ABSTRACT
When Shakespeare is unbound, is that a good thing or a bad thing? The poster for the 2018 French Shakespeare Society meeting suggests humorously that unbinding the bard is a very good thing. Part superhero, part monster, Shakespeare defiantly breaks the chains of the codex book that confines him, his broad grin and furrowed brows telling us all we need to do about the pleasures of destruction and escape from the page’s bondage. More frequently in our post-print era, the end of the book is figured as a tragedy. The book’s demise demands elegy; it presages cultural degeneration, even apocalypse. As early as 1992, Robert Coover mourned the passing of printed books, their end paradoxically signaled by a misleading abundance:
The very proliferation of books and other print-based media, so prevalent in this forest-harvesting, paper-wasting age, is held to be a sign of its feverish moribundity, the last futile gasp of a once vital form before it finally passes away forever, dead as God.
Coover 1992 The specific threat in 1992 was hypertext, although hypertext’s dismantling of the page’s integrity through metonymic linkages did not survive the passing of Web 1.0. In 1998, Ian Donaldson would write, in a hopeful vein, “Like the death of the author, the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated” (Donaldson 1998: 2). Nonetheless, he offers copious examples of the indignities to which books (and by extension, their authors, even when long dead) are subjected. Take, for example, Byron’s ironic discovery that leaves from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela were being used to wrap a gypsy’s bacon in Tunbridge Wells (3). Donaldson highlights as well the book’s inherent fragility – a wish for the book to outlast brass and stone that evolves in tandem with anxiety about its vulnerability to dissolution. Notable for this sentiment is Ben Jonson’s dedicatory poem to Shakespeare’s First Folio: Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe, And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give. 1623: A4r