Shakespeare and the Book Trade

Shakespeare and the Book Trade follows on from Lukas Erne's groundbreaking Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist to examine the publication, constitution, dissemination and reception of Shakespeare's printed plays and poems in his own time and to argue that their popularity in the book trade has been greatly underestimated. Erne uses evidence from Shakespeare's publishers and the printed works to show that in the final years of the sixteenth century and the early part of the seventeenth century, 'Shakespeare' became a name from which money could be made, a book trade commodity in which publishers had significant investments and an author who was bought, read, excerpted and collected on a surprising scale. Erne argues that Shakespeare, far from indifferent to his popularity in print, was an interested and complicit witness to his rise as a print-published author. Thanks to the book trade, Shakespeare's authorial ambition started to become bibliographic reality during his lifetime.

Introduction; 1. Quantifying Shakespeare's presence in print; 2. Shakespeare, publication and authorial misattribution; 3. The bibliographic and paratextual makeup of Shakespeare's Quarto playbooks; 4. Shakespeare's publishers; 5. The reception of printed Shakespeare; Appendix A. The publication of playbooks by Shakespeare and his contemporaries to 1660; Appendix B. Printed playbooks of professional plays, including reprints, 1583–1622; Appendix C. Shakespeare's publishers, 1593–1622.

Lukas Erne is Professor of English at the University of Geneva. He holds degrees from the Universities of Lausanne, Oxford and Geneva. He has taught at the University of Neuchâtel and, as Visiting Professor, at Yale University, Connecticut. He has been the Fowler Hamilton Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and the recipient of research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. He is the author of Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators (2008), Beyond 'The Spanish Tragedy': A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (2001) and Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003), which was named 'Book of the Year' in The Times Literary Supplement. He is the editor, with Guillemette Bolens, of Medieval and Early Modern Authorship (2011), of The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet (2007) and, with M. J. Kidnie, of Textual Performance: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare's Drama (2004). He gave the Lyell Lectures, on 'Shakespeare and the Book Trade', at the University of Oxford in spring 2012.