Virtual Florence, 2021

ABSTRACT: This is about the transformation of popular theater into high literature; and the technology involved is a combination of editing, printing and marketing. I have called it "the invention of Shakespeare" because it is also about the creation of an author suited to the increasing centrality and canonicity of the works. Shakespeare in his own time was known and admired not as a literary monument, but as a popular playwright; and to the reading public, he was best known not as a playwright at all, but as the author of the two long narrative poems published near the beginning of his career, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece -both of these went on being reprinted until long after his death. A few of the plays—not many—were published in multiple quarto editions, and would therefore also have been known to a substantial number of readers. But even these, though they became books, exhibit characteristics of popular drama, as do many of the previously unpublished plays that were eventually gathered into the monumental folio of 1623. To transform the plays into books we clarify, correct and modernize, to produce a clear, readable, unproblematic text, which is very unlike the texts that came from Shakespeare's pen and confronted Shakespeare's original readers. What happens when a play becomes a book?