The phrase “all this,” with respect to the present volume, refers to the imaginative writings of William Shakespeare. Preserved in print chiefly by the “labours,” “risks,” and “speculations” of dozens of printers, publishers, and booksellers, Shakespeare’s poems and plays in their earliest editions are evidence of direct and historically meaningful encounters with the community of tradesmen to whom, as Arber reminds us, we owe much of the intellectual heritage of early modern England.¹ The collective term for printers, publishers, and booksellers in the early modern period was “stationer,” meaning a practitioner of any of the trades involved in book production,...

In 2005 Forbes magazine ran a fluff piece on the annual revenue that might accrue to the Shakespeare estate were it in full control of his intellectual property and related brand identity; the conservative estimate was $15 million.¹ That $15 million is, of course, only a small percentage of the annual revenue hypothetically generated by the property/brand. The exponential growth of Shakespeare revenue is a modern phenomenon, though it can be traced to energetic entrepreneurial activity in the eighteenth century, particularly among members of the book trade working synergistically alongside theater impresarios, actors, editors, and writers whose livelihoods and reputations...

In the history of English theater, 1594 was either a year of momentous importance, changing London’s theatrical landscape forever, or not particularly noteworthy, a year that saw some companies rise to prominence and others vanish just as they had in the past and would in future years.¹ While the significance of what happened in 1594 for the development of commercial playacting can be debated, there can be no question that the year marked a radical change in the history of printed drama. More playbooks were registered and more plays appeared in print in 1594 than ever before, by a wide...

According to one estimate, Thomas Playfere was “crackt in the headpeece, for the love of a wench as some say.”¹ The description is not what one would expect of the prestigious Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, who soon after would begin preaching regularly at the court of James I, but Playfere was just as famous in his day for losing his wits as he was for his extraordinarily eloquent, if at times lengthy and abstruse, sermons. The young London law student John Manningham was given the name of the wench in question and duly noted that “Dr. Playfare...

So Henry Chettle describes his dealing with the manuscript and the preparation of printer’s copy and licensing of Robert Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit (1592) in “To the Gentlemen Readers,” in Chettle’s Kind-harts dreame of probably 1593 (STC 5123). Licensed it might have been, but when Greene’s book was entered by William Wright in the Stationers’ Register on 20 September 1592, the entry read, “Entred for his copie, vnder master watkins hande / vppon the perill of Henrye Chettle / a booke intituled Greenes Groatsworth of wyt.”¹ Whether Chettle was telling the truth or not, he seems to have been describing...

Since the mid-1980s, historians have undertaken a broad reconsideration of the roots of the English Civil War. Dissatisfied with the assumption that a republican political temper emerged spontaneously in the late 1630s, that various social practices and customs kept sixteenth-century Englishmen from conceiving of themselves as active citizens or of the “commonwealth” as a republican state, Patrick Collinson, Markku Peltonen, and Quentin Skinner among others have identified a number of different republican strands of thought and action in Tudor England.¹ Collinson has even gone so far as to characterize late Elizabethan England as a “monarchical republic,” arguing that it “was...

Did Shakespeare own his own playbooks? Although in an essay of this title Andrew Gurr is hesitant to answer “yes,” he nevertheless shows the strong likelihood that Edward Alleyn personally controlled a number of the dramatic manuscripts used by the Admiral’s Men—including many of Christopher Marlowe’s plays.¹ “It has been assumed with too little question,” he notes, “that the company sharers always owned the playbooks they used in their repertories collectively.”² More than rhetorical, Gurr’s question has high stakes: if Shakespeare controlled even some of his publications after Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, such could change our understanding of...

Recent scholarship has helpfully shown how “ideological commitment was not the sole province of authors but also of printers-publishers,”¹ thus qualifying the earlier assumption that “like the grocer and the goldsmith,” early modern stationers “were mainly interested in money.”² This important shift in our understanding of the active role of textual agents involved in the transmission of early English drama into print has also led to more balanced and nuanced views about Shakespeare’s attitude to dramatic publication. While Lukas Erne has effectively demystified earlier theories about the antagonistic relationship between Shakespeare and his stationers, I have shown how a synergy...

Shakespeare’s history plays have often been read with one eye looking forward to the reign of Charles I and the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642. The first writer to make this move was John Milton in Eikonoklastes, published only nine months after the execution of Charles I in January 1649. Milton alleged that Charles had learned the tyrannical arts of flattery and counterfeited piety from his reading of his “Closet Companion,” William Shakespeare, “who introduces the Person of Richard the third, speaking in as high a strain of pietie, and mortification, as is utterd in any passage”...

The Two Noble Kinsmen is an oddball among Shakespeare’s printed plays. The 1634 first edition is the only Shakespearean playbook in which the Bard’s name appears on the title page alongside that of another playwright, John Fletcher. It is the only play now generally accepted as Shakespeare’s (at least in part) to have been first printed after the publication of the First Folio. Like Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen seems to have been omitted from the Folio because it was perceived by Shakespeare’s editors John Heminge and Henry Condell as either too collaborative or else perhaps as collaborative in the...