Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640-1740

This book appears at an apt time.  There has hardly ever been so much contention about the Shakespeare canon, and attribution studies generally, as there has been over the last twenty years, and particularly the last three or four.  Although this volume would appear to be slightly removed from the heart of the matter because of its stated dates of coverage, much of what it has to say directly confronts the very often heated debate.   As this volume makes abundantly clear, the authorship/canon question goes back to the very earliest times, specifically the Third Folio of 1664, when the thirty-six plays of the First and Second Folios had seven plays added:  Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Locrine; The London Prodigal; The Puritan; Sir John Oldcastle; Thomas Lord Cromwell; and A Yorkshire Tragedy.  Only Pericles has been subsequently accepted as Shakespeare’s.  The Fourth Folio (1685) also included these seven extra plays, so that when Rowe came to produce his edition in 1709, the first with a named editor, and slavishly based his edition on the Fourth Folio, these seven plays were seen to be part of the canon. Pope’s editions of 1723-25 and 1728 reduced the canon back to the original thirty-six, and thus the canon stood, with hardly a tweak,…