Recent studies in early modern cultural bibliography have put forth a radically new Shakespeare—a man of keen literary ambition who wrote for page as well as stage. His work thus comes to be viewed as textual property and a material object not only seen theatrically but also bought, read, collected, annotated, copied, and otherwise passed through human hands. This Shakespeare was invented in large part by the stationers—publishers, printers, and booksellers—who produced and distributed his texts in the form of books. Yet Shakespeare’s stationers have not received sustained critical attention.
Edited by Marta Straznicky, Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography shifts Shakespearean textual scholarship toward a new focus on the earliest publishers and booksellers of Shakespeare’s texts. This seminal collection is the first to explore the multiple and intersecting forms of agency exercised by Shakespeare’s stationers in the design, production, marketing, and dissemination of his printed works. Nine critical studies examine the ways in which commerce intersected with culture and how individual stationers engaged in a range of cultural functions and political movements through their business practices. Two appendices, cataloguing the imprints of Shakespeare’s texts to 1640 and providing forty additional stationer profiles, extend the volume’s reach well beyond the case studies, offering a foundation for further research.
Table of Content
Introduction: What Is a Stationer?
—Marta Straznicky
Chapter 1. The Stationers’ Shakespeare
—Alexandra Halasz
Chapter 2. Thomas Creede, William Barley, and the Venture of Printing Plays
—Holger Schott Syme
Chapter 3. Wise Ventures: Shakespeare and Thomas Playfere at the Sign of the Angel
—Adam G. Hooks
Chapter 4. ‘Vnder the Handes of . . .’: Zachariah Pasfield and the Licensing of Playbooks
—William Proctor Williams
Chapter 5. Nicholas Ling’s Republican Hamlet (1603)
—Kirk Melnikoff
Chapter 6. Shakespeare the Stationer
—Douglas Bruster
Chapter 7. Edward Blount, the Herberts, and the First Folio
—Sonia Massai
Chapter 8. John Norton and the Politics of Shakespeare’s History Plays in Caroline England
—Alan B. Farmer
Chapter 9. Shakespeare’s Flop: John Waterson and The Two Noble Kinsmen
—Zachary Lesser
Appendix A: Shakespearean Publications, 1591-1640
Appendix B: Selected Stationer Profiles
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
About the author
Marta Straznicky is Professor of English at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550-1700.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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