Shakespeare at the White Greyhound

Summary

Edmond Malone was ‘utterly incredulous’ at the idea that Shakespeare launched his career by holding on to the horses of playgoers outside the theatre, in part because

it is not reasonable to suppose, that his countryman, Mr. Richard Field, the son of a tanner in Stratford, and a very eminent printer in London, whom our poet in 1593 employed to issue ‘the first heir of his invention’ to the world, would have suffered an amiable and worthy youth to have remained in so degraded a state, without making some effort to rescue him from it.

Malone's immediate concern was to disprove the apocryphal story that young Will, new to London and in dire financial straits, started his professional life as nothing more than a servant, and he was interested in Richard Field only as a way to rescue Shakespeare from circumstances that were rather less than auspicious. But Malone's suggestive language – the ‘very eminent’ printer, ‘employed’ by Shakespeare to publish Venus and Adonis, which the poet himself had described in the dedicatory epistle as the ‘first heire of my inuention’ – reveals a further assumption based on this fortuitous Stratford connection that has since become axiomatic: that Shakespeare authorized and arranged for his own debut in print. Richard Field thus provides essential evidence of Shakespeare's own authorial intention and professional ambition, albeit an ambition he soon abandoned for the world of the playhouse. As David Scott Kastan has argued, using evidence that echoes Malone, ‘[c]learly, Shakespeare's commitment to print was reserved for his narrative poetry. His Venus and Adonis and Lucrece were published in carefully printed editions by his fellow townsman, Richard Field, and to each volume Shakespeare contributed a signed dedication.’ The recent Arden 3 edition of Shakespeare's poems, the latest in what has been a welcome and concerted effort to relocate the poetry from the margins to the centre of both Shakespeare's career and our critical focus, likewise reiterates this conventional wisdom, describing the two poems as ‘authorized by Shakespeare’ and ‘excellently printed by his Stratford contemporary Richard Field’. When compared to the frequently disparaged state of the printed plays, these ‘excellent authorized texts’ confirm the view that Shakespeare's investment in print publication – that is, in an elite form of literary authorship separate from the popular business of the theatre – was restricted to the poems. This standard account has lately been challenged by Lukas Erne, who argues that Shakespeare's commitment to print did indeed extend to the plays, and that he and his company actively sought to publish them. Erne questions a number of the accepted narratives of Shakespeare's career, with varying degrees of success, but Richard Field continues to play a crucial role in Erne's argument since his putative connection to Shakespeare provides the necessary documentary guarantee of authorized Shakespearian texts. Indeed, as the editors of a recent essay collection have remarked, the presumed link between Field and Shakespeare provides the ‘textual corroboration’ as well as the ‘aspirational context’ to Erne's argument.