Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640–1740

Emma Depledge, Peter Kirwan

Cambridge University Press, Sep 28, 2017 - Literary Criticism

Canonising Shakespeare offers the first comprehensive reassessment of Shakespeare's afterlife as a print phenomenon, demonstrating the crucial role that the book trade played in his rise to cultural pre-eminence. 1640–1740 was the period in which Shakespeare's canon was determined, in which the poems resumed their place alongside the plays in print, and in which artisans and named editors crafted a new, contemporary Shakespeare for Restoration and eighteenth-century consumers. A team of international contributors highlight the impact of individual booksellers, printers, publishers and editors on the Shakespearean text, the books in which it was presented, and the ways in which it was promoted. From radical adaptations of the Sonnets to new characters in plays, and from elegant subscription volumes to cheap editions churned out by feuding publishers, this period was marked by eclecticism, contradiction and innovation as stationers looked to the past and the future to create a Shakespeare for their own times.

Contents

• Shakespeare for Sale 16401740: 17
• Publishers Politics and: 26
• Henry Herringman Richard Bentley and Shakespeares: 38
• The Fifth Shakespeare Folio: 55
• The 17345 Price Wars Antony and Cleopatra: 63
• Consolidating the Shakespeare Canon 16401740: 81
• Cupids Cabinet Unlockt 1662 Ostensibly By: 107
• Editing: 130
• Editing Shakespeare 16401740: 145
• The 170911 Editions of Shakespeares Poems: 171
• Alexander Pope Interventionist Editing and The Taming: 187
• Editorial Annotations in Shakespeare Editions After 1733: 201
• Afterword: 216
• Chronological List of Other Shakespeare Publications: 245
• Index: 267

About the author

Emma Depledge is lecturer in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature at the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland. She has published a number of articles on Shakespeare in the Restoration and her first book explores the publication, performance and adaptation of Shakespeare's plays from 1642–1700.

Peter Kirwan is Associate Professor of Early Modern Drama at the University of Nottingham. His books include Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha (Cambridge, 2015) and Shakespeare and the Digital World (Cambridge, 2014). He is currently completing a monograph on the theatre company Cheek by Jowl and new editions of Pericles and Doctor Faustus.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640–1740
• Editors: Emma Depledge, Peter Kirwan
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2017
• ISBN: 1108670377, 9781108670371
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Shakespeare