Canonising Shakespeare

This book demonstrates how the book trade of 1640-1740 canonised Shakespeare by selling, editing and promoting his plays and poems.

1. Introduction Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan; Part I. Selling Shakespeare: 2. Shakespeare for sale, 1640-1740 Emma Depledge; 3. Royalist Shakespeare: publishers, politics and the appropriation of The Rape of Lucrece (1655) Adam G. Hooks; 4. Henry Herringman, Richard Bentley and Shakespeare's Fourth Folio (1685) Francis X. Connor; 5. Shakespeare without rules: the fifth Shakespeare folio and market demand in the early 1700s Lara Hansen and Eric Rasmussen; 6. The 1734-5 price wars, Antony and Cleopatra and the theatrical imagination Anthony Brano. Part II. Consolidating the Shakespeare Canon: 7. Consolidating the Shakespeare canon, 1640-1740 Peter Kirwan; 8. John Benson's 1640 poems and its literary precedents Faith Acker; 9. Cupids Cabinet Unlock't (1662), ostensibly 'by W. Shakespeare', in fact partly by John Milton Lukas Erne; 10. Discovering Shakespeare's personal style: editing and connoisseurship in the eighteenth century Edmund G. C. King; Part III. Editing Shakespeare: 11. Editing Shakespeare, 1640-1740 Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan; 12. Dramatic typography and the restoration quartos of Hamlet Claire M. L. Bourne; 13. The 1709/11 editions of Shakespeare's poems Paul D. Cannan; 14. Alexander Pope, interventionist editing and The Taming of the Shrew (1725) Jonathan H. Holmes; 15. Editorial annotations in Shakespeare editions after 1733 Adam Rounce; 16. Afterword Patrick Cheney.