Henry Condell. It is a reconstruction of the world the First Folio was made in, and of what the two men would actually have had to do to bring it about, keeping what the record documents separate from what it only lets us infer. The popular account compresses a complicated commercial and theatrical process into a single tidy sentence: two loyal friends collected their late colleague’s plays and edited them into a book.

Almost every word of that sentence needs qualifying.

(A note on spelling. Names had no fixed form in this period, and this one appears in many: the printed plays and the Folio use Shakespeare or Shake-speare; the Stratford parish records and the surviving signatures lean to Shakspere and Shaksper; a court paper such as the Revels account writes Shaxberd. The variation is orthographic. It does not mark out different people, and it does not by itself sort the documents into the man and the author. This document uses Shakspere for the man from Stratford and Shakespeare for the works and the pen name, a modern convention adopted to keep two questions legible: who the Stratford man was, and who wrote the plays. The convention is ours, not the period’s, and the spelling alone settles neither question.)

“Editors” is the wrong word

Books of 1623 had no editors in the modern sense, and the First Folio was no exception. Its title page credits the stationers, Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, and the enterprise was a publishing syndicate that also included William Aspley and John Smethwick. The hands-on making of the text happened in the Jaggard printing house, where several compositors set the type; the bibliographer Charlton Hinman distinguished at least five of them by their spelling and spacing habits, and the uneven quality of the printed text shows how inconsistently the pages were proof-read against copy. The preparation of the manuscript copy fell to company professionals and paid specialists. Ralph Crane, a professional scrivener, transcribed fair copies of several of the plays, his hand clearest in the opening comedies, and has been called, with some justice, Shakespeare’s first editor. Edward Knight, the King’s Men’s book-keeper, managed the company’s scripts and, on a scholarly hypothesis associated with W. W. Greg, may also have proofed copy for the Folio; how much of the copy passed through either man is not documented.

Against that background, Heminges and Condell weren’t editors and had no training that would have made them so. Heminges was the company’s business and financial manager, a sharer from 1594, a Globe shareholder, a freeman of the Grocers’ Company, and the man who received the King’s Men’s court payments. Condell was a sharer and householder with property in Fulham. Both could sign their names, so both were literate to the level their trade required, but there is no evidence that either had a university education, any classical or scholarly training, or any experience preparing a book for the press. Their documented competence is that of actors and theatre men of business. Many books still call them the Folio’s editors; that is a convenience of language, not a description the record supports. Defensible words are compilers and sponsors: they provided the plays, the company’s consent to print them, and their names to vouch for the texts, but not the legal right to print, which lay with the stationers.

The words in their names read like Jonson’s

The two prose pieces signed by Heminges and Condell, the dedication to the Herbert brothers and the address “To the Great Variety of Readers,” are the source of nearly everything the popular story treats as their editorial voice, including the famous claim to have collected the plays of their “friend and fellow.” Yet a long line of scholars, from Edmond Malone and George Steevens onward, has argued that Ben Jonson wrote or heavily shaped those epistles, on the strength of verbal parallels with Jonson’s own prose: phrases such as “absolute in their numbers,” and echoes of his Discoveries and of his dedication to The New Inn.

Percy and Evelyn Simpson, editing Jonson, reviewed the case at length and were cautious about it, and it remains an argument from style rather than a documented fact. But it is widely enough accepted that the honest position is this: the texts most often quoted as Heminges and Condell speaking as editors may not be their composition at all. If Jonson supplied the words, then the men’s actual contribution was their names and their standing, not the sentiments the words express.

A signed testimonial carries two things: the authority of the name that signs it, and the claims the words make. If Jonson wrote the words, then the claims are his: that the fellows gathered the plays, that these are the true copies, that they mourned their friend. Heminges and Condell need not have composed those words, though they may well have chosen or approved them. Either way, the prose was not what only they could give; their names were, and the names were the point. What the book needed, and what Jonson’s praise alone could not supply, was the word of Shakspere’s own fellows: the two men who had acted beside him for twenty years, vouching that these were the genuine and complete plays, not the ‘stolen and surreptitious’ copies the epistle disowns. Only insiders could give that assurance, which is why their signatures, and not Jonson’s, sit at the foot of it. It would then be Jonson’s framing carrying their endorsement, not their own account of what they did, which is why it cannot be read as their first-hand testimony about the making of the book.

How plays were owned and kept in those days

A play in this period belonged to a company, not to its author and not to a building. A company ordinarily controlled a play it had bought and its use in the repertory, though the exact arrangements varied, and each play required one authoritative manuscript, the “book,” which carried the Master of the Revels’ licence and served as the prompt copy in performance. That book was a valuable asset, kept in the custody of the company’s book-keeper, and physically present in the tiring-house, the backstage area, whenever the play was in rehearsal or performance. This was true of every company, not only the King’s Men: Philip Henslowe’s surviving papers for the Admiral’s Men at the Rose show a company treating its stock of playbooks as owned property, with plays listed as assets.

One caution belongs here by the same standard applied to everything else: the often-cited 1598 inventory that Henslowe’s records once contained is itself now lost and survives only through a transcript by John Payne Collier, a documented forger, so even that thread is weaker than it first appears.

What the record documents, then, is custody: the licensed books were company property, held by the book-keeper, at the playhouse when in use. What it does not document is a permanent archive. No surviving source describes a library or muniment room at the Globe, the Blackfriars, or any playhouse, gives an inventory of a manuscript store, or says where the books physically lived between productions. A company keeping its own books is fact; a storehouse full of manuscripts in a room at the theatre is a reasonable picture that the evidence does not actually supply.

One company by 1623, but not from the start

From 1594 onward the plays that carry the name Shakespeare belonged to a single company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which became the King’s Men in 1603; William Shakspere of Stratford is documented as a sharer in it. Everything in the canon from the mid-1590s on was that one company’s property from the beginning, which covers the great bulk of the plays. But the earliest plays had divided lives before the company existed. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were formed only in 1594, in the regrouping that followed the long plague closures of 1592 to 1594, which had bankrupted and scattered the older troupes. The quarto title pages record the result: the 1594 Titus Andronicus says it was played by Derby’s (that is, Strange’s), Pembroke’s, and Sussex’s Men, three companies for one play, and the 1595 text of Henry VI Part 3, as The True Tragedy, names Pembroke’s Men. Naming three companies on one title page is unusual, and it most likely reflects those unsettled years, when failing troupes are thought to have sold or shared their playbooks to raise money. So the earliest plays genuinely were held and performed by other companies, and had to have been: before 1594 there was no Chamberlain’s Men to hold them. They came into the new company during and after the 1594 reorganisation, though the exact means for each play, whether purchase or carriage by personnel, is partly a matter of inference.

That the King’s Men held the whole Folio repertory by 1623 is therefore true in the practical sense but is built from convergent records rather than any single inventory. Court records tie particular plays to the company: the Master of the Revels’ account for 1604 to 1605 lists the King’s Men performing several Shakespeare plays at court, and names the poet as “Shaxberd” against some of them, Othello, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, and The Merchant of Venice, while other entries name no poet, as was usual for such records; the company’s court payments, meanwhile, were received by Heminges himself. One caveat attaches to this account in particular: it was among the Revels papers that Peter Cunningham was accused of forging in the nineteenth century. Modern scholarship generally accepts it as genuine, but the “Shaxberd” detail rests on a document with that history behind it. The 1619 order discussed below presupposes the company’s rights in its plays. And the Folio was produced by the company’s own leading men. Yet for a real subset of the plays, above all the roughly eighteen never printed before, there is no independent record at all, and the Folio is the only witness that the play existed and was the company’s. The contrast is sharp. King Lear carries external provenance: its 1608 quarto and the Stationers’ Register entry of 1607 both state that it was played before the King at Whitehall on St Stephen’s night by his Majesty’s servants who played at the Globe. Timon of Athens carries none: no surviving mention from any source before the Folio, no recorded performance, no quarto, and no place in Francis Meres’s 1598 list; it enters the record only in the Folio, where, on the usual bibliographical reading, it was slotted in as a late substitute when Troilus and Cressida was held up. For Lear the company’s ownership is documented outside the book; for Timon it is the book vouching for itself.

The real permissions problem was the stationers, not the theatres

Because the unpublished plays were the King’s Men’s own property, gathering them raised no question of asking other playhouses for anything; there was nothing to ask, and no one else to ask. The friction lay elsewhere, in the London book trade. About half the plays had already appeared as quartos, and under the Stationers’ Company the right to reprint a text belonged to whichever stationer had entered it, quite apart from the acting company.

This is the moment to say what that syndicate was, because it is the real engine of the book. Publishing and printing were separate trades: the person who owned the copy and financed the book, usually a bookseller, was often not the printer who owned the press. The heaviest cost was paper, imported and dear, and a folio was the largest and most expensive format, so the paper for a run of several hundred large-sheet copies tied up a great deal of money for months before any of it came back. That was more risk than one stationer would carry, so several combined: each put in a share of the capital and took a share of the return, and they pooled the copyrights they separately held, which is just what a collection of already-printed plays needed. That is why the imprint names four men. Isaac Jaggard was the printer and Edward Blount the leading publisher, while William Aspley and John Smethwick were taken in largely because they owned the rights to some of the plays already in quarto, so their inclusion both cleared those copyrights and spread the cost. A publishing syndicate was not a company of artists but a small consortium of book-trade men jointly financing one costly volume and combining the rights that made it legal to print.

Where those two men’s rights had come from shows the ordinary channels by which such property moved. A stationer acquired the copy in one of three ways: by entering a new text in the Register himself, by buying or being assigned it from another stationer, or by inheriting it. Aspley held his by original entry, having joined Andrew Wise in 1600 to register and publish Much Ado About Nothing and the second part of Henry IV. Smethwick held his by purchase down a chain of booksellers: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Taming of the Shrew came to him in 1607 by transfer from Nicholas Ling, who had himself only lately gathered several of them from Cuthbert Burby. None of this touched the author or the acting company; the right was trade property, moved by registration, sale and inheritance among stationers alone.

So the previously printed plays had to be cleared commercially. The mechanism is visible in the records: on 8 November 1623 Blount and Isaac Jaggard entered sixteen plays in the Stationers’ Register as “not formerly entred to other men,” registering only the previously unregistered ones, while the rest were covered because rights-holders sat inside the syndicate. The near-loss of Troilus and Cressida, kept out until a prior 1603 entry that happened to have descended to the Jaggards could be reconciled at the last minute, shows the system at work. And the precedent was fresh: in 1619 the same Jaggard shop had printed the Pavier quartos, an earlier attempt at a Shakespeare collection, and the King’s Men had objected, prompting the Lord Chamberlain, William Herbert, to order that no King’s Men play be printed without the company’s consent. The company had thus asserted control over the printing of its plays four years before the Folio, which is in effect the authorised version of what had been blocked when attempted without them. The 1619 letter itself does not survive and is known from a 1637 reference, so it too is attested at one remove.

Who had the authority to print, and who did not

The authority to print lay in a definite place, and it was not with Heminges and Condell. The legal power to print a text belonged to whoever owned the copy. For the plays already in quarto that meant Aspley, Smethwick, and the other rights-holders in the syndicate; for the plays never printed, the right was created only when Blount and Isaac Jaggard entered them in the Register on 8 November 1623, an entry that itself required the Company’s allowance. Heminges and Condell owned no copies and held no such right.

What ran through the two men was of two other kinds, and neither was a right to print. One was the company’s consent to release its own unprinted plays, which the 1619 order had made necessary and which they, as senior sharers, could give; but that is the company authorising the use of its property through them, not a right granted to them, and no document records that consent for the Folio. The other was authentication: as Shakspere’s surviving fellows, they vouched for the texts as the Folio’s “True Originall Copies,” which is a warranty of genuineness, not a licence to print. The dedication to the Lord Chamberlain, William Herbert, who had issued the 1619 order, was a bid for patronage and protection, not a legal authorisation either. So the chain runs thus: the King’s Men consented through their senior men, the stationers owned or registered the copies and thereby held the right to print, the Company’s licenser allowed the entry, and Heminges and Condell lent their names to vouch for the texts.

What Heminges and Condell would actually have had to do

Set out plainly, the work divides into parts, and none of it is editing in the modern sense. For the plays never printed, they would have drawn the company’s own books from the book-keeper’s keeping, and where a book was old or heavily marked, arranged for a fresh fair copy, which is what Ralph Crane’s transcripts represent. For the plays already in print, they, or more precisely the stationers of the syndicate, would have assembled the copyrights and supplied quarto copy, sometimes corrected against a manuscript. Across the whole they would have lent their names and their standing as the surviving fellows who had known Shakspere and acted beside him for twenty years, and provided, or lent their names to, the prefatory framing that presents the collection, framing that was very likely Jonson’s work. The physical copy would have gone to the Jaggard shop in batches as the printing advanced, over roughly February 1622 to November 1623 on Charlton Hinman’s reconstruction, the shop running several other books at once and pausing, in his account, when other work took priority; printing moved section by section, comedies then histories then tragedies, so the manuscripts were fed in as each part was reached, not stacked in a single pile at the outset. None of the manuscript copy used to set the Folio is known to survive, which is consistent with copy being marked up by the compositors and then discarded. All of this is organisational, custodial, and sponsoring labour, and all of it is entirely plausible for two senior sharers. It is simply not the same activity as editing a text.

The useful comparison is Jonson’s own Folio of 1616. Jonson did in life what the dead author of the Shakespeare plays could not: he supervised his own collection. He entered it in the Stationers’ Register himself, unusual for a writer of plays, worked closely from 1615 with a first-rate printer, William Stansby, selected and revised his contents, leaving out collaborative and lesser work and provocatively titling stage plays his Workes, and oversaw the text. That is the ordinary engine of such a book, a single living author curating and proofing with a good printer, and it very likely made the 1623 project thinkable. It also measures the difference. The Shakespeare Folio had no author to choose, revise, or correct; its authority and its manuscripts came from the sharers, its craft from the Jaggard shop, and its framing, in all probability, from Jonson. Much of what an author would normally have supplied was either supplied by other hands or simply went undone, which is why the text is as uneven as it is.

The honest bottom line

Nothing here shows that Heminges and Condell did not do what they are credited with doing. The documented facts, their two decades in the company, their access through it to the company’s playbooks, the mourning rings left them in Shakspere’s will, and their names on the Folio’s own list of principal actors, make them the natural and plausible people to have gathered and authorised the material. What the record will not support is the tidy popular version of their role. They were not editors in any modern sense; such copy-preparation as the record can trace was Crane’s and perhaps Knight’s, and the printing was the Jaggard shop’s. The prefaces that give them an editorial voice were, in all likelihood, written by Jonson. The plays were not lifted whole from a single archive but assembled from a company’s working stock, from previously printed quartos whose rights had to be bought, and, for the earliest plays, from a repertory that had passed through other companies before the King’s Men existed. And for a real part of the collection, the claim that the company held the play rests on the Folio’s own word and nothing else.

The accurate picture is of senior company men who supplied three things the project could not proceed without: their standing as the men who had known Shakspere, their access to the company’s books, and their names on the result. The craft belonged to others. That is not a smaller story than the legend. It is a truer one, and it is how such a book actually came to be made in those days.

Sources

Folger Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare Documented: Stationers’ Register entry for the First Folio (16 plays, 8 Nov 1623); King Lear first edition (1608) and its Stationers’ Register entry (1607); Account of Edmund Tylney, Master of the Revels, plays performed 1604–5; Treasurer of the Chamber records naming Heminges as payee; Shakespeare’s company.

Folgerpedia: Promptbooks; Timon of Athens.

Internet Shakespeare Editions: The First Folio (1623); Titus Andronicus Quarto 1 (1594).

Wikipedia: First Folio; Shakespeare’s editors; John Heminges; Henry Condell; Ralph Crane; Ben Jonson folios; William Stansby; William Jaggard; Thomas Pavier; Pembroke’s Men; Henslowe’s diary; Timon of Athens.

Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson: Prose Contributions to Shakespeare’s First Folio (on the attribution of the epistles to Jonson).

W. W. Greg, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses (on the book-keeper, the licensed book, and playhouse custody).

firstfolios.com: Printing the First Folio (printing timeline and interruptions).

Related: How Shakspere Got Connected to the Works and The Ever-Living Poet, which weigh the First Folio as evidence.