Shakespeare and the Book Trade follows on from Lukas Erne's groundbreaking Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist to examine the publication, constitution, dissemination and reception of Shakespeare's ...printed plays and poems in his own time and to argue that their popularity in the book trade has been greatly underestimated. Erne uses evidence from Shakespeare's publishers and the printed works to show that in the final years of the sixteenth century and the early part of the seventeenth century, 'Shakespeare' became a name from which money could be made, a book trade commodity in which publishers had significant investments and an author who was bought, read, excerpted and collected on a surprising scale. Erne argues that Shakespeare, far from indifferent to his popularity in print, was an interested and complicit witness to his rise as a print-published author. Thanks to the book trade, Shakespeare's authorial ambition started to become bibliographic reality during his lifetime.
This open access book provides translations of early German versions of Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew. The introductory material situates these plays in their German context and ...discusses the insights they offer into the original English texts. English itinerant players toured in northern Continental Europe from the 1580s. Their repertories initially consisted of plays from the London theatre, but over time the players learnt German, and German players joined the companies, meaning the dramatic texts were adapted and translated into German. There are four plays that can legitimately be considered as versions of Shakespeare’s plays. The present volume (volume 2) offers fully-edited translations of two of them: Tito Andronico (Titus Andronicus) and Kunst über alle Künste, ein bös Weib gut zu machen / An Art beyond All Arts, to Make a Bad Wife Good (The Taming of the Shrew). For the other two plays, Der Bestrafte Brudermord / Fratricide Punished (Hamlet) and Romio und Julieta (Romeo and Juliet), see volume 1. These plays are of great interest not only to all Shakespeareans, but also to scholars who are concerned with the broader issues of translation, performance and textual transmission over time. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Swiss National Science Foundation.
Abstract
This article recovers parts of the biographically and bibliographically intertwined history of two early modern Zurich citizens, their joint travels and the Shakespeare quartos each of them ...owned. The first part focuses on a previously forgotten copy of the third quarto edition of Pericles (1611), now at the Zurich Central Library, and its original owner recorded on the title page, Marcus Stapfer (1591–1619). The second part of the article adds to the investigation Johann Rudolf Hess (1588–1655), the owner of the other early Shakespeare quartos at the Zurich Central Library. Stapfer and Hess jointly undertook extended educational travels from 1610 to 1614, including to London, where they are likely to have acquired their Shakespeare quartos in the summer of 1613. The article traces what is known about the quartos’ subsequent ownership history, before concluding that Shakespeare thus appears to have had a continuous bibliographic presence in Switzerland since the early seventeenth century.
Now in a new edition, Lukas Erne's groundbreaking study argues that Shakespeare, apart from being a playwright who wrote theatrical texts for the stage, was also a literary dramatist who produced ...reading texts for the page. Examining the evidence from early published playbooks, Erne argues that Shakespeare wrote many of his plays with a readership in mind and that these 'literary' texts would have been abridged for the stage because they were too long for performance. The variant early texts of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Hamlet are shown to reveal important insights into the different media for which Shakespeare designed his plays. This revised and updated edition includes a new and substantial preface that reviews and intervenes in the controversy the study has triggered and lists reviews, articles and books which respond to or build on the first edition.
Erne focuses on the text of Christopher Marlowe's play "Tamburlaine the Great." Marlowe's two-part play Tamburlaine the Great was first printed in London in 1590. What the prefatory address suggests ...is that Tamburlaine in its original state was longer and generically more mixed than the text that has come down to us, and contained material that Jones decided to omit, notably fond and friuolous Iestures, in modern spelling gestures, perhaps with a hint at jests and the kind of clownage (line 2) the play's Prologue denigrates. The original text of Tamburlaine seems to have mixed serious matter with comedy, and like some of Faustus' critics, Jones preferred the play without the comedy.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) is often assumed to have an oeuvre that is authorially and textually well defined and neatly delimited, an oeuvre, that is, in keeping with his distinctive, ...well-defined biographical persona. This essay argues that this sense of a well-defined oeuvre is a convenient myth and that, if we are interested in a more accurate assessment of the extent and preservation of his writings, we first need to disintegrate Marlowe. Where we may wish to find either plain Marlowe or not Marlowe, we may instead have collaborative Marlowe, revised Marlowe, doubtful Marlowe, and mutilated Marlowe. The early editions of Doctor Faustus end with the words, "terminat auctor opus," and each of these words turns out to be characteristic of the myth this essay investigates and may have played a role in constructing it. Marlowe did not single-handedly complete all his writings, several of them are not sole-authored, and his collaborative and partly fragmented writings may not amount to what we usually consider an opus. Instead, they turn out to be fully embedded in the exigencies of the messy, collaborative world of the early modern theater and book trade.
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Recent work in Shakespeare studies has brought to the forefront a variety of ways in which the collaborative nature of Shakespearean drama can be investigated: collaborative performance (Shakespeare ...and his fellow actors); collaborative writing (Shakespeare and his co-authors); collaborative textual production (Shakespeare and his transcribers and printers). What this leaves unaccounted for is the form of collaboration that affects more than any other our modern reading experience of Shakespeare's plays: what we read as Shakespeare now always comes to us in the form of a collaborative enterprise - and is decisively shaped by the nature of the collaboration - between Shakespeare and his modern editors. Contrary to much recent criticism, this book suggests that modern textual mediators have a positive rather than negative role: they are not simply 'pimps of discourse' or cultural tyrants whose oppressive interventions we need to 'unedit' but collaborators who can decisively shape and enable our response to Shakespeare's plays. Erne argues that any reader of Shakespeare, scholar, student, or general reader, approaches Shakespeare through modern editions that have an endlessly complicated and fascinating relationship to what Shakespeare may actually have intended and written, that modern editors determine what that relationship is, and that it is generally a very good thing that they do so.
A hitherto unknown copy of the fifth quarto of Hamlet (1637) contains information about a performance of the play in 1664. The quarto is at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (shelfmark: 70.10 ...Poet.), where it was catalogued no later than 1730. Nothing can be ascertained about the copy's earlier history, except that it must have been originally stab-stitched rather than bound, the typical holes near the top, in the middle and near the bottom of the gutter being clearly visible. It now has an undistinguished cardboard binding, covered by grey-beige paper, with the following barely legible words on the spine: 'The Tragedie of Hamlet by Shakespeare: 1637'.
A duodecimo volume published in 1662 with the title The Art of Courtship appends a pamphlet, called The New Accademy sic of Complements, with a number of previously undiscovered adaptations of poems ...by John Donne. They are based on eleven poems from the Songs and Sonnets of undoubted authenticity: 'Air and Angels', 'The Apparition', 'The Broken Heart', 'The Ecstasy', 'The Indifferent', 'A Jet Ring Sent', 'Love's Alchemy' and 'The Curse' (adapted into one poem), 'The Message', 'Song, Sweetest Love', and 'Woman's Constancy'; two elegies, 'The Anagram' and 'His Parting from Her'; and two non-canonical poems first included in Donne's Poems in 1635: 'Song, Soul's Joy' and 'Song, Dear Love'. One poem, which was first printed in the fourth edition of Donne's Poems of 1649 and whose authenticity has sometimes been doubted, 'The Token', is included without adaptation. This article prints and briefly discusses the poems based on Donne's and contextualizes the book in which they first appeared.
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This article is an offshoot of work towards an edition of Bel-vedére or The Garden of the Muses, a printed commonplace book published in 1600. The editors' comprehensive analysis of the origins of ...the 4,482 one- or two-line passages has resulted in the discovery of thirteen hitherto untraced passages that are based on Shakespeare (and of a fourteenth passage whose Shakespearean origins were discovered by the scholar Charles Crawford in the early twentieth century but not published). These passages and their Shakespearean source texts in Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour's Lost, Richard II, Richard III, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece are discussed here and serve to illustrate the range of adaptive strategies used in the compilation of the commonplace book. Three additional passages which have perhaps been adapted from Shakespeare source texts, including one of his sonnets, are also discussed. Discussion of the Shakespearean presence in Bel-vedére is contextualised by a brief account of prior work on the commonplace book and the attempted identification of its origins.
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