Shakespeare and the Book Trade

Contents:

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.

Summary:

Shakespeare and the Book Trade follows on from Lukas Erne's ground-breaking 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.

Reviews:

Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare and the Book Trade is a thrilling sequel to Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (CUP, 2003). Whereas the earlier book challenged the dominant template of Shakespeare as a ‘man of the theatre’, arguing that Shakespeare wrote his plays for both the stage and the page, the new study argues that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century book trade responded to this mode of self-invention by featuring Shakespeare as a literary author. An admirable amount of original research has gone into the study, making it of use to a wide array of readers. With Shakespeare and the Book Trade, Lukas Erne manages to do that most coveted of things: he has written another book that everyone must read.
Patrick Cheney, Penn State University

Lukas Erne's follow-up volume to Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist always promised to be an exciting and challenging piece of scholarship. That promise is fully realised here. Shakespeare and the Book Trade is an engaging, intelligent, detailed and masterful study, which will serve as a standard reference work for years to come.
Andrew Murphy, University of St Andrews

This is the sequel to Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist of 2003. … If you value empirically grounded narratives—and this reviewer does—Erne’s second book on the early publication of Shakespeare is even more impressive than the first. The evidence in this book ... seems unassailable. Shakespeare and the Book Trade is an even greater triumph and as the dust-jacket’s commendations rightly boast, our view of Shakespeare will never be the same again. (The Review of English Studies)

Shakespeare and the Book Trade is a formidable achievement. Cantilevered over a tightly engineered structure, with masses of data and tables, it is written with admirable clarity and leaves the subject looking permanently different. Its main propositions seem to me largely beyond dispute, and it is inherently likely that Shakespeare appreciated the reciprocal and profitable dynamism of book and play. (Notes and Queries)

Although I said earlier that this book stands well on its own, perhaps I may be excused here for speculating as to where it will best be shelved on individual scholars’ bookshelves. The temptation, of course, will be to place it next to Literary Dramatist; Erne himself once thinks of the pair as a “diptych” (10). But the impressive collocation of facts about Shakespeare’s presence in print during and shortly after his lifetime makes it as likely a companion for works of a reference nature, such classic studies as E. K. Chambers’s William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930) and Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1974). So thorough is Erne’s research here that this study has claims on being, like the work of Chambers and Schoenbaum, central to research in the field. (Comparative Drama)

Erne’s book is the second panel of a “diptych of monographs” begun in 2003 with Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (recently published in a revised edition) seeking to establish a “Readerly Shakespeare”. His argument in Shakespeare and the Book Trade is essentially straightforward, clearly argued, with plenty of supporting evidence, and written in an elegant and eminently reasonable style. (The Times Literary Supplement)

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. ... Shakespeare and the Book Trade should be read in tandem with Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge University Press is taking advantage of the publication of the former by issuing a second edition of the latter that also includes a new preface by the author. Erne has always been a wonderful writer – all his books and essays are insightful and well crafted – but he is especially good here as he deftly answers his critics, many of whom seem to have misunderstood the argument and/or evidence in 2003. This is required reading for all who read the first edition but especially for those who remain unconvinced. (Early Modern Literary Studies)

Shakespeare and the Book Trade powerfully asserts that Shakespeare was as successful in the printing house as in the playhouse. (Around the Globe)

The quantitative focus, particularly evident in the earlier chapters, is balanced by an admirable array of evidence compiled from a range of sources. ... Erne’s arguments so deftly engage with previous scholarship and with his myriad sources that this will certainly become an indispensable book to scholars of Shakespeare’s poetry and plays. The book elegantly argues for a reappraisal of the material and bibliographical conditions in which Shakespeare’s less glamorous quartos and octavos were first published, and highlights other agents beside the author who had a stake in their production. Thus, as well as realising its stated aim of proving that Shakespeare was the most popular print dramatist of his own time, Erne’s work also exposes fertile fields that will no doubt open up avenues for new research on the history of the book trade. (Cambridge Quarterly)

Shakespeare and the Book Trade advances our understanding of its subject at every turn. (English Studies)

Erne has drawn on a large number of texts to produce his insightful analysis. By looking not only at survival rates and figures, but also at the individuals who choose to invest in Shakespeare by either publishing, collecting, or excepting his texts, Shakespeare and the Book Trade provides a comprehensive picture of Shakespeare’s enduring popularity. This highly influential analysis will be of particular interest to scholars of the early modern book trade, early modern printed drama, and of, course, scholars seeking to study Shakespeare within the material, cultural, and monetary contexts of his own time. (Sixteenth Century Journal)

The perception that Shakespeare was already regarded as a ‘literary dramatist’ by those who published the first printed editions of his plays and by his first readers is probably the most significant revolution to have occurred in the fields of Shakespeare editing and textual studies since the ‘materialist turn’ in the mid-1980s. And the sheer fact that fewer Shakespeare scholars would now question the opening statement in Lukas Erne’s new book, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, namely that ‘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’ (1), is a testament to the importance and the sheer impact of Erne’s work to date. Shakespeare and the Book Trade builds on Erne’s earlier book, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003), by establishing the ‘bibliographic presence’ of Shakespeare in the London of his time (1). In other words, Erne, having made a strong argument to demonstrate Shakespeare’s active interest in the fashioning of his literary persona as a print-published author in his first book, now sets out to show that Shakespeare’s interest in dramatic publication would not have turned him into the most frequently printed and reprinted playwright in his own lifetime, had the book trade not taken an interest in him too. Erne’s new book, much needed, thoroughly researched and beautifully argued, brilliantly demonstrates that ‘Shakespeare’s early bibliographical reception . . . anticipates his eighteenth-century canonization’ (2) and that ‘[t]he view that Shakespeare was not discovered by the book trade until after his death. . . is thus precisely wrong’ (18). (Shakespeare Survey)