A subject of ongoing debate, contention, and revision, the publication of Shakespeare's King Lear in 1608 has divided textual scholars seeking to understand the text's provenance and the substantive differences between the quarto and folio versions of the play. Accounts have often concentrated on the printing process, undertaken by the workshop of Nicholas Okes, and how it shaped the textual state of the first quarto, an edition that has sometimes been derided as one of the period's worst printed. 1 Limited attention, however, has been paid to the publisher of King Lear -Nathaniel Butter. As Peter Blayney outlines, the publisher was 'the prime mover' in the early modern book trade, responsible for acquiring the text, paying for its manufacture, and often for selling the copies wholesale (to other booksellers) and retail (to individual book buyers). It was, as Blayney clarifies, 'the publisher, not the [trade] printer, who decided that the text should be made public'. 2 Butter made this decision for King Lear. He and his bookshop at the Sign of the Pied Bull near St Austin's Gate in Paul's Churchyard also became a permanent part of King Lear through the playbook's title-page imprint. Although books could be bought and traded throughout London and, indeed, across the country, Butter's bookshopand, therefore, Paul's Churchyardwere a part of King Lear wherever it went, introducing a web of cultural and political associations that could shape the experiences of readers.

This chapter examines the coexistence of error and correction in printed plays from the commercial stages in England. It proposes two textual experiences of error — announced error and silent error — and offers a case study on Edward III, a play that has often generated interest for its connection to Shakespeare. Regularly overlooked is the significance of the play’s early quarto editions (1596, 1599) in shedding light on the transmission of plays from stage to page, including the agents and processes of correction in reprint editions. By tracing how the play was prepared for publication this chapter argues that error and correction encourage readers of commercial playbooks to act as ‘authorisers’, compelled to navigate the play’s continued provisionality in print.

Nostalgia can be a powerful and adaptable political idea that evokes a dislocation between past and present but, paradoxically, also collapses that temporal distinction by inscribing an idealized, selective past with the concerns of the present and announcing its contemporaneity.First performed and printed in the early Jacobean period, Thomas Heywood's 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody recall significant events from Elizabeth I's reign and were among a number of new Foxean history plays that registered some anxiety about England's future under the new Stuart king, James I. Their nostalgia for the Elizabethan past acquired new urgency and application through printed editions -and, indeed, Heywood's plays proved to have, on the basis of edition numbers, lasting appeal in print. Part 1 was printed eight times between 1605 and 1639, and Part 2 was printed four times between 1606 and 1633, which makes the former among the period's most frequently reprinted plays. 1 This article concentrates on the Caroline editions of Part 1 (1632, 1639) and Part 2 (1633) to demonstrate how Heywood's plays became part of an emerging "counterpublic" during the 1630s that was sometimes at odds with royal policy and to highlight the potential of reprints to generate new interpretations, when the political, theatrical, and economic factors shaping a play's first performance and publication have changed. 2 It argues that the plays' nostalgia for Elizabethan histories and figureheads acquires a topical, transnational currency during the Thirty Years' War, particularly through the collaborative textual communities that oversaw the reprinted editions. While plays are often seen as participants in a period's political culture, there is a very real exchange between Heywood's plays and the political context of their Caroline publication,

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