Binding and unbinding

Abstract

This essay sets out to analyse the seven successive or contemporary forms in which Shakespeare’s poems and plays were published from the 1590s until the end of the eighteenth century. It highlights a dual tendency: On the one hand, Shakespeare’s texts were bound together with those of other authors or exclusively with his own (as in the Folio of 1623 and the Works of the eighteenth century), while on the other, his texts were fragmented and dispersed in commonplace books and anthologies of their finest passages.