The Texts of Shakespeare

Name: The Texts of Shakespeare
Price: 130 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock
ISBN: 9781350561052

The Transformation of Popular Theatre to Printed Book

Stephen Orgel (Stanford University, USA)

$130

Hardback

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English

The Arden Shakespeare
05 March 2026

Theatre Studies; Literary studies: general; Literary studies: plays & playwrights; Shakespeare studies & criticism

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 in 1623 made a radical claim for his plays as literature, in effect declaring his plays modern classics.

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 Shakespeare’s 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.

By: Stephen Orgel (Stanford University USA)
Imprint: The Arden Shakespeare
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 218mm, Width: 148mm, Spine: 16mm
Weight: 360g
ISBN: 9781350561052
ISBN 10: 1350561053
Pages: 192
Publication Date: 05 March 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Stephen Orgel is J. E. Reynolds Professor in Humanities, Emeritus, in the Department of English at Stanford University, USA. He is the author and editor of over 20 books and innumerable articles on Shakespeare and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including The Globe In Print (2024) and Impersonations (1996).

Reviews for The Texts of Shakespeare: The Transformation of Popular Theatre to Printed Book

Here, from one of the greatest scholars of our time, is a wonderful introduction for anyone and everyone who wants to begin to understand how Shakespeare’s plays became books and how that changes how we view them, whether studying them in class, working on the plays in the theatre or just being curious. * Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA *