Trading in 'Shakespeare'

Abstract

Remarkably, for a book about Shakespeare during the period spanning his own lifetime, discussion of the man himself is refreshingly absent from most of Shakespeare and the Book Trade. Delivered as the Oxford Lyell Lectures in Bibliography in 2012, this book is instead an impressively wide-ranging study of Shakespeare's bibliographical presence from 1584. It is intended to accompany Erne's prior work, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, in dismantling the pervasive view that Shakespeare neither sought nor saw success as a print-published dramatic author. The central argument across the pair of studies is the opposite: that Shakespeare desired literary status for his plays, and it was the book trade that helped him achieve it. Alongside other titles of the last decade that focus on the playwright's presence in the book trade, such as Andrew Murphy's Shakespeare in Print, David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book, and Marta Straznicky's Shakespeare's Stationers, Erne's contribution assesses the publication of Shakespeare's plays within the field now broadly termed the history of the book. But more than these studies, Shakespeare and the Book Trade is focused throughout on playbooks rather than playtexts. It is distinguished by its sustained analysis of the printed plays and poetry as material that was produced for a particular bibliographical culture in which Shakespeare was becoming ‘a book trade commodity’ (p. 2), and by the author's choice to focus primarily on the quarto and octavo playbooks and poems. Underlying the entire work is an attention to under-studied agents within the book trade – the reading public who sought Shakespeare's titles for their shelves, and the lesser-known booksellers and stationers who traded in his name and crafted the physical make-up of his books.