Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Lukas Erne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 287. Cloth $60.00. Lukas Erne's book seeks to challenge certain fundamental assumptions about Renaissance (and, specifically, Shakespeare) publishing that have been repeated so many times that they have achieved the status of truisms, invoked unthinkingly by generation after generation of scholars. The first of these assumptions is that Shakespeare's theater company actively discouraged the publishing of play texts. Erne interrogates this supposition by examining the publishing record and he seeks to demonstrate a pattern whereby, at least during his time specifically as a Lord Chamberlain's Men playwright, Shakespeare's plays were being brought to print (or, at least, entered in the Stationers' Register) roughly two years after their first performances. Erne notes that the plays were often brought to publication by stationers who had direct connections with the theater-stationers such as James Roberts, who held the monopoly for the printing of playbills. He sees the two year cycle as constituting a coherent and deliberate strategy, aimed at generating publicity for old plays as they were being revived in the theater-the published texts offering "a way of securing free promotion for a revival when a playbook would have been sold in bookshops and advertised with title pages put up on posts in London" (91). That Shakespeare's theater company were engaged in an ongoing battle with predatory publishers is a myth of long-standing. But Erne has more recent historical assumptions in his sights here also. Over the course of the past decade or so, many commentators, drawing heavily on Foucault's seminal "What is an Author?," have suggested that, because the Renaissance lacked a modern understanding of copyright, then the concept of proprietary authorship is anachronous when applied to Renaissance writers.1 These scholars lay heavy stress on the fact that so many playtexts in the Renaissance period (especially before the turn of the century) were published without any indication of who their authors were. Erne challenges the "all or nothing" logic of this strand of scholarship, arguing forcefully (and convincingly) that, while Renaissance concepts of copyright certainly differ materially from those evolved over the course of the eighteenth century, this does not mean that authors did not have a sense of proprietorship over the texts that they wrote. He argues that "the idea of copyright as the right of the author was very much present in Shakespeare's time, though it was not anchored in the law until the eighteenth century" (8). As for the gradual emergence of Shakespeare's name as a signifying element on playtext title pages, Erne seeks to provide a literary rather than a theoretical explanation for this development, usefully challenging recent work by scholars such as Douglas A. Brooks. Noting that Shakespeare's name began to appear on title pages for the first time in 1598 (and not 1600, as Brooks incorrectly states in From Playhouse to Printing House),'1 Erne argues that what prompted the emergence of the author from anonymity was his canonization as a centrally important writer by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, published, precisely, in 1598. This is a neat and interesting argument, but Erne himself recognizes one crucial flaw in his ingenious suggestion: Ql Love's Labour's Lost, Q2 and Q3 Richard II and Q2 Richard HI all appeared in 1598 and all included Shakespeare's name on the title page. But it is a touch unlikely that all four texts could have gone to press only after Meres's book was printed and circulated in the very same year. This seems particularly unlikely in the case of the two editions of Richard H, published by Andrew Wise. Registering this problem, Erne is forced to fall back on conjecture: "It may well be . . . that Wise found out about Palladis Tamia . . . before its appearance. After all, it would have been in the publishers' and booksellers' best interest to be aware as early as possible of a text which, by dealing with literary reputation, might have an effect upon their customers' future demand. …