Selling Shakespeare : Biography Bibliography and the Book Trade (Hardcover)

ID: j9JUWQ2mz1

Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press

Adam G. Hooks offers a new history of Shakespeare s life in print and an innovative account of dramatic criticism and biography. Selling Shakespeare tells a story of Shakespeare s life and career in print a story centered on the people who created bought and sold books in the early modern period. The interests and investments of publishers and booksellers have defined our ideas of what is Shakespearean and attending to their interests demonstrates how one version of Shakespearean authorship surpassed the rest. In this book Adam G. Hooks identifies and examines four pivotal episodes in Shakespeare s life in print: the debut of his narrative poems the appearance of a series of best-selling plays the publication of collected editions of his works and the cataloguing of those works. Hooks also offers a new kind of biographical investigation and historicist criticism one based not on external life documents nor on the texts of Shakespeare s works but on the books that were printed published sold circulated collected and catalogued under his name.