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  • Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing
  • Cyndia Susan Clegg (bio)
Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing. By Andrew Murphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 503. $75.00 cloth.

A wry grin surely spread across Andrew Murphy's face when he transcribed this quotation from Frederick J. Furnivall into the penultimate chapter of Shakespeare in Print: "'Why didn't the brute edit his own works? . . . He could have done it in a month, and spared us poor devils the bother of centuries. . . . There are times when I wish I could stand him up in the corner there and punch his head for him!'" (209). Furnivall's editorial ventures (catalogued individually under entry 675 in Murphy's publishing chronology [361-62]) appear only a little over a third of the way through the Shakespeare editions the chronology reports! To bring this history and chronology current to the year 2002, Murphy had to contend with at least a thousand more Shakespeare editions than Furnivall confronted, and he did so without Furnivall's vexed relationship to Shakespeare editing.

Shakespeare in Print—as its subtitle, A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, suggests—is in certain respects two books: a carefully annotated chronology from 1593 to 2002 of the most influential or editorially significant editions of the printed texts of Shakespeare's poems and plays, and a discursive account of that chronology which attends to both the circumstances of publication and the critical reception of these printed texts. Murphy restricts his study to books published for the British and American markets; he admits neither translations nor texts prepared principally for performance. Even with these exceptions, the appendix's chronology, which is more comprehensive than the discursive history, still reflects choices dictated by Murphy's acknowledged interest in editorial theory and the popularization of Shakespeare. The chronology lists all single-play Shakespeare volumes up to 1709 and after that includes only those that he regards as editorially significant. "Single-play texts certainly continued to appear," but, according to Murphy, "they tended in large measure to be spin-offs from the collected-works series" that were so central to eighteenth-century publishing (279). All editions of collected works up to 1821 appear in the chronology. Following 1821, Murphy is guided by the Shakespeare Variorum Handbook (MLA, 1971), which, he says, provides "the skeleton for the appendix, post-1821—and, indeed, much of the flesh as well" (281). He supplements this with editions such as Ward and Lock's 1890 Sixpenny Shakespeare,"the cheapest complete edition published during the course of the nineteenth century," which played an important role in turning Shakespeare into a cultural icon (281).

Century by century, Shakespeare in Print's discursive history examines the principal printed editions and conditions that led to their production. The first of the two chapters on late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century printed texts attempts to account for the multiple paths by which both plays and poems found their way into print. The second chapter moves into what, for Murphy, appears to be far more comfortable ground—the early collected editions whose publishers and editors (albeit unnamed) [End Page 332] dictated selections and revisions. Chapters 3 through 6 recount the publishing history of the long eighteenth century that witnessed what Murphy characterizes as the

emergence of a theoretically self-conscious tradition of Shakespeare editing. . . . Shakespeare had been edited before, of course. Someone, after all, had to assemble and organise the texts that were included in the First Folio volume. . . . But it was in the eighteenth century that named editors first began to set out in their texts an explicit editiorial programme. . . .

(280)

Central to this discussion is the role that English copyright law played—first by enabling the entrenchment of the Tonson cartel, whose policy of "producing market-leading 'celebrity-edited' collected-works editions" (279) lent cachet to Shakespearean publication, and then by provoking challenges to both the Tonson supremacy and copyright. The challenges yielded smaller-format editions in England and fostered Shakespeare publishing in Scotland and Ireland, which led ultimately to American publication. The 1724 end of perpetual copyright, which placed Shakespeare in the public domain...

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