Pericles, fourth edition

The fourth edition of Pericles was published by Thomas Pavier and printed by William Jaggard in 1619. Pavier and Jaggard printed ten plays by or attributed to Shakespeare, now known to scholars as the Pavier quartos. Four years later, Jaggard printed the First Folio for a consortium of publishers.

This edition of Pericles was was bound together with The vvhole contention betvveene the tvvo famous houses, Lancaster and Yorke, a combination of Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2 and Henry VI Part 3. These plays have their own titles pages, but were printed with continuous signatures, the only such set in the Pavier quartos, suggesting that they were intended to be bound together. Unlike several of the Pavier quartos, the title page for Pericles includes the correct date and publisher: “T.P. 1619.” The fourth edition of Pericles was printed from the third with some minor corrections to the text.

The copy shown above is one of 43 copies of this edition listed in the English Short Title Catalogue. This copy is bound with one of the only surviving complete sets of the Pavier quartos, which is part of the Folger Shakespeare Library collection. A.S.W. Rosenbach purchased the copy from Marsden J. Perry on July 22, 1919, and after Henry Folger purchased it, he had a portrait painted of himself holding it.

First published in 1609, Pericles was among the most popular plays in print during the early seventeenth century, with a total of six editions published by 1635. This edition title’s page also includes that the play was written “By W. Shakespeare.” Many scholars now believe that Shakespeare co-authored Pericles, most likely with George Wilkins, who wrote a prose romance version of Pericles published in 1608. Like Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles is notably absent from the First Folio.

To learn more about this play, please see the page about Pericles on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare's Works and the British Library’s Shakespeare in Quarto, which also includes another copy of this edition.