2.2 Playgoer and Collector of Playbooks

Dering prepared his adaptation in early 1623.  His first wife Elizabeth had died in January of the previous year, and Dering’s interest in household performance may have been a homosocial attempt to compensate for some part of his loss. 

He was exceptionally well prepared to undertake this production.  He had been admitted to study at the Middle Temple on 25 October 1617, and there are twenty-six payments recorded in his Book of Expenses for “seeing a play” in London between 1619 and 1626.¹  Dering was therefore working on his adaptation of Henry IV at a time when he was at the height of his life as a young man who frequented the London theatre and cultivated the axiomatically trivial literature of playbooks. 

Dering’s library contained a highly significant collection of plays in quarto: indeed, the most extensive such collection of which we know.  Between 1619 and 1624 he purchased an extraordinary total of at least 221 playbooks; most of them are entered in his account book without the title or author being named.² To put the figure of 221 in perspective, Greg’s Bibliography of the English Printed Drama records a total of 413 plays published up to 1626 from the earliest days of printing.  Many of these would have been out of print for many years. 

The figure from Greg reduces to 252 if we take the start date as 1600.  This is an indicative but arbitrary figure. It makes no allowance for books published before 1600 and more recently reprinted, such as several of Shakespeare’s plays.  These would add to the potentially available total.  But they are offset by books printed since 1600 that would no longer have been available by the 1620s.  Despite this imprecision, the comparison figure of 252 titles as against Dering’s purchases of 221 titles can be taken to indicate that he must have purchased every title that he could possibly his hands on, and multiple copies of at least a few of them.

The main period of Dering’s playbook purchasing began after the death of Elizabeth in January 1622.³ Over half of the books—no less than 159—were acquired later in the year of Henry IV, in November-December 1623.⁴  He is the earliest known purchaser of the Shakespeare First Folio; his account book records the transaction on 5 December 1623, and his payment of two pounds suggests that he bought two bound copies.⁵  He purchased a copy of the 1616 Jonson Folio on the same day. 

The first trace of his interest in household performance comes in February 1620, when he paid the substantial sum of £5 to “some fellowes that came a maskinge hither” (“Booke of Expences” fol. 7v). If the performance was indoors, which is more than likely on a day in English February, Dering would have configured the hall of Surrenden House to make a space at one end of the room for the masquers, leaving the rest for their audience. In a Jonsonian masque at court the masquers would have danced with members of the audience at the end of the performance; we cannot tell whether the travelling masquers followed the same practice. 

This entertainment may have prompted Dering to contemplate productions of his own. On occasion he purchased multiple copies of one play, perhaps having private performance in mind. On 4 December 1623, the day before Dering acquired his Shakespeare and Jonson folios, he spend more modestly on six copies of the 1615 edition of the play called A Merry Dialogue between Band, Cuff, and Ruff.⁶ It was highly unusual to buy multiple copies of a single work,⁷ and so this purchase probably reflects another project to stage a play. The purchase of three copies of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman Hater a few months later on 16 March 1624⁸ might point in the same direction. Thus Dering might have staged up to five identifiable plays: The Spanish Curate (before Henry IV), Henry IV (February-March 1623), Band, Cuff, and Ruff (December 1623), The Woman Hater (March 1624), and Aristocles (c.1627). 

Dering’s adaptation of Henry IV was possible only because he had, as a book-collector, brought into physical proximity two different volumes that had been issued thirteen years apart from different publishing houses.  Dering’s scribe followed the 1613 Quarto of 1 Henry IV,⁹ issued by Matthew Law. 2 Henry IV had been printed only in the Quarto of 1600, issued by Andrew Wise and William Aspley; Dering’s copy was of the expanded state (Q1B) that included a scene, 3.1, that had originally been omitted. 

Dering must have had one of the largest collections of play quartos in England in the 1620s, if not the largest. His collection would have far outstripped John Harrington’s collection of 135 plays that the writer catalogued in 1610.¹⁰  We do not know exactly how Dering bound his small-format volumes, but it was common practice for owners to give material form to collocated copies by binding them together, as for instance did Dering’s fellow Kentishman and fellow Member of the Long Parliament Thomas Twisden when he bound together a 1604 copy of 1 Henry IV and a 1600 copy of 2 Henry IV.¹¹  Dering’s Book of Expenses records various payments relating to book-binding, including six payments for binding playbooks within a few days of December 1623. Binding was relatively expensive. A single quarto binding cost 10d, so when Dering records spending that sum on “binding a volume of play bookes” it is clear that more than one play was bound within one volume. However, a binding would have almost doubled the original purchase cost of about 6d for each quarto of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, and would have been a wasteful expenditure on books Dering was to subject to heavy marking up. There would have been convenience in Dering and Carington keeping the play quartos separately, one in each household, so they could work on them separately. And Dering records no payments for bookbinding before December 1623, months after his preparation of the manuscript. For these reasons, the two quarto copies probably remained separate when the manuscript was copied from them. Nevertheless, Dering’s physical collocation in his library of the two printed copies of the two plays is in itself significant in terms of book history. 

Dering’s Shakespeare quarto purchases are unlikely to have been confined to the Henry IV plays, or even the larger sequence of histories to which they belong. In terms of the material book, such sequences do not pre-exist; they have to be made. In 1619, a few years before Dering adapted Henry IV, and before the publication of the 1623 First Folio, William Jaggard and Thomas Pavier had produced and issued a collection of Shakespeare quartos designed to be sold either singly or bound together in various different combinations. Two of the plays are those now known as 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI. Jaggard and Pavier set a strong precedent for bringing together Shakespeare plays, and specifically for publishing two parts of a sequence of history plays as a single artefact under a joint title (The Whole Contention between the Two Famous Houses Lancaster and York). Dering, as an inveterate playbook-buyer in London, is likely to have bought such a volume, or at least to have noticed it in the bookshops he visited.  

But Dering’s interest in 1623 lay beyond library-building. For Dering as playbook collector, the theatre that so greatly fascinated him acts as the original scriptorium—more or less the Jacobean present-day equivalent of the medieval monastery.  The subsequent printing of plays enabled print to take on its characteristic role in dispersing the text beyond the original restricted locale.  Dering’s activity as collector of printed books that happen also to be interrelated playbooks makes possible the constitution of the two separately published parts as a single entity. 

To look forward from the printed books and towards Dering’s planned performance, the medium of the text now reverts from print to manuscript. This inverted intermediality might seem to confound the usual flow from manuscript to print, but was far from rare. Other examples of the flow from print to manuscript include the copying out of favoured quotations of the kind seen in Dering’s commonplace book. Indeed, The History of Henry IV could be regarded as a commonplace quotation writ large. It too draws on more than one source. Unlike commonplacing, it results in a single text embodied in a single document for the first time. 

1. Lennam 146-7
2. see the listings in Lennam, Appendix A, 149-51; Krivatsy and Yeandle
3. Williams and Evans
4. Krivatsy and Yeandle 141
5. Krivatsy and Yeandle entry 4.547:1-2
6. Krivatsy and Yeandle 4.545
7. Smith, “To Buy”
8. “Booke of Expences” fol. 36v
9. Williams and Evans vii
10. for Harrington and the later collectors, see Greg 1306-18
11. Knight 321