Publisher's Synopsis
In the last twenty-five years, a new sensibility has come to predominate in the editing of early modern English drama. Textual critics of Shakespeare in particular have come to privilege stage versions of his plays, thus presenting readers with an image of Shakespeare revising his works - frequently in close collaboration with his colleagues - for specific performances. Though recognizing the importance of texts rooted in performance, Akihiro Yamada, Professor Emeritus of Shinshu University in Japan, argues in ""Secrets of the Printed Page in the Age of Shakespeare"" that Shakespeare and his contemporaries must nevertheless have had in mind not only his actual audiences but also his potential readers. For Yamada, textual criticism should seek to restore texts to the version their authors seemed to have intended in hopes of creating works of lasting utility. With this in mind, Yamada has undertaken careful bibliographic studies of not only all the books printed by Thomas Creede and Peter Short, printers of Shakespeare, but also nearly all extant copies of early editions of plays by George Chapman, John Ford, and John Marston. ""Secrets of the Printed Page"" collects and revises the results of many of these studies, made over the course of Yamada's fifty-year-long career, and places them alongside shorter, more general essays of interest to textual bibliographers and early modern critics of all stripes. The book also features an original-spelling edition, the first of its kind, of an untitled seventeenth-century drama in manuscript called, in this edition, Arcadia Restored. (A modern-spelling edition of ""Arcadia Restored"" has also been prepared by Yamada and published as ""AMS Studies in the Renaissance"", number 47).
