Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes

Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée

Zachary Lesser (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

208 Seiten

2024
University of Pennsylvania Press (Verlag)
978-1-5128-2608-1 (ISBN)

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Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a "collected works" of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men, the project ran into trouble. In an attempt to salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. The deception worked for nearly three hundred years, until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentieth century. The discovery of these "Pavier Quartos," as they became known, was a landmark success for the New Bibliography and played an important role in establishing the validity and authority of that method of analysis. While more recent scholars have reassessed the traditional narrative that the New Bibliographers wrote, no one has gone back to look at the primary evidence: the quartos themselves.

In Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes Zachary Lesser undertakes a completely fresh study of these playbooks. Through an intensive bibliographical analysis of over three hundred surviving quartos, Lesser reveals evidence that has gone entirely unseen before: "ghosts" (faint, oily impressions produced when one book is bound next to another); "holes" (the tiny remains of the first simple stitching that held pamphlets together); and "rips and scrapes" (post-production alterations of title pages). This new evidence—much of it visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic methods—suggests that the "Pavier Quartos" are far more mysterious, with far more consequential ramifications for book history and Shakespeare scholarship than we have thought.

Zachary Lesser is the Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Hamlet" After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Ghosts

Chapter 2. Holes

Chapter 3. Rips and Scrapes

Conclusion. Questions

Appendix A. Census of Known Sets of the 1619 Quartos

Appendix B. Order of Plays in Known Bindings of the 1619 Quartos

Appendix C. Copies Consulted

Notes

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	24.04.2024
Reihe/Serie	Published in cooperation with the Folger Shakespeare Library
Zusatzinfo	7 color imgs and 1 table
Verlagsort	Pennsylvania
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-5128-2608-1 / 1512826081
ISBN-13	978-1-5128-2608-1 / 9781512826081
Zustand	Neuware