Trading in ‘Shakespeare'

Remarkably, for a book about Shakespeare during the period spanning his own lifetime, discussion of the man himself is refreshingly absent from most of Shakespeare and the Book Trade. Delivered as the Oxford Lyell Lectures in Bibliography in 2012, this book is instead an impressively wide-ranging study of Shakespeare’s bibliographical presence from 1584. It is intended to accompany Erne’s prior work, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, in dismantling the pervasive view that Shakespeare neither sought nor saw success as a print-published dramatic author. The central argument across the pair of studies is the opposite: that Shakespeare desired literary status for his plays, and it was the book trade that helped him achieve it.

Alongside other titles of the last decade that focus on the playwright’s presence in the book trade, such as Andrew Murphy’s Shakespeare in Print, David Scott Kastan’s Shakespeare and the Book, and Marta Straznicky’s Shakespeare’s Stationers, Erne’s contribution assesses the publication of Shakespeare’s plays within the field now broadly termed the history of the book. But more than these studies, Shakespeare and the Book Trade is focused throughout on playbooks rather than playtexts. It is distinguished by its sustained analysis of the printed plays and poetry as material that was produced for a particular bibliographical culture in which Shakespeare was becoming ‘a book trade commodity’ (p. 2), and by the author’s choice to focus primarily on the quarto and octavo playbooks and poems. Underlying the entire work is an attention to under-studied agents within the book trade – the reading public who sought Shakespeare’s titles for their shelves, and the lesser-known booksellers and stationers who traded in his name and crafted the physical make-up of his books.

Erne terms his approach ‘bibliometric’ – that is, focused on numerical data such as a playbook’s number of editions and reprint rate in order to deduce its contemporary commercial success. He deploys these figures to argue that it was Shakespeare, not Jonson, whose name was most coveted by the play-buying public in his own time. This quantitative focus, particularly evident in the earlier chapters, is balanced by an admirable array of evidence compiled from a range of sources, chiefly the Stationers’ Register, early modern library catalogues, and the title pages and printed apparatus in dozens of early printed books. Chapter 1 attempts to quantify Shakespeare’s relative popularity during the period 1584–1642 by using the number of published editions and reprints as an indicator of a playwright’s popularity. As Erne is well aware, this quantitative approach necessarily raises questions about its limitations, and is particularly vulnerable to criticism that the repeated appearance of certain authors in such a list might reflect prolific careers rather than their contemporary popularity.

Yet throughout the book, Erne is sensitive to the study’s shortcomings and his methods are appealingly transparent. In the case of chapter 1, he furnishes a number of figures whose variety controls for skewed results. For example, to prevent his data on Shakespeare’s popularity being artificially inflated by the inclusion of his anonymously published works, Erne provides figures not only for all playbooks published between 1584 and 1616, but also for those published with title-page ascriptions to named authors. The chapter concludes that Shakespeare’s reprint rate was four times that of Jonson, and that he was more popular amongst readers of plays in the first half of the century than in the second. In spite of the inherent challenges of using edition print rates to assess popularity, the thoroughness of Erne’s method and the rigour of his numerical analysis, supported by a detailed appendix to chapter 1 (of playbooks published to 1660), make his arguments about Shakespeare’s pre-eminence all the more persuasive.

The book’s second chapter deals with authorial misattributions to Shakespeare, with the underlying assumption that assigning a play or poem to a well-known author reflects a desire to capitalise on the saleability of his...