This collection builds upon the seminar “Shakespeare and the Book Trade, 1642–1737,” organized by Emma Depledge and Peter Kirwan at the 2014 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. The seven seminar participants are here joined by eight additional established and emerging scholars. The resulting sixteen-chapter volume reflects the editors’ and contributors’ sustained conversations and offers a coherent, well-balanced consideration of a century that, Depledge and Kirwan suggest, “oversaw the consolidation of Shakesepeare's pre-eminent status, the development of modern conventions for presenting plays in print and shifts in the marketplace for printed books that made Shakespeare both an elite product and widely available to anyone who could read” (3). Together, the essays show how agents of the book trade interpreted and sold Shakespeare to later readers.

A coauthored introduction defines the collection's chronological limits and explains that, while most of Shakespeare's works had been published before 1640, their continued print publication after the closing of the theaters shaped both Shakespeare's canon and reputation for a growing print readership. The chapters that follow are organized into three sections: “Selling Shakespeare,” which focuses on stationers’ efforts to attract and accommodate readers; “Consolidating the Shakespeare Canon,” which examines efforts to establish the authenticity of Shakespearean works; and “Editing Shakespeare,” which traces continuities between late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century practices. There is necessarily some overlap between the three sections, but each features an introduction by the editors that helpfully synthesizes its major themes and arguments. An afterword by Patrick Cheney emphasizes the collection's treatment of Shakespeare as both a poet and a playwright as well as the stakes, both for and beyond English studies, of examining the various agents involved in fashioning his posthumous reputation. The volume also includes two appendixes: a detailed table of “Shakespeare Editions and Shakespeare-Related Publications (1640–1740) Cited in This Collection,” which includes the date, title, attribution, imprint, format, and price (if known) for each book, and a “Chronological List of Other Shakespeare Publications before 1900 Cited in This Volume.” These appendixes are not only a valuable addition to the book but a spur to future research.

As the editors note, the collection's tripartite structure in some ways belies its admirable coherence, and conversations between essays range across the three sections. Depledge and Kirwan express hope that readers will find their own “routes through the book” (13), and this is easily done. For instance, chapters by Anthony Brano, Claire M. L. Bourne, and Jonathan H. Holmes address different kinds of relationships between text and performance. Adam G. Hooks, Faith Acker, and Lukas Erne explore the political uses of Shakespeare, often in relation to other authors, including John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Milton. Francis X. Connor, Lara Hansen, Eric Rasmussen, and Paul D. Cannan focus on the business of publication, while Edmund G. C. King and Adam Rouce trace the evolution of editorial apparatus. Together, the essays offer a sense of the economic and social cooperation and competition that drove the early modern book trade.

Unfortunately, some small errors have made their way into this otherwise excellent volume. These include minor typographical issues, such as a bold section heading that reads “Richard Bentley at the Post-House in Russel [sic] Street” (41), and more substantive ones, including the misidentification of John Marriot's son Richard as the publisher of the 1633 edition of John Donne's Poems (100), when the younger Marriot was not even freed of the Stationers’ Company until 1639. (Richard Marriot did publish the Poems from 1650.) The former are perhaps hard to avoid; the latter are more problematic in a volume committed to restoring less-familiar book trade figures to literary history. Nevertheless, this valuable collection builds upon and complements work on Shakespearean publication in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, especially Marta Straznicky's Shakespeare's Stationers (2012). Though the volume focuses on Shakespeare, its insights into the vibrant early modern book trade and the individual agents operating within it will undoubtedly be of interest to scholars working on a wide range of literary, cultural, and book historical projects.