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.

This study establishes the remarkable presence of Shakespeare's plays and poems in the early modern English book trade.

Selling Shakespeare tells a story of Shakespeare's life and career in print, a story centered on the people who created, bought, and sold books in the early modern period. The interests and investments of publishers and booksellers have defined our ideas of what is 'Shakespearean', and attending to their interests demonstrates how one version of Shakespearean authorship surpassed the rest. In this book, Adam G. Hooks identifies and examines four pivotal episodes in Shakespeare's life in print: the debut of his narrative poems, the appearance of a series of best-selling plays, the publication of collected editions of his works, and the cataloguing of those works. Hooks also offers a new kind of biographical investigation and historicist criticism, one based not on external life documents, nor on the texts of Shakespeare's works, but on the books that were printed, published, sold, circulated, collected, and catalogued under his name.

An account of Shakespeare's plays as they were transformed from scripts into books.

This book demonstrates how the book trade of 1640-1740 canonised Shakespeare by selling, editing and promoting his plays and poems.

This book demonstrates how the book trade of 1640-1740 canonised Shakespeare by selling, editing and promoting his plays and poems.

The book trade historically tended to operate in a spirit of co-operation as well as competition. Networks between printers, publishers, booksellers and related trades existed at local, regional, national and international levels and were a vital part of the business of books for several centuries. This collection of essays examines many aspects of the history of book-trade networks, in response to the recent ‘spatial turn’ in history and other disciplines. Contributors come from various backgrounds including history, sociology, business studies and English literature. The essays in Part One introduce the relevance to book-trade history of network theory and techniques, while Part Two is a series of case studies ranging chronologically from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Topics include the movement of early medieval manuscript books, the publication of Shakespeare, the distribution of seventeenth-century political pamphlets in Utrecht and Exeter, book-trade networks before 1750 in the English East Midlands, the itinerant book trade in northern France in the late eighteenth century, how an Australian newspaper helped to create the Scottish public sphere, the networks of the Belgian publisher Murquardt, and transatlantic radical book-trade networks in the early twentieth century.

This study establishes the remarkable presence of Shakespeare's plays and poems in the early modern English book trade.