{"id":2736,"date":"2023-03-28T12:44:57","date_gmt":"2023-03-28T16:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=2736"},"modified":"2025-09-21T17:38:37","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T21:38:37","slug":"lesser-zachary-ghosts-holes-rips-and-scrapes-shakespeare-in-1619-bibliography-in-the-longue-duree-philadelphia-university-of-pennsylvania-press-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2023\/03\/28\/lesser-zachary-ghosts-holes-rips-and-scrapes-shakespeare-in-1619-bibliography-in-the-longue-duree-philadelphia-university-of-pennsylvania-press-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesser, Zachary. Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Dur\u00e9e.<\/em> Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Lesser, Zachary. Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Dur\u00e9e.<\/em> Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.\u00a0<\/h1>\n\n
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Megan E. Fox<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a>, <\/span>Reviews<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Cover<\/a><\/svg><\/span><\/a><\/div><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lesser, Zachary. Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Dur\u00e9e.<\/em> Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes <\/em>addresses one of the most contentious volumes in Shakespeare print history, the 1619 collection of plays known as the Pavier Quartos. Sometimes referred to as the \u201cFalse Folio,\u201d plagued with false dates and inconsistent collation, the Pavier Quartos were for the New Bibliography school a project that validated the authority and purity of the 1623 First Folio. However, by turning away from the often prescriptive bibliography of the early twentieth century to \u201cclose looking\u201d\u2014 \u201creexamining these same materials, but with the advantage of fresh theoretical perspectives, revisionist thinking about the limits of the New Bibliography, and new technologies”\u2014Zachary Lesser argues that we are able \u201cquite literally to see things that the New Bibliographers could not\u201d and make new discoveries about these oft-examined texts (19). This book began as a co-authored chapter with Peter Stallybrass in Shakespeare and Textual Studies <\/em>(2015, eds. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai), in which Lesser and Stallybrass posit that William Jaggard printed the 1619 collection, which included Shakespeare plays but also Thomas Heywood\u2019s A Woman Killed with Kindness, <\/em>in a form that intentionally evoked a reader\u2019s sammelb\u00e4nde more than an authorial collection. Ultimately, they suggest the name shift from Pavier Quartos to Jaggard Quartos, a convention Lesser follows in this book (and I use in this review). Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes <\/em>extends and expands upon Lesser\u2019s earlier work on this important 1619 collection of Shakespeare\u2019s plays: via personal examination of 289 of the extant 372 copies of the Jaggard Quartos, with an additional 53 copies examined on his behalf, Lesser reevaluates the New Bibliographical narrative of this edition which has remained mostly unquestioned since W. W. Greg\u2019s 1908 essay \u201cOn Certain False Dates in Shakespearean Quartos.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The central methodological claim of Lesser\u2019s case study is that an attention to the long and disparate lives of each individual copy helps us to better understand the making of the Jaggard Quartos and allows us to complicate the studies conducted by New Bibliographers, whose bibliographic descriptions and attendant explanations of the texts\u2019 extant forms still condition contemporary approaches to bibliography. By carefully studying individual copies across long periods of time, Lesser provides a fuller picture of the material conditions of their production and use. He asserts that \u201cthe plays we read today in rare book libraries represent only the current stage of a long historical process that has changed, and often obscured, the material forms they took in the past\u201d (72). Though ghosts, holes, rips, and scrapes act as chapter titles and as starting points for Lesser\u2019s reevaluation of the New Bibliographic narrative of what \u2018Shakespeare\u2019 meant in 1619, Lesser\u2019s analysis integrates a broad range of evidence. One revealing example of how Lesser\u2019s chronologically attentive close reading  leads to new discoveries is a text he examined at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The copy\u2019s blue paper binding led cataloguers to label it as a \u201cmade-up volume \u2026 put together probably in the 18th or 19th century,\u201d but Lesser\u2019s attention to the book’s unusual organization led him to question that description (48). Looking underneath the later binding showed evidence of a contemporary leather and glue binding, proving it as a copy of Jaggard Quartos. A laser focus on the paradigm of \u2018ideal copy\u2019 and a disregard for later interventions on the seventeenth century books allowed this copy to escape prior notice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the book, Lesser grapples with a sensationalizing trend in which bibliographic research casts itself as crime scene investigation or s\u00e9ance. He observes in the introduction that \u201cthere is a genre problem that seems almost inherent in bibliographic studies, as [Laurie] Maguire has noted: they tend to take the form of the detective story\u201d (18-19). The bibliographer-as-detective trope hides its assumptions and fixates on stable, complete solutions. Wary as he is of the sensationalizing aspects of bibliography which undergird the New Bibliography\u2019s narratives of discovery and success, Lesser sometimes falls into this rhythm, quoting Sherlock Holmes, using Agatha Christie in an epitaph, and occasionally making observations such as \u201cthese title pages have a secret\u201d (87). In reference to the copy of the Quartos at the Newberry Library mentioned above, Lesser observes that \u201ccataloging practices have obscured our understanding of its true nature\u201d (47-48). Likewise, Lesser\u2019s usage of \u2018ghosts\u2019 as both bibliographic details and suggestive presences haunting catalog records is useful insofar as it reiterates the continued gaps in our knowledge of these copies in the longue dur\u00e9e<\/em>, but this is no more a ghost story than detective novel. Playing into the suggestiveness of language such as \u201cthe ghost who returns to haunt the Pavier Quartos is the ghost of \u2018Shakespeare,\u2019\u201d (33) or using ghostly as a descriptor (\u201cghostly evidence\u201d (36), \u201cghostly copies\u201d (75), \u201cghostly form\u201d (100), \u201cghostly palimpsest\u201d (130), among others), Lesser illustrates the importance of a point that he makes throughout the volume: we operate in response to prior historiographical milieu, and we need to continually examine these influences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lesser\u2019s conclusion compellingly argues for the value of bibliographic rigor and for the potential that \u201cclose looking\u201d offers to contemporary textual studies. Therein, Lesser offers a summary of the new set of facts we have to work with in regards to the 1619 Quartos, their implications, and some of his conjectures based on those facts. He concludes with a series of questions about the Jaggard Quartos, a move I found to be full of intellectual humility, generosity, curiosity, and excitement for future study of these texts. Perhaps most importantly, Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes <\/em>is a persuasive argument in favor of archival research and the integral role descriptive bibliography continues to play in historical and literary scholarship. Although digital access changes the ways we research and allows us to see what prior scholars could not, the types of conclusions Lesser is able to draw are only possible if one can look closely at the objects themselves. Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes <\/em>is an important foray into the revivified question of the Jaggard Quartos, a testament to what one can learn from close looking as well as to what remains unanswered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Megan E. Fox, University of Wisconsin-Madison<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The central methodological claim of Lesser\u2019s case study is that an attention to the long and disparate lives of each individual copy helps us to better understand the making of the Jaggard Quartos and allows us to complicate the studies conducted by New Bibliographers, whose bibliographic descriptions and attendant explanations of the texts\u2019 extant forms still condition contemporary approaches to bibliography. By carefully studying individual copies across long periods of time, Lesser provides a fuller picture of the material conditions of their production and use. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5139,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888,1887],"tags":[1894,1926,1930],"class_list":["post-2736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-reviews","tag-15th-17th-centuries","tag-drama","tag-europe"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2736"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5646,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736\/revisions\/5646"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}