A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text

Notes on Contributors vii

Acknowledgments x

Note on Texts xi

Introduction: What Happens in Hamlet? 1
Andrew Murphy

Part I Histories of the Books 15

1 The Publishing Trade in Shakespeare’s Time 17
Helen Smith

2 Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590–1619 35
Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier

3 Shakespeare Writ Small: Early Single Editions of Shakespeare’s Plays 57
Thomas L. Berger

4 The Life of the First Folio in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 71
Anthony James West

Part II Theories of Editing 91

5 The Birth of the Editor 93
Andrew Murphy

6 The Science of Editing 109
Paul Werstine

7 Editing Shakespeare in a Postmodern Age 128
Leah S. Marcus

8 Shakespeare and the Electronic Text 145
Michael Best

Part III Practicalities 163

9 Working with the Text: Editing in Practice 165
David Bevington

10 Working with the Texts: Differential Readings 185
Sonia Massai

11 Mapping Shakespeare’s Contexts: Doing Things with Databases 204
Neil Rhodes

Afterword 221
John Drakakis

Bibliography 239

Index 258