The plays of William Shakespeare have been collected and read widely since the Bard’s death. The first folio edition of the plays was published a mere seven years after Shakespeare died; already, Shakespeare was considered an important literary figure.
More important than his role as a writer, Shakespeare also became a symbol of culture and literary knowledge. It became crucial – especially in England, the country that produced him – to spread the work of Shakespeare as essential reading.
One publisher decided to trick out the complete works of Shakespeare – divided into three volumes separating the comedies, histories, and tragedies – with illustrations and important authorial context. That publishing house was Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.
John Cassell was a British publisher and social reformer who believed in the education of the working class. Through his publishing house Cassell, established in 1848, he printed tracts and magazines with the primary goal of educating people. In addition to this, the publishing house also printed quality editions of classic literature, such as these 1900 editions of the plays of William Shakespeare.
In the preface, the average reader of 1900 is told what the goal of these editions is:
The assumption here is that the introduction of literature into the home will help to preserve it. There is the hope that families will gather around the fire, read from these books, and find some joy in what is considered high-minded literature. Famous scenes are rendered in beautiful, realistic illustrations: the death of Romeo and Juliet, Ophelia’s madness in Hamlet, Othello’s murder of Desdemona. The crucial visual elements of the plays, in these editions, are well represented for someone who may not have the opportunity to see them acted.
However, while these volumes claim to be a comprehensive collection of Shakespeare’s plays, there is one notable work missing here that would be found in any complete Shakespeare volume today: Titus Andronicus. Knowing that this would be noticed by anyone familiar with the works of Shakespeare, editors Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke address this exclusion in the preface of the tragedies. They say, “We have also omitted Titus Andronicus, a play commonly attributed to Shakespeare; and we have done this not only on account of its grossness, but because it is our conviction that it is not his writing.”
This is not a unique perspective on Titus, especially for the time. If you look at the history of the play’s authorship, you will see a mad scramble to attribute it to someone other than Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus, with its hyper-violence, cannibalism, the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, and all manner of other things many find distasteful, has long been a subject of controversy among Shakespeare scholars and fans. While also being very dark and violent, it is also poorly structured, paced, and convoluted. It is easy to dismiss it as a lesser work or one not of Shakespeare’s pen at all, as we see in this preface.
However, the theory that Shakespeare did not write Titus Andronicus has, in the years since 1900, been proven to hold little water. Still, it remains a puzzling piece to those who view Shakespeare as an infallible cultural icon. How does one consolidate that view with a subpar, messy play such as Titus? Some critics, like Harold Bloom, have tried to recontextualize the play as a parody of Christopher Marlowe. Others have dismissed the play as outright bad, often tacking on comments of disbelief (but not concrete claims) that the great William Shakespeare could even write such a thing. There have also been theories that it was one of his co-authored plays, and the credit due to the other writer has been lost to time. This also lends itself to the veneration of Shakespeare; if it was co-authored, then maybe Shakespeare didn’t write the “bad parts”.
At some point, it gets very ridiculous. Why all this fuss over a single play? There are, contained within these three volumes, unaccountable violence and mayhem, sometimes illustrated for the viewer. For example, I find it more than a little silly that Titus Andronicus was excluded here when the beheading of Cloten in Cymbeline is illustrated on a half-page.
The most interesting thing about these volumes to me is that they simultaneously look to exalt Shakespeare and spread him as a figure of culture, but also do not want to acknowledge the full writer he was. The writer Shakespeare is supplanted by the symbol. Truly, we all know that violence is part of the package of Shakespeare. Bawdiness is part of the package of Shakespeare. But there is great interest in pretending that isn’t true, when really, Shakespeare was a writer like any other writer, and sometimes he wrote a bad play.
Nevertheless, there is charm in these editions, incomplete as they are. There is something nice in the idea of, “…the father, perhaps, reading to the rest while they pursued their several occupations; the mother and girls at their sewing; the boys at their slate and their sketching…” Even nicer, I think, is the more likely image of real children (supplanting these docile, imaginary ones) play-acting stabbings and sword fights and the deaths of lovers, fascinated by the drama and mayhem of Shakespeare, as is illustrated in these family-friendly books.
Follow SCRC on Social Media and look out for future posts on our Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky accounts. To search the collections held at Special Collections Research Center, go to our website and browse the finding aids by subject or title. You may also e-mail us at speccoll@gmu.edu or call 703-993-2220 if you would like to schedule an appointment, request materials, or if you have questions.
