The Texts of Shakespeare

Name: The Texts of Shakespeare
Brand: Bloomsbury Publishing (AUS)
Price: 83.75 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

The Transformation of Popular Theatre to Printed Book

By: Stephen Orgel

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Paperback | 22 January 2026

At a Glance

Paperback
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.4 x 13.8 x 1.6

Paperback

$83.75

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Available: 22nd January 2026

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How did plays from the popular theatre, written by an author better known as a poet, become the greatest literary monument in English? Renowned Shakespearean Stephen Orgel reveals how the transformation of Shakespeare's scripts was a triumph of both editorial intervention and marketing.

By no means the most admired playwright of his time, Shakespeare's most popular work during his lifetime and for decades afterwards was the long poem Venus and Adonis, first published in 1593. It wasn't until 1598 that Shakespeare's name appeared on the title page of a book, so how did Shakespeare's plays become the benchmark of English Renaissance drama? By examining the process of transformation from performance script to published book Orgel provides an accessible story of the making of Shakespeare's reputation in print and of how the publication of his plays in a grand folio made a radical claim for his plays as literature, in effect declaring his plays modern classics.

About half of Shakespeareâs plays appeared in inexpensive quartos, not all during Shakespeareâs lifetime. Seven years after his death his colleagues collected his plays in the first folio of 1623, a grand and very expensive volume. With chapters on the poems, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Pericles and Macbeth, this book offers a number of case studies illustrating a variety of problems of dealing with the quartos, as well as how different a 'good' text of a play was for Shakespeareâs readers and for modern scholars. It closes with an account of the production of the first folio, which, with the precedent of the Ben Jonson folio of 1616, effectively conferred classic status on this popular contemporary dramatist.

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