By Morgan A. Brown Shakespeare's status as a legendary playwright is partly the outcome of four centuries of textual revision and reconstruction. Much of the work that went into perfecting Shakespeare's published texts was done in the first six decades of the 18th century. During that period, no fewer than six major editions of Shakespeare's dramatic corpus appeared on the London book market, published by Jacob Tonson and his eponymous great-nephew.
Each edition that the Tonsons produced was subject to fierce debate, fiery criticism, and market competition. What emerged from this process of competition and redistribution in the 1700s was a Shakespeare more ordered, digestible, and masterful than any other shade of the Bard that had existed 100 years prior.
Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson, praised the Bard's plays as "not of an age, but for all time" in the posthumous First Folio (1623) edition of Shakespeare's plays. But such inflated encomia were so common in Elizabethan and Stuart England that anyone familiar with commendatory verses treats such panegyrics as mere convention. In other words… (Read more)
Source: Mises.org
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