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  • Shakespeare's Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800 by Jean-Christophe Mayer
  • Joshua J. McEvilla (bio)
Shakespeare's Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800. By Jean-Christophe Mayer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018. xv + 259 pp. £75. isbn 978 1 107 13833 9.

Richly endowed with examples, Jean-Christophe Mayer's Shakespeare's Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800 is a strong addition to the quickly growing literature of 'readership studies'. Devised according to six chapters with a rigid structuring of subsections—for example, Chapter 1 has 13 subdivisions—Mayer's survey of the 'rise of the reader' contributes to the field by finding a logical and entirely helpful order to elaborate on mostly original findings.

The first chapter skilfully cherry-picks from different studies to reimagine the literacy and economic conditions of 'early buyers and collectors of Shakespeare'. It updates and expands on Alan H. Nelson, 'Shakespeare and the Bibliophiles: From the Earliest Years to 1616', in Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading, edited by Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (London, 2005), pp. 49–73. Chapter 2 maps the 'material world' of Shakespeare's early readers from objects and the impression of objects found in early copies ('traces of a compositor's hair', a 'rusty mark left by a pair of scissors', a 'key') to the 'graffiti' of early life-writing in Shakespeare editions ('drawings depicting houses', a poem, signatures). Chapter 3 deduces a 'concordia discors' between the hermeneutic impulse of the knowledgeable gentleman reader and the 'critical' textual editor, responding to Sonia Massai's Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge, 2007). Chapter 4 provides as a correlative to the 'literary' editor a wide-ranging look at early stage-related, theatre-marketed textual adaptations of Shakespeare (such as the 'Smock Alley' Third Folio, pp. 118–22). Chapter 5 seems to test the waters for the argument of intentional 'detachability' of quotable passages for 'commonplacing' as a condition of literariness. To Mayer, 'quotability' is comparable to 'why size matters' and the classical minimalism of title-page elements in early-seventeenth-century playbooks, [End Page 121] building on and responding to Lukas Erne's Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 36–43 and 137–43. The final chapter, divided into two parts, examines the critical judgment that early readers passed on Shakespeare. It reflects on the evolution of textual dialogue from the private circulation of annotated copies to the 'hierarchies of taste' associated with the public circulation of published reading aids (p. 181).

Principally Mayer draws his examples from the collections at the Folger Shake-speare Library, including hands-on consultation of nineteen First Folios, sixteen Second Folios, and numerous commonplace books and single-play editions (pp. 230–32). Particularly resonant among an abundance of examples are the 'gift' First Folio, presented by printer William Jaggard to the heraldic officer Augustine Vincent, whose Discoverie of Errours was in press at the same time as the Folio (p. 41); Folger STC 22318 Copy 2—a 1612 quarto of Richard III—that 'contains emendations in an eighteenth-century hand and an etched portrait of Richard III' (p. 83); Folger MS M.a.4, wherein the 'Diary of a Sheffield Dissenter' records the anonymous author staying up 'till after 11 o'clock reading "Much ado about nothing"' (p. 217); and the Folger's second copy of the famous book of early vernacular sayings Belvedére or the garden of the Muses (1610), in which a defensive seventeenth-century owner warns, 'I will rite my name for to betray Hee who steales / my booke away' (p. 50). Flipping through the book, Figure 2.2 jumps from the page—a doodled drawing of an interior space beneath Hugh Holland's commendatory verse in Folger Fo. 1 no. 78 (p. 53).

In addition to the above examples, Mayer provides new critical readings of a wide range of other documents. He writes of diarist Richard Stonley's 'habit of lending books within his family circle', citing a diary entry of 4 March 1581 (Folger MS V.a.459, f. 50r). Speculatively, Stonley's 'desire to give his grandson...

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