Erne 2013

"Shakespeare and the Book Trade argues that Shakespeare’s place within early modern textual culture made of him a surprisingly prominent man-in-print. I provide a corrective to the view that Shakespeare’s early bibliographical reception in no way anticipates his eighteenth-century canonization. ”

distant reading approach; gathering wide swath of data rather than selective readings

focusing on quarto play books and poetry, since first folio has been extensively covered elsewhere

39 plays appeared in print in early modern period; 18 during his lifetime in quarto

topsellers: 3 history plays, I Henry IV, Richard III, Richard II; Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, and Pericles also successful

Venus and Adonis was popular, 10 editions before the end of Shakespeare’s life

table: chronological listing of Sh publications to 1660

18-20 play books originally appeared anonymously

"“The evidence suggests that Shakespeare, as Patrick Cheney has argued, was a poet-playwright, whose presence in print precisely combined the two genres.35” “Another observation which emerges from the chronological table is that Shakespeare’s arrival in the book trade was sudden and massive.”

“The number of Shakespeare publications peaked early and then steadily declined over the next decades. The view that Shakespeare was not discovered by the book trade until after his death and that the rise of his reputation was gradual and posthumous is thus precisely wrong.”

“The stationers, to whom Shakespeare and his fellows released many of his play texts, turned Shakespeare into a remarkably successful author in print, and we have every reason to believe that he was keenly aware of, and affected by, this development.”

Chapter 1. Quantifying Shakespeare’s Presence in Print

"“In the period from 1586 to 1637, a decree limited the number of copies of ordinary books to 1,500, but, as Philip Gaskell has shown, ‘the masters ignored the decree and printed larger editions whenever it suited them to do so’.”

popularity of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis — went through more editions than many other now more widely-read poems

"“As far as I am aware, the only literary titles in English first published in Elizabethan or Jacobean London of which there were more editions than of Venus and Adonis are John Lyly’s prose romances, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580).”

cf of Shakespeare’s published output to Robert Greene

Blayney, Farmer, Lesser - debate over the popularity of playbooks, SQ 2005

“for the whole period from the beginning of the publication of professional plays to 1642, when public performances ceased, Shakespeare, with seventy-four editions of playbooks, out-publishes all his contemporaries by more than 50 per cent. ”

“I would argue, then, that our thinking about Shakespeare’s status from his own time to the eighteenth century has been too linear, too much anchored in the belief that the reputation he came to acquire in the eighteenth century is diametrically opposed to his lack of cachet in the early seventeenth century.”

Chapter 2. Shakespeare, publication, and authorial misattribution

number of misattributions is remarkably high for Shakespeare; and no other dramatist in the period had any misattributions

“During his lifetime and in the years following it, pseudepigraphy appears to have been a Shakespearean prerogative.”