The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus (the Folger quarto, 1594)

A cheap London pamphlet of 1594, the sole surviving copy of Shakespeare's first printed play, spent roughly a century in a private Swedish household, glued at some point to two eighteenth-century lottery handbills used as makeshift endpapers, before a postal clerk in Malmo connected a newspaper story about an expensive old Bible to the worn little book he had inherited. Henry Clay Folger bought it in January 1905 for GBP 2,000 through his regular London agents, and it has been at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington since the Library's founding in 1932.

Its significance goes beyond rarity. Because this quarto was believed lost, a later reprinter's invented ending, patched in after his own copy suffered damage, was read as genuine Shakespeare for roughly three centuries. This copy's rediscovery corrected that text for the first time since 1600. The play's authorship is itself unsettled: a century of scholarship argues over how much of it, if any, was written by George Peele rather than Shakespeare alone, a dispute this record states as open because named scholars on both sides remain unpersuaded by each other.

The photograph used here is the Folger Shakespeare Library's own image of this exact copy, released by the Library into the public domain; no other copy of this edition exists anywhere to confuse it with.

What it is

A small, cheaply printed quarto pamphlet of a play, made from full sheets folded twice to give four leaves each, the standard format for a text meant to be sold for a few pence rather than preserved. The leaf measures roughly 17 by 12.7 centimetres. The first leaf, presumably a blank, is lost, and one interior leaf is torn at the corner with a few letters gone from both sides. This is the only surviving copy of the first edition, printed in London in 1594, of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and by extension the earliest surviving printed text of any Shakespeare play.

Pamphlets like this one were not built to last. They were stitched, not bound, sold unbound or in flimsy paper wrappers, read to pieces, and thrown away once a bigger collected edition made them redundant. That roughly twenty copies survive today across all three quarto printings of this one play, out of print runs that likely ran into the low thousands each, gives some sense of the ordinary loss rate for Elizabethan playbooks. That precisely one copy of the first printing survived at all is closer to an accident than an achievement.

How it was made

The quarto was printed by John Danter, a London stationer working out of Hosier Lane, to be sold by two booksellers, Edward White and Thomas Millington, whose names and shops appear in the imprint rather than the printer's own reputation. This division of labour, one man operating the press and setting type, others financing and retailing the finished sheets, was the ordinary structure of the Elizabethan book trade, and nothing about the physical production of this pamphlet marks it out from dozens of other cheap quartos Danter's shop turned out in the same years.

Setting a play from manuscript copy into type was mechanical work, not editorial work as a modern reader would recognise it. A compositor read a line or a phrase, memorised it, and set the type from memory, which is precisely how small verbal errors, a wrong preposition, a doubled word, a misheard vowel, entered the text at the moment of printing rather than at any later stage of transmission. Every early Shakespeare quarto carries some level of this kind of noise, and Titus Andronicus is no exception: the Folger's own textual notes to the play run for pages, recording hundreds of small emendations where later editors have judged the Quarto's spelling, punctuation or wording to need correction. None of that noise is unusual for the period. What is unusual is that, for this particular play, the corrected Quarto text is the ONLY textual record modern readers have that was not itself copied from a damaged exemplar, which is what makes this specific physical copy, rather than the play in the abstract, the object of consequence.

What makes the object exceptional is not how it was made but what happened to the only copy that survived it, and what that copy turned out to prove about a text every scholar for three centuries had read in a corrupted form. That story occupies most of this record.

First performed, first printed

The title page states that the play was acted by three different companies: the Right Honourable the Earl of Derby's, the Earl of Pembroke's, and the Earl of Sussex's men. A play changing hands between three troupes inside a year or two is unusual enough to need an explanation, and the likeliest one is the plague closures that shut London's theatres for long stretches between 1592 and 1594, which broke up and reshuffled several acting companies and scattered their playbooks along with them. Philip Henslowe's diary records a performance by Sussex's Men at the Rose theatre on 24 January 1594, marked "ne" for new, which is generally taken as this play's first recorded outing, though whether "ne" meant newly written or merely new to that company's repertoire is itself argued over.

The play was entered anonymously in the Stationers' Register on 6 February 1594, the formal step that gave a printer the legal right to publish it, with a note that it had already been acted by the three named companies. It reached print within weeks. Shakespeare's name appears nowhere on the title page, which was standard for the period; playwrights were tradesmen supplying scripts to companies, not authors whose names sold books, and most quartos of the 1590s name no writer at all. External evidence that this was his play comes later: Francis Meres listed it among Shakespeare's tragedies in his survey of contemporary literature, Palladis Tamia, in 1598.

The authorship question

Whether Shakespeare wrote the whole of Titus Andronicus has been argued for over a century, and the argument has never fully settled. J.M. Robertson opened the modern case in 1905, concluding from vocabulary and verse patterns that much of the play belonged to George Peele. T.M. Parrott in 1919 and J. Dover Wilson in 1948 refined the claim, generally pointing to Act 1, scene 2.1 and scene 4.1 as Peele's work, with Shakespeare writing or heavily revising the remainder. MacDonald P. Jackson's rare-word and stage-direction studies of 1979 and 1996 supported the same division, and Brian Vickers's 2002 book Shakespeare, Co-Author gave it its fullest statistical treatment, using polysyllabic word counts, alliteration rates and patterns of direct address. A later computational study by Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney tested Vickers's claim against the play's five longest scenes and reported that their methods, too, separated out the same opening act as Peele's.

The case has never gone unanswered. Edward Capell defended sole Shakespearean authorship as early as 1768, arguing that the play's crudeness was a feature of the revenge-tragedy genre rather than evidence of a second pen. Arthur Sampley in 1933 and Hereward Price in 1943 argued that Act 1's structural discipline does not match Peele's known looseness. Eugene Waith in 1984 and Alan Hughes in 1994 and 2006 accounted for the play's unevenness as Shakespeare's own inexperience, with Hughes proposing that Shakespeare absorbed Peele's influence before coming to London rather than sharing the manuscript with him. E.K. Chambers's 1930 critique of Robertson's parallel-passage method is still cited as the reason Robertson's original case is no longer taken at face value, and Jonathan Bate has pointed out the structural weakness common to all such arguments: a verbal echo proves imitation exists, not who imitated whom.

A second, smaller dispute concerns when the play was written at all, whether in 1591 to 1592 or 1593 to 1594, a question David Farley-Hills reopened in a 2000 article without resolving it. This record states both disputes as open, not because the evidence is silent but because named scholars on both sides have read the same evidence and reached opposite conclusions.

What the play is about, and where it comes from

The story the quarto preserves is a revenge tragedy built from classical materials rather than English history or an Italian novella, Shakespeare's more usual sources. The two building blocks scholars point to are Ovid's Metamorphoses, source of the myth of Philomela's rape and mutilation that the play adapts directly onto the character of Lavinia, down to the detail of a woven message replacing a severed tongue, and Seneca's Roman tragedies, whose stock devices, a revenge plot driven by an outraged parent, an on-stage body count, long declamatory speeches over the dead, Titus Andronicus follows closely enough that generations of critics assumed direct imitation. T.S. Eliot's own 1927 dismissal of the play, discussed below, was delivered inside an essay specifically about how badly Elizabethan playwrights other than Shakespeare imitated Seneca, which makes his verdict on this play a case study in a wider argument about classical influence, not an isolated judgment.

None of this reflects a hidden programme or a private belief system on Shakespeare's part; it reflects the ordinary training of an Elizabethan grammar-school education, in which Ovid and Seneca were set texts, and the ordinary commercial demand of a London stage that wanted spectacular, bloody entertainment in the early 1590s, a demand Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy had already shown could fill a theatre. Reading the play's violence as evidence of a young writer testing how far a fashionable genre could be pushed, rather than as evidence of anything darker about its author, is the plain and sufficient explanation, and this record adopts it because the sources support nothing more elaborate.

A family library in Sweden

Long before any of that scholarship existed, this particular copy was already in private hands an ocean away from the argument. The earliest identifiable owner is recorded only by a name inked onto the back flyleaf: Charles Robson, who lived from 1735 to 1794. Nothing beyond that inscription and those dates has been traced about who he was or how an English playbook printed in 1594 came into his possession in the first place; both are open questions this record cannot close.

A second inscription, in Swedish and dated 1845, records the book passing to a grandson of Robson's through a daughter, one P.M. Krafft. A third inscription, dated 1877, records it passing again, from P.M. Krafft to his own son, Petrus Johannes Krafft. Both transfers are known only from what the family itself wrote inside the cover; no external document corroborates either one, which means the chain of ownership between Robson's death in 1794 and 1845 rests entirely on the family's own record of itself.

By the time it reached Petrus Johannes Krafft, a postal clerk in Malmo, the quarto had been rebound at some point using two eighteenth-century Swedish lottery handbills as makeshift endpapers or wrapper material, an entirely practical and unremarkable piece of thrift that happened to leave behind, glued into an English playbook, two pieces of Swedish popular ephemera from roughly 1770. Those handbills survive today, preserved through every subsequent rebinding, and they are the only trace this record can offer of exactly when or where in Sweden the quarto was rebound.

A newspaper story about a Bible

The book might have stayed in the Krafft family indefinitely had Petrus Johannes Krafft not read a newspaper report, some time in 1904, about the sale of an early English Bible for a very large sum of money. According to the account later given in Joseph Quincy Adams's 1936 facsimile edition, the story made Krafft think of the worn little English book he already owned, and wonder whether it might be worth something on the same terms. He had no reason to know that his was not merely an old book but the only surviving copy of anything.

The realisation, once tested, held. The quarto surfaced to scholarly attention in Sweden in 1904 and, once its significance was confirmed, was purchased by Henry Clay Folger in January 1905 for the sum of GBP 2,000, arranged through Folger's regular London agents, the booksellers Henry Sotheran Ltd. That a single undistinguished-looking pamphlet, unrecognised for a century inside a private Swedish household, turned out to be the one surviving witness to Shakespeare's first printed play is the kind of discovery story that this publication exists to record precisely, and to distinguish from the invented anecdotes that gather around famous objects once they become famous.

The sale and the secrecy around it

Henry Folger did not buy this way by accident. He rarely attended auctions in person and relied on professional agents, chiefly Henry Sotheran Ltd in London and the dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach in the United States, specifically to keep his own name out of negotiations; a seller who knew a wealthy, determined American collector wanted an object would ask more for it. To preserve that anonymity here, the purchase was initially entered in Sotheran's own sales records simply as a purchase made for stock, with no buyer named.

The secrecy did not last past the point of sale. When the purchase became public at the start of 1905, it made news in three countries for three different reasons: the Swedish press was startled that one of their own countrymen had turned up so significant a find; the British press was dismayed that a piece of English literary history was leaving the country for America; and the American press was simply delighted at the acquisition. No other copy of the 1594 quarto has been found since, in Sweden or anywhere else, in the twelve decades since the sale.

No export mechanism existed to stop any of this. Britain's Waverley system of export deferral for national treasures did not exist until 1952, and in any case this quarto had left England for Sweden centuries before Folger ever saw it; the 1905 transaction moved the book a second time, from a Swedish seller to an American buyer, a transfer no contemporary law in either country regulated. The British press could be dismayed, and was, but had no legal lever to act on that dismay. That gap between public sentiment and legal power over cultural property is itself a piece of history worth recording, since it is precisely the gap that later export-control regimes, including the one Britain built after 1952, were designed to close.

What GBP 2,000 meant in January 1905

Placing that figure requires a comparison from inside the same market rather than a generic modern conversion, and the same collector and the same London agent supply one. Six years earlier, in 1899, Henry Folger had used the same firm, Henry Sotheran Ltd, represented by the same agent, A.B. Railton, to pursue what became known as the Vincent-Sibthorp copy of the Shakespeare First Folio, a complete 1623 volume discovered gathering dust in a coach house at Canwick Hall in Lincolnshire. After months of transatlantic negotiation conducted partly by telegram, the owner, Coningsby Sibthorp, accepted a final price of GBP 5,000 for that single volume, paid in instalments beginning with a first payment of GBP 2,000 in July 1899.

Two things follow from that comparison. First, the GBP 2,000 Folger paid for this quarto in 1905 was, in absolute terms, exactly the size of the first instalment he had already paid six years earlier merely to begin securing one complete First Folio, itself a small fraction of that Folio's eventual GBP 5,000 total price; a complete Shakespeare in one volume commanded roughly two and a half times what the sole surviving witness to his first printed play did. Second, the sums involved sat at the very top of what any private collector anywhere was paying for early English books in this period; Folger and Sibthorp's negotiation itself references a British Museum interest in the Sibthorp Folio at the same time, evidence that national institutions were competing in the identical market. Two thousand pounds in January 1905 was, by any standard available in that market, a very large sum indeed for a single damaged pamphlet, and everyone involved in the sale knew it.

The purchase also has to be read against the scale of what Folger was doing generally. Over roughly forty-five years of collecting, he and Emily acquired 82 First Folios, the largest holding of any single collector or institution and something close to a third of the surviving copies from the entire 1623 print run, alongside a comparable quantity of early quartos, promptbooks, portraits and other Shakespeareana. A single GBP 2,000 payment, however large in isolation, was one purchase inside a decades-long campaign that eventually filled an entire purpose-built library in Washington; the significance of this object to the history of the text is not diminished by the fact that, to its buyer, it was one very good acquisition among hundreds.

John Danter, pirate printer

The man who printed this quarto did not live to see it become famous, or infamous. John Danter operated his own press in London through most of the 1590s, and his name is attached to some of the more disreputable corners of the early Shakespeare printing record: three years after Titus, in 1597, his shop issued the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet, later classed for over a century as a corrupt "bad quarto" reconstructed from actors' memory rather than an authorial manuscript, though modern scholarship treats it more charitably as a typical product of the popular-pamphlet market Danter specialised in. Danter printed only the first four sheets of that book himself before handing the remainder to another printer, Edward Allde, to finish.

Later in 1597, Danter's press was raided by the authorities and his equipment seized. The trouble concerned an unrelated matter, not either Shakespeare quarto, but it has coloured his reputation ever since, and the label "notorious pirate" attached to him in some later accounts owes at least as much to that raid, and to the retrospective embarrassment of the bad-quarto theory, as it does to anything specifically fraudulent about how he ran his shop. He died within two years of the raid, in 1599, having operated as a master printer for barely a decade.

Danter's shop was never a Shakespeare specialist; it was a general jobbing press that took whatever paying work came to hand, ballads, pamphlets, and the popular prose of writers like Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene, alongside the two Shakespeare quartos that happened to survive to make his name recognisable centuries later. That ordinariness matters for how this object should be read: nothing marked Titus Andronicus out, at the point of printing, as more significant than any other cheap play-pamphlet leaving Danter's press that year. Its later importance is entirely a function of what did and did not survive, not of anything special done to it in 1594.

What the discovery corrected

The most consequential fact about this copy has nothing to do with drama and everything to do with textual accident. When the printer of the Second Quarto, in 1600, reprinted this First Quarto, his own copy of it had been damaged at the foot of its final two leaves, with several lines lost. Rather than leave a gap, the Q2 printer composed four replacement lines of his own and set them in place of Shakespeare's original ending.

For roughly three centuries, because the First Quarto itself was believed lost, those four invented lines were, in the words of the Folger's own editors, "universally accepted as authentic" Shakespeare. Every reader, editor, and actor who ever encountered the play's ending before 1905 encountered a stranger's guess at how it went, printed with no indication that it was anything else. The rediscovery of this single copy in a Swedish household did not just add an interesting artefact to a collector's shelf; it silently corrected the received text of a Shakespeare play for the first time in three hundred years, restoring an ending no living reader had seen. Few surviving books of any kind can claim to have done that.

The play's transmission carries one further complication. When it was reprinted again in the 1623 First Folio, the text largely followed the Third Quarto of 1611, itself a reprint of the flawed Second Quarto, but the Folio also added an entire new scene, 3.2, the so-called fly scene, found in no quarto at all. Folger editors read the addition, along with a scatter of new stage directions elsewhere in the Folio text too precise for any printer to have invented unaided, as evidence that the Folio's printer had access to a second, probably theatrical, manuscript that does not otherwise survive. Modern editions differ on how to handle it: some print only the quarto text on principle, others, including the Folger's own edition, incorporate the Folio's added scene in brackets.

Condition and conservation

The copy carries the marks of its working life and its repeated rescue. Leaf B2 is torn at the tail corner, with a couple of letters lost from the recto and several more from the verso; the title leaf has at some point been silked, a now largely superseded conservation technique in which a fine, near-transparent tissue is laid over a fragile printed page to hold it together. The Folger Library has rebound the volume in dark blue goatskin, and in doing so preserved rather than discarded the physical evidence of its earlier life: the book's previous blue-gray paper wrappers, and the two Swedish lottery handbills used as improvised endpapers by an unknown hand in Sweden, are bound in at the end of the volume rather than removed.

That decision, to keep the ephemera rather than tidy the book up, is itself a small statement about what this kind of object is for. The lottery bills tell a reader nothing about Shakespeare, but they are irreplaceable evidence of exactly where and in what condition this specific copy sat for over a century, and their preservation is the reason the object's own physical history remains checkable rather than merely asserted.

Nothing in the published record specifies exactly when each conservation campaign took place, only that the volume has been rebound and repaired at least once since arriving at the Folger. That is a gap this record notes rather than fills: a fuller conservation history, tied to specific dates and treatments, would sit naturally in the Library's own institutional archive rather than in any source consulted for this record.

Where it lives now

The quarto has been at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., since the collection's transfer there; Henry Folger died in June 1930, two years before the Library he had spent the previous decade planning and building opened to the public in 1932. It was included among the fifty manuscripts and printed books assembled for Shakespeare, Life of an Icon, a Folger exhibition curated by Heather Wolfe that ran from 20 January to 27 March 2016 as part of the Library's contribution to the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death.

A full photographic digitisation of the copy is publicly available through the World Digital Library, a joint project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO, and individual plates from the Folger's own imaging programme circulate under a public-domain release through the Folger's Luna digital image system, which is the route this record uses for its own illustration. Joseph Quincy Adams's 1936 facsimile edition, published shortly after the quarto's rediscovery had settled into scholarly use, remains the standard printed surrogate for readers without access to the original or its digital surrogates.

Critical fortune has moved a long way from Danter's shop. T.S. Eliot dismissed the play outright in 1927 as unworthy of Shakespeare's name; Peter Brook's stylised, ribbon-for-blood 1955 Stratford production, with Laurence Olivier as Titus and Vivien Leigh as Lavinia, is generally credited with rehabilitating the play on stage, turning what one contemporary critic had expected to be an assembly of absurd horror into what reviewers called an unforgettable performance of grief. The single surviving copy of the play's first printing, meanwhile, has sat through that entire critical reversal in the same reading room in Washington, unmoved and, for most of the twentieth century, barely visited by comparison with the attention paid to the play itself.

What is happening to the object right now is, by design, less dramatic than what happened to it in 1904 and 1905. It is not on continuous public display, being a fragile paper pamphlet rather than a bound folio robust enough for permanent exhibition; it surfaces in temporary exhibitions such as Life of an Icon and is otherwise consulted, in person or through its digital surrogates, by editors and scholars working on the play's text. That is the ordinary present tense of a rare book once its moment of discovery has passed: not silence, but a steady, undramatic use by exactly the readers it was rediscovered for.