Shakespeare's rise to prominence was by no means inevitable. While he was popular in his lifetime, the number of new editions and revivals of his plays declined over the following decades. Emma ...Depledge uses the methodologies of book and theatre history to provide a re-assessment of the reputation and dissemination of Shakespeare during the Interregnum and Restoration. She demonstrates the crucial role of the Exclusion Crisis (1678–1682), a political crisis over the royal succession, as a foundational moment in Shakespeare's canonisation. The period saw a sudden surge of theatrical alterations and a significantly increased rate of new editions and stage revivals. In the wake of the Exclusion Crisis, Shakespeare's plays were made available on a scale not witnessed since the early seventeenth century, thus reversing what might otherwise have been a permanent disappearance of his drama from canonical familiarity and firmly establishing Shakespeare's work in the national cultural imagination.
False Dating Depledge, Emma
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America,
06/2018, Volume:
112, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Two Quarto editions of Hamlet bear the date 1676, known respectively as Q6 and Q7. The imprints to both editions state that Andrew Clark printed them for John Martyn and Henry Herringman. Thus far, ...the existence of two "1676" Hamlets has (understandably) led scholars to believe that Shakespeare's play was relatively popular at the time, with two editions within twelve months suggesting that the first edition sold out quickly. This essay builds on W. W. Greg's hunch concerning false dating and uses paper evidence to demonstrate that Q7 in fact dates from 1683-84, approximately eight years after its purported date. Depledge suggests that Richard Bentley probably financed the edition with the false date in collaboration with Jacob Tonson and the printer Robert Everingham, and offers a hypothesis as to why these men published Hamlet with a false date and imprint in 1683-84.
By exploring William Shakespeare's position in the performance and print market for the twenty-two years after Charles's Restoration, this paper argues for the importance of the Exclusion Crisis as ...the watershed moment in Shakespeare's afterlife. The author takes the reopening of the theaters and the establishment of the two patent theater companies, the King's Company and the Duke's Company, in 1660, as his starting point, ending with the former's financial demise and the creation of the United Company in 1682. His essay thus approaches the topic of "Shakespeare for Sale" by considering the extent to which Shakespeare's name was used to sell plays, as well as the occasions when his plays, or versions of his plays, were and were not deemed vendible between 1660 and 1682. Scholars of Shakespeare's authorial afterlife have tended to survey lengthy time spans, generally concurring that the eighteenth century witnessed the most significant moment in Shakespeare's journey towards canonization.
