Reading Readings

the long version

Reading Readings brings together essays by eighteen critics and textual scholars on texts that play a crucially informative role in the history of Shakespeare reception: the eighteenth-century editions. These texts tell, in extraordinary detail, the response of the age that granted Shakespeare his canonical status. They show, too, the development of a new range of critical and bibliographical practices, and display the workings of influential eighteenth-century cultural and market forces.