It is ironic that, although he is probably the best known author in the world today, Shakespeare himself had little or no interest in publishing his works. Less than half of the plays attributed to him appeared in print before his death, and he seems to have had no particular interest in ensuring that those which were printed accurately reflected what he had written. Consequently it is difficult to gauge the authorial accuracy of the plays which have been handed down to us.

In this seminar, based on an extract from his work Shakespeare and the Book, David Scott Kastan looks at the era in which Shakespeare's plays were first performed and printed for public consumption. He describes a world before copyright laws, where plays were published not so much for profit but simply "because they could be". In the process, he raises many issues surrounding the questions of authorship, authenticity and, ultimately, the accuracy of historical interpretation.

Students will benefit most from this seminar by reading it in the context of other chapters from Shakespeare and the Book, which is available through Fathom.

• Describe the publishing world of seventeenth-century London.
• Identify the factors which have impinged on interpretation of the plays' texts.
• Compare alternative possibilities for quotations from Shakespeare.
• Assess the concept of authorship, especially in its historical context.

Shakespeare and the Book is a lively and learned account of Shakespeare{A146}s plays as they were transformed from scripts to be performed into books to be read, and eventually from popular entertainments into the centerpieces of the English literary canon. Kastan examines the motives and activities of Shakespeare{A146}s first publishers, the curious eighteenth-century schizophrenia that saw Shakespeare radically modified on stage at the very moment that scholars were working to establish and restore the {A145}genuine{A146} texts, and the exhilarating possibilities of electronic media for presenting Shakespeare now to new generations of readers. This is an important contribution to Shakespearean textual scholarship, to the history of the early English book trade, and to the theory of drama itself. Shakespeare and the Book persuades its readers of the resiliency of the book itself as a technology and of Shakespeare{A146}s own extraordinary resiliency that has been made possible not least by print.

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