Shakespeare and the Book Trade

Lukas Erne is Professor of English at the University of Geneva. He holds degrees from the Universities of Lausanne, Oxford and Geneva. He has taught at the University of Neuchâtel and, as Visiting Professor, at Yale University, Connecticut. He has been the Fowler Hamilton Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and the recipient of research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. He is the author of Shakespeare's Modern Collaborators (2008), Beyond 'The Spanish Tragedy': A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (2001) and Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003), which was named 'Book of the Year' in The Times Literary Supplement. He is the editor, with Guillemette Bolens, of Medieval and Early Modern Authorship (2011), of The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet (2007) and, with M. J. Kidnie, of Textual Performance: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare's Drama (2004). He gave the Lyell Lectures, on 'Shakespeare and the Book Trade', at the University of Oxford in spring 2012.

• Introduction; 1. Quantifying Shakespeare's presence in print; 2. Shakespeare, publication and authorial misattribution; 3. The bibliographic and paratextual makeup of Shakespeare's Quarto playbooks; 4. Shakespeare's publishers; 5. The reception of printed Shakespeare; Appendix A. The publication of playbooks by Shakespeare and his contemporaries to 1660; Appendix B. Printed playbooks of professional plays, including reprints, 1583–1622; Appendix C. Shakespeare's publishers, 1593–1622.

'An admirable amount of original research has gone into [this] study, making it of use to a wide array of readers. With Shakespeare and the Book Trade, Lukas Erne manages to do that most coveted of things: he has written another book that everyone must read.' Patrick Cheney, Pennsylvania State University