Shakespeare and the book trade

Abstract

Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). xvi+302pp. ISBN 978 0 5217 6566 4.'Shakespeare was a man of the theatre who wrote plays for the stage, but he was also a dramatist and poet who wanted to be read and who witnessed his rise as a print-published author' (p. 1). Lukas Erne gets right to the point in the first sentence of his new monograph, a follow-up to his groundbreaking study Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003). Those who were won over by that earlier work will find much to admire in this new one; those who refused to give up a popular paradigm after reading Literary Dramatist may find it more difficult to hold on to after completing Shakespeare and the Book Trade; and those who have remained on the fence since 2003 should be convinced by Erne's expansion of his argument in 2013.The paradigm Erne challenged at the start of the 21st century was an entrenched one: Shakespeare was a playwright indifferent to the publication of his plays. The plays could best be understood in and through performance because he was only ever interested in the stage. While some plays were indeed printed, Shakespeare himself had nothing to do with the process. Besides, printed plays were nothing more than ephemera, quickly read and then discarded; they certainly were not worth collecting like other literary genres such as poetry. The trouble with this view, as Erne clearly demonstrated in 2003, is that it ignores considerable evidence that the plays of Shakespeare were actively read and collected in his time, that there appears to have been a concerted effort on the part of the Lord Chamberlain's Men to get many of the plays into print during the late 1590s and early 1600s, and that some of the longer quartos such as Hamlet and Henry V were issued with readers in mind. In Erne's new paradigm Shakespeare is a man of both the playhouse and the printing house.Literary Dramatist was focused primarily on textual matters. Book Trade is principally concerned with material ones. Erne investigates the 'publication, constitution, and reception of [Shakespeare's] quarto playbooks published from 1594 to 1622, along with his poetry books' (p. 7) and over five chapters and three appendices substantially builds on the case he first made a decade ago. In a comparative analysis of play quarto publication in Chapter 1, for example, he establishes that Shakespeare was by far the most popular playwright in print in early modern London, even more popular than Ben Jonson. A straight line has been drawn tracing Shakespeare's popularity with readers from the early 18th century to today. Erne corrects this view by demonstrating that he was also popular with readers in the first half of the 17th century; in other words, he became popular again in the early 18th century. This is one of the chapters in Book Trade that relies heavily on tables and statistics, which Erne admits will be off-putting to some readers, but the evidence is clearly laid out, the data commentary lucidly written, and the results hard to ignore.The focus of Chapter 2 is pseudepigraphy, the practice of misattribution. Between 1595 and 1622 ten playbooks were published with a false ascription to Shakespeare on the title page: five with some form of the whole name and five with initials like 'W.S.' or 'W.Sh.'. Erne argues that there was a method to this madness, as certain stationers were trying to cash in on Shakespeare's name. Sometimes this investment paid off; sometimes it did not. But such a strategy of misrepresentation was not employed for any other playwright. …