Shakespeare's Syndicate The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade
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Ben Higgins read English at the University of Exeter before going to the University of Oxford for postgraduate work. He has held lectureships at Wadham College, Lincoln College, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is currently Career Development Fellow in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall.Ben Higgins's Shakespeare's Syndicate is a hugely impressive study of the bookish world around the First Folio. Conceived as an extensive close reading of the book's title page, it takes the reader on a thrilling tour of the book trade that published, printed, marketed, and sold this most influential of volumes. Devoting a chapter each to Edward Blount, John Smethwick, William Aspley, and William and Isaac Jaggard, Higgins makes the case for these figures as 'merchants of belief', vital to the formation of the book's value, and the 'creation of [its] literariness'.
Shakespeare's Globe Book Award Judges
This is an important book for academic libraries to purchase, as it provides a deeper dive into the stated primary sources than most of the other books I have reviewed on this topic.
Anna Faktorovich, editor-in-chief, Pennsylvania literary Journal
Ben Higgins has managed something we might have thought was by now impossible: he tells a completely fresh and fascinating story about the First Folio. Higgins's remarkable knack for uncovering new archival details gives us the deepest scholarly investigation yet undertaken into the lives of the men and women who produced Shakespeare's collected works. At the same time, Higgins uses each of the Folio publishers as a lens to reveal broader trends and networks in the book trade, offering an exciting and generative methodology for others to follow. Shakespeare's Syndicate is required reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare, his plays, and his life and afterlife in print.
Zachary Lesser, Edward W. Kane Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
More careful, coherent, and convincing by far is Ben Higgins's excellent Shakespeare's Syndicate: The First Folio, Its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade
Catherine Nicholson, New York Review
Indispensable for future scholarship [...] Shakespeare's Syndicate is a major study of the First Folio that is required reading for all those interested in the early modern book trade and the individuals who helped preserve in print so many of Shakespeare's plays.
Rory Loughnane, The Review of English Studies
This is an extraordinarily detailed account of the agents behind the First Folio [...] Higgins offers nearly three hundred pages of fresh information and context based on extensive archival research. The book is punctuated by revelations throughout [...] Higgins has a special talent for making brilliant observations and offering keen insight into their import.
Eric Rasmussen, Shakespeare Jahrbuch
Through small moments in the Folio, Higgins bends time away from the history and death of Shakespeare, to the lives and labor of the stationers, who ushered the completed books to buyers and readers who could grapple with Shakespeare's membership in the growing pantheon of English writers that Jonson identifies [...] By reorienting the Folio in time, Higgins asks new sets of questions of it, seeking to articulate the roles-both large and small-of the stationers who ensured that the volume reached readers' bookshelves.
Brandi K Adams, Shakespeare Quarterly