The Texts of Shakespeare: The Transformation of Popular Theatre to Printed Book

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How did plays from the popular theatre, written by an author better known as a poet, become the greatest literary monument in English Renowned Shakespearean Stephen Orgel reveals how the transformation of Shakespeare's scripts was a triumph of both editorial intervention and marketing.

By no means the most admired playwright of his time, Shakespeare's most popular work during his lifetime and for decades afterwards was the long poem Venus and Adonis, first published in 1593. It wasn't until 1598 that Shakespeare's name appeared on the title page of a book, so how did Shakespeare's plays become the benchmark of English Renaissance drama By examining the process of transformation from performance script to published book Orgel provides an accessible story of the making of Shakespeare's reputation in print and of how the publication of his plays in a grand folio made a radical claim for his plays as literature, in effect declaring his plays modern classics.

About half of Shakespeares plays appeared in inexpensive quartos, not all during Shakespeares lifetime. Seven years after his death his colleagues collected his plays in the first folio of 1623, a grand and very expensive volume. With chapters on the poems, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Pericles and Macbeth, this book offers a number of case studies illustrating a variety of problems of dealing with the quartos, as well as how different a 'good' text of a play was for Shakespeares readers and for modern scholars. It closes with an account of the production of the first folio, which, with the precedent of the Ben Jonson folio of 1616, effectively conferred classic status on this popular contemporary dramatist.

Author Bio

Stephen Orgel is J. E. Reynolds Professor in Humanities, Emeritus, in the Department of English at Stanford University, USA. He is the author and editor of over 20 books and innumerable articles on Shakespeare and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including The Globe In Print (2024) and Impersonations (1996). He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEH Fellowships, and ACLS Fellowships; he has been a Getty Fellow, a visiting fellow at New College, Oxford, and the Clark Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and on the board of the Associazione Malatesta in Italy.