Selling Shakespeare
Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade

Adam G. Hooks offers a new history of Shakespeare's life in print and an innovative account of dramatic criticism and biography.

Adam G. Hooks (Author)

9781107138070, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 February 2016

218 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.46 kg

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.

Introduction – a life in print: toward a Shakespearean bio-bibliography
1. Shakespeare's poems and Shakespeare's printer: Richard Field and the narratives of Shakespearean authorship
2. Sweet and swaggering: Shakespeare's plays, Playfere's sermons, and their publisher Andrew Wise
3. 'All in one volume': Shakespeare's quartos, the First Folio, and their printer William Jaggard
4. Making plays: booksellers and the bio-bibliography of Shakespeare.

Subject Areas: Publishing industry & book trade [KNTP], Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]