Shakespeare and the Book Trade by Lukas Erne (review)

Throughout, this book is presented as a sibling to that of Lukas Erne’s 2003 book, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, of which a second edition, with a new preface, was also published in 2013. The overall argument is that Shakespeare not only wanted to write plays for the theatre, but that he actively worked to be read: that he was partly responsible for the cultivation of his commoditization. This coupling of volumes is something of a shame, for Erne’s most recent book can adopt a defensive tone, which is used to refute, sometimes at great length, the few major criticisms that Literary Dramatist received—largely in 2008 by David Scott Kastan. In fact, Erne’s most recent volume works well as a stand-alone, carefully-documented thesis, which effectively argues that Shakespeare was the most successful writer of printed plays of his time: the only book-length study on the subject, and, given the daunting amount of scholarship that went into it, probably the last for a while.

In chapter 1, Erne seeks to establish the scope of Shakespeare’s bibliographic presence. In particular, he assesses the popularity of Shakespeare’s work in comparison to his dramatic contemporaries, including John Lyly and Ben Jonson. Erne measures Shakespeare’s printed presence through a quantitative analysis (or ‘bibliometrics’) of the printed texts of Shakespeare and others. His tables seem clear and accurate, although he does not make use of ‘edition sheets’, or the number of sheets that make up an edition. Edition-sheet analysis is useful in identifying the amount of time a printer had to commit to seeing an edition through the press. Erne refutes the claim of G. E. Bentley that Jonson’s general popularity was greater than Shakespeare’s from 1600 to 1690. Chapter 2 addresses contemporary misattributions of quarto playbooks to Shakespeare. From 1584 to 1633, no professional play seems to have been misattributed to anyone other than Shakespeare, whereas between 1595 and 1622 as many as ten editions may have been falsely attributed to Shakespeare. As Erne argues, the pattern of misattribution that emerges indicates that Shakespeare’s texts were coveted, and that his name was seen by publishers as a commodity.

Chapter 3 focuses on early-modern editions of Shakespeare’s plays. In this chapter, Erne’s investigation is divided in two: first, editions are evaluated in terms of paratextual features such as authorial ascriptions, dedications, sententiae markers, act and scene division; and second, they are assessed in relation to bibliographic features such as format, typeface, and paper in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Erne identifies a lack of paratextual features in Shakespeare’s plays, and argues that their absence marks Shakespeare’s ‘unpossessive authorship’, even as playwrights such as Jonson increasingly used such features to self-advertise. Ultimately, and in direct contradistinction to Shakespeare, the features of the playbooks of Jonson indicate a desire to create an elite drama in keeping with indoor playhouses.

Chapter 4 establishes the known Stationers associated with Shakespeare’s plays, including Cuthburt Burby, Nathaniel Butter, Thomas Pavier, and Matthew Law. An assessment of Shakespeare’s plays as a percentage of each publisher’s known stock suggests that Shakespeare featured prominently in retail marketing strategies. By extension, Shakespeare’s quarto plays were seen by many publishers as commercially viable. Chapter 5 discusses how Shakespeare’s quarto playbooks were seen as more than ephemera by his contemporary readers, despite Sir Thomas Bodley’s claims to the opposite effect in 1612. Many readers had his playtexts bound, catalogued, annotated, and adapted in commonplace books. Early owners included Sir William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649) and Sir John Harington (1560–1612), as well as the Royal Library of King Charles I.

Erne’s concern that quantitative analysis may to some seem ‘an aberration’ (p. 25) is, I think, unfounded and unnecessary, or at least to a younger generation who are expected to know how to tag and encode...