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i n t r o d u c t i o n What Is a Stationer? Marta Straznicky it does behove us to honour the labours and risks of those men, who sought indeed a livelihood and even a fortune in their occupations; but who often did far worthier than that, even sometimes to the risking of all that they possessed, and without whose speculations all this would have been lost to us. —Edward Arber The phrase “all this,” with respect to the present volume, refers to the imaginative writings of William Shakespeare. Preserved in print chiefly by the “labours,” “risks,” and “speculations” of dozens of printers, publishers, and booksellers, Shakespeare’s poems and plays in their earliest editions are evidence of direct and historically meaningful encounters with the community of tradesmen to whom, as Arber reminds us, we owe much of the intellectual heritage of early modern England.1 The collective term for printers, publishers , and booksellers in the early modern period was “stationer,” meaning a practitioner of any of the trades involved in book production, including binding , parchment making, and copying, and after 1557 referring more strictly to a member of the Stationers’ Company, which was incorporated in that year.2 While not all stationers would have had the opportunity or even the inclination to engage in cultural or political movements through their business practices, it is clear that a large number did, and did so in ways we are only now beginning to understand. To construe such stationers as “readers” marta straznicky 2 as well as tradesmen is to foreground their cultural agency in the production and dissemination of Shakespeare’s works; more broadly it is to inquire how commerce intersected with culture to transform so many varieties of manuscript , emanating to different degrees from the pen of a single individual, into the material property of books. The underlying premise of this collection is that the stationers who invested in Shakespeare’s writings had motives that were not exclusively financial, that in deciding to publish a poem or a play of Shakespeare’s (whether authorial attribution concerned them or not) they performed an act of critical judgment that is discernible in the material text, not least in its very existence. Shakespeare’s Stationers explores how the trade in books affected the interpretation of Shakespeare by early modern printers , publishers, and booksellers and how their interpretations in turn shaped Shakespeare into the “great Variety” of print commodities he would become in his first fifty years as a published author. The critical and historical procedures underlying this volume build on Zachary Lesser’s Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication, which argues that the intellectual facet of the stationers’ trade is crucial to understanding what individual plays meant “in these editions, in these specific historical moments, to these people.”3 These concerns resonate with the overlapping fields of cultural bibliography and the history of reading, specifically as they have been articulated in the seminal work of D. F. McKenzie, Robert Darnton , and Roger Chartier.4 Writing out of the fertile conjunction of poststructuralist and Marxist thought, these scholars established new objectives and protocols for a sociologically oriented study of books that takes the material form of a text as inseparable from the meanings produced by its readers. The claim, of course, is not that book design in any of its facets controls or determines the readings a text might generate, but, in Chartier’s terms, more basically that “any comprehension of a writing, no matter what kind it is, depends on the forms in which it reaches its reader.”5 Considering that book form itself is produced not only by technical skill and industry but also by social formations, ideologies, personal and intellectual disposition, and sheer creative energy, this is fundamentally a humanistic principle, returning, on the one hand, real readers and the artifacts of reading to reception history and, on the other, “human motive and intention” to bibliography.6 This shift in book history has had a profound impact on Shakespeare studies , generating major reappraisals of the textual history of Shakespeare’s plays, a new tradition of editorial theory and methodology, and widespread critical attention to bibliographic format, typography, binding, book collecting, and Introduction 3 the practices and technologies of early modern reading.7 Far from being the preserve of an elite corps of bibliographers and textual scholars, the study of the “materiality of the text” has become integral to historicist criticism, implicating as it does the physical...

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