Selling Shakespeare
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.
- Offers new evidence to show how and why Shakespeare's works were first printed and sold
- Provides a new critical method that shifts attention from Shakespeare to the publishers and booksellers who sold his works
- Introduces an alternate form of dramatic criticism to show how booksellers were the first biographers and bibliographers
Product details
March 2016Adobe eBook Reader
9781316496886
0 pages
0kg
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- 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.