The Books of the Plays: Shakespeare & Print

Course Description

It is a cliché of Shakespeare scholarship that he was a “man of the theater.” But he was also a product of print. This class will be an intensive exploration of the ways in which print was responsible for Shakespeare (or better, for “Shakespeare”). No manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays have survived, so print is what allows us to read and even perform Shakespeare now. But it wasn’t inevitable that his plays reached print, and, even when they did, it wasn’t inevitable that they would have survived. (Think about Love’s Labor’s Won, a title mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598, and which was owned and offered for sale by an Exeter bookseller in 1603.) The course will allow us to explore the conditions of print in early modern England, though mainly focus on the publication and circulation of Shakespeare’s plays in print—from the earliest quartos, to the aborted Pavier collection of 1619, to the four early folios (1623–1685), to the great eighteenth-century editions, to the “Globe” Shakespeare of 1864, and to modern editorial projects in which we all first encountered Shakespeare. There will also be some consideration of what it means to “edit” Shakespeare.

The course will be run as a seminar, and will be project-specific, drawing its focus in part from the interests of its participants, but with work depending upon the extraordinary resources of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, as well as the collections of the Elizabethan Club. Participants will have the opportunity to work closely with the early materials, do original research, and pursue topics of their own interest as they come to understand the ways in which print is what has allowed Shakespeare to become not just the name of England’s (the world’s?) most famous playwright but also the synecdochal name of a treasured book.

The seminar is designed for scholars, graduate students, librarians, and collectors, who are interested particularly in Shakespeare (and early drama), but interested also in the material and institutional practices of the early English printing trade and in thinking about how materiality might affect literary understanding.

In their personal statement, applicants are requested to summarize their background in the field, indicate any current research projects, and suggest topics or issues that they would particularly like the course to address.

Faculty

David Scott Kastan

David Scott Kastan is the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University, having previously taught at Columbia University and at Dartmouth College. He is one of the General …

Advance Reading List

Suggested Advance Readings

All of the suggested readings below are likely to be in any college or university library, or available via interlibrary loan (ILL).

Blayney, Peter W.M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1991. (Available through the Folger’s online shop, SKU 002004, or online via sites like AbeBooks.com.) A wonderful and inexpensive introduction to the bibliography of early modern books. Be careful not to confuse this $7.95 paperback with the $150 Norton facsimile bearing the same title and an introduction by Blayney.

[If you are new to basic bibliography, you might want to watch the video The Anatomy of a Book: I. Format in the Hand-Press Period, written by Terry Belanger. Many college libraries have it, but the DVD with the workbook and practice sheets can be purchased directly from Rare Book School for $45. The DVD can be purchased alone for $25. ]

Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Based on his Lyell Lectures in 2012, Erne examines “the publication, constitution, dissemination, and reception of Shakespeare’s printed plays and poems,” focusing mainly on his print popularity and the question of his own concern with that.

Hooks, Adam G. Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and The Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Also considering the narrative poems, Hooks shows how our ideas of Shakespeare were shaped by the book trade, “by the stationers who put Shakespeare up for sale, and by the ways customers and readers responded to and used the books branded with his name.”

Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare and the Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A short book, based on the Northcliffe Lectures given at the University of London in 2000, that considers the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays have been made available to readers from their earliest readers, through the first age of editing in the eighteenth-century to the (beginnings of) the digital present. At least you will know much of what I think—or once thought.

[There are also a number of excellent essays (not by me), in Kastan, David Scott. A Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, particularly the five essays in the section called “Printing.”]

Smith, Emma, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. An extremely useful set of essays on the 1623 so-called First Folio (not, of course, the first folio, but the first publication of Shakespeare in a folio format), and on the conditions of early modern English book culture.

Course Evaluations

Course History