This chapter considers reprints as new editions and insists that they offer the clearest indication of an author or play’s popularity. I explore the accessibility of Shakespeare’s plays between 1660 and the turn of the century, place quarto playbook publication in the context of late seventeenth-century politics, and highlight how traditional periodization, folio-centric scholarship and attitudes toward abbreviated and altered playtexts have distorted our view of the print history of Renaissance drama. I argue that Shakespeare’s unaltered plays were not recognised as marketable print commodities until c. 1681, a development reflected in publishers’ willingness in the 1680s and 1690s to not just publish his plays but also risk facing the consequences associated with pirate printing ventures. The chapter intervenes in long-standing debates about the causes and measurability of Shakespeare’s popularity and his relationship to authorship, genre, and the canon in the late seventeenth-century book trade.

Chapter 4 takes up the question of book size, including format (folio, quarto, etc.) as well as the adjectives applied to books (big, large, little, etc.). The rhetoric of book size gave people a way to talk about information.

The version of 2 Henry VI most people know, read, and study is the play printed in 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. There is, however, an early alternative version of the play, about one third shorter in length, that was printed in quarto format in 1594, entitled The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, and reprinted in 1600 and 1619. The provenance of this shorter text, and its relationship to the Folio text, has provoked much debate. First focusing on the variant versions of a speech about lineage in early quartos and Folio, while drawing in consideration of practices of coauthorship and revision, the chapter then turns to how the death of Gloucester is represented in the various versions. The chapter considers how the different textual versions of this English history play convey also a different emotional register that affects both character and situation.