The legitimation of printed playbooks in Shakespeare's time When were printed playbooks first considered literature? When did playwrights first become authors? What are the cultural and material forces that shaped these processes? Scholarship has investigated these questions and proposed answers or, more often, taken certain answers for granted. In this chapter, I am going to suggest that these answers need to be refined or, in some cases, corrected. The standard critical argument in the past has been that the concept of dramatic authorship emerges in the early seventeenth century with the advent of a new kind of scholarly writer, the first "self-crowned laureate," to use Richard Helgerson's designation, who was also a dramatist. 1 He was neither a professional writer of the sort of Robert Greene, who scraped a living with his pen, nor a writer in the service of a nobleman, like Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton, nor a courtier or a gentleman writing to please his own private circle, like Sir Philip Sidney. Instead, he was a scholar interested in writing and bringing a new kind of self-confidence to the profession. In the more sweeping version of this argument, his advent in print is first signaled by the publication of Jonson's Workes in 1616. Commenting on the "conception of the nature and status of drama," one scholar has written that: One man can be said to have. .. changed literary history abruptly. This man, Ben Jonson, deserves his place in English cultural history not just for his brilliant hardedged comedies, but also for his insistence that a play is literature. The moment that changed the conception of the nature and status of drama came in 1616. In that year Jonson published a folio of about a thousand pages containing nine of his plays, eighteen of his masques and entertainments, and a substantial body of his epigrams, panegyrics, and verse letters; he called this miscellany of traditional literary forms and dramatic texts The Works of Benjamin Jonson.

Shakespeare and the Book Trade follows on from Lukas Erne's groundbreaking Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist to examine the publication, constitution, dissemination and reception of Shakespeare's printed plays and poems in his own time and to argue that their popularity in the book trade has been greatly underestimated. Erne uses evidence from Shakespeare's publishers and the printed works to show that in the final years of the sixteenth century and the early part of the seventeenth century, 'Shakespeare' became a name from which money could be made, a book trade commodity in which publishers had significant investments and an author who was bought, read, excerpted and collected on a surprising scale. Erne argues that Shakespeare, far from indifferent to his popularity in print, was an interested and complicit witness to his rise as a print-published author. Thanks to the book trade, Shakespeare's authorial ambition started to become bibliographic reality during his lifetime.

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE POPULARITY OF POETRY BOOKS IN PRINT, 1583-1622 by lukas erne and tamsin badcoe Shakespeare's poems had very uneven success in the early modern book trade: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece became immediate bestsellers, whereas the Sonnets received not a single reprint in the 30 years following their original publication in 1609. We argue that an examination of the popularity of poetry books in the book trade is necessary to come to a better understanding of the status of Shakespeare's printed poems in their own time. What were the best-selling poetry books of the period, and how popular were they compared to Shakespeare's narrative poems? How unusual was it for a poetry book to be reprinted 15 times (like Venus and Adonis), or not to be reprinted at all? We also contextualize the question of popularity by focusing on genre, placing Shakespeare's Sonnets and Venus and Adonis amidst the publication history of their generically most closely related poetry books. Our article also has a second, broader ambition, which is to evaluate the popularity of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century poetry books in relation to the book trade more generally. When they were first published, Shakespeare's poems had very uneven success in the book trade. Venus and Adonis, his first work to reach print, became an immediate bestseller, with 6 editions in the 1590s, 10 during his lifetime, and 16 by 1636. 1 Shakespeare's Sonnets, in contrast, received not a single reprint in the 30 years following their original publication in 1609. 2 These figures seem surprising given that Shakespeare's narrative poem has since become one of his lesser known works, whereas the Sonnets are now among the most famous poetry in the English language. His other poems were more popular than the Sonnets but less than Venus and Adonis: his second narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, first published in 1594,