Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640–1740 eds. by Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan (review)

Bridging book-historical work on Shakespeare's late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stationers with cultural histories of Shakespeare from the Restoration onward, Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan's groundbreaking collection, Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640–1740, offers the first history of Shakespeare's poems and plays in the book trade in the 1640s, Interregnum, Restoration, and early eighteenth century. The collection demonstrates the integral role that the book trade played in the consolidation of Shakespeare's authorial canon and of his status as a literary and cultural icon.

The volume is helpfully divided into three interlocking parts, each of which combines poetry and plays and proceeds chronologically across two centuries: "Selling Shakespeare" (Adam G. Hooks, Francis X. Connor, Lara Hansen and Eric Rasmussen, and Anthony Brano), "Consolidating the Shakespeare Canon" (Faith Acker, Lukas Erne, and Edmund G. C. King), and "Editing Shakespeare" (Claire M. L. Bourne, Paul D. Cannan, Jonathan H. Holmes, and Adam Rounce). Depledge and Kirwan supply four excellent introductions: one for the entire volume, and one at the head of each part that highlights the broader stakes of the essays' individual case studies and draws connections between them. Patrick Cheney's afterword considers the wider implications that the collection's innovative approach—eschewing both traditional categories of periodization and the discipline's usual segregation of genres—might have for Shakespeare and early modern studies. Four useful appendices (respectively, a list of extant copies of the Fifth Folio; the first lines of poems in Cupids Cabinet Unlock't; Shakespeare publications from 1640 to 1740; and other pre-1900 Shakespeare publications cited in the edition) offer direction for further work.

The essays offer a rich trove of new findings. Several shed light on significant yet little-known texts: Hansen and Rasmussen provide new external evidence to confirm for the first time that a Fifth Folio was printed in 1700. Erne retrieves a poetry collection, Cupids Cabinet Unlock't (1662)—spuriously attributed to Shakespeare but omitted from recent textual histories of Shakespeare—that features five critically overlooked poems by John Milton. Cannan's essay, on two neglected collections of Shakespeare's poems edited by Bernard Lintott (1709 and 1711) and Charles Gildon (1710), argues that Lintott's antiquarianism and Gildon's populism anticipate later editorial visions that continue to shape Shakespeare editing.

Other essays challenge assumptions about Restoration and eighteenth-century "Shakespeare." Bourne's analysis of typographical innovations in Restoration quartos of Hamlet, which were designed to convey extralexical elements of performance, overturns "established wisdom" about those stationers' indifference to readers (153). Holmes demonstrates how Alexander Pope introduced a new character into The Taming of the Shrew by incorporating elements from The Taming of a Shrew, setting an editorial precedent that endured from 1725 until 1790. Brano attributes our tendency to read Shakespeare's plays as individual works to the Walker-Tonson price wars of 1734–35, "when all of Shakespeare's plays became available in cheap, single editions" (63). King's essay scrutinizes evolving notions of canonicity itself: for eighteenth-century editors, "the Shakespeare canon" was selective, excluding not only spurious texts but also genuine texts deemed unworthy of their author (79).

Overturning earlier teleological narratives about Shakespeare's rise to cultural preeminence over this period, several essays highlight "the messy complexities of the material and commercial practices" (12) that eventually led to Shakespeare's canonization. As Hooks demonstrates, a fortuitous partnership between the stationers John Stafford and William Gilbertson led to the publication of an Interregnum edition of Lucrece (1655) that appended The Banishment of Tarquin, a royalist continuation of Shakespeare's poem by John Quarles. While Gilbertson saw Tarquin as a way to add value to a recently acquired older title, the edition enabled Stafford and Quarles to forward their royalist political agenda. Similarly, Connor attributes the Fourth Folio (1685) to the confluence of the literary ambitions of stationer Henry Herringman and the...