Canonising Shakespeare
Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640–1740

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

Emma Depledge (Edited by), Peter Kirwan (Edited by)

9781316608258, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 4 August 2022

282 pages, 12 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.385 kg

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.

1. Introduction Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan
Part I. Selling Shakespeare: 2. Shakespeare for sale, 1640–1740 Emma Depledge
3. Royalist Shakespeare: publishers, politics and the appropriation of The Rape of Lucrece (1655) Adam G. Hooks
4. Henry Herringman, Richard Bentley and Shakespeare's Fourth Folio (1685) Francis X. Connor
5. Shakespeare without rules: the fifth Shakespeare folio and market demand in the early 1700s Lara Hansen and Eric Rasmussen
6. The 1734–5 price wars, Antony and Cleopatra and the theatrical imagination Anthony Brano. Part II. Consolidating the Shakespeare Canon: 7. Consolidating the Shakespeare canon, 1640–1740 Peter Kirwan
8. John Benson's 1640 poems and its literary precedents Faith Acker
9. Cupids Cabinet Unlock't (1662), ostensibly 'by W. Shakespeare', in fact partly by John Milton Lukas Erne
10. Discovering Shakespeare's personal style: editing and connoisseurship in the eighteenth century Edmund G. C. King
Part III. Editing Shakespeare: 11. Editing Shakespeare, 1640–1740 Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan
12. Dramatic typography and the restoration quartos of Hamlet Claire M. L. Bourne
13. The 1709/11 editions of Shakespeare's poems Paul D. Cannan
14. Alexander Pope, interventionist editing and The Taming of the Shrew (1725) Jonathan H. Holmes
15. Editorial annotations in Shakespeare editions after 1733 Adam Rounce
16. Afterword Patrick Cheney.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]