Adam G. Hooks: Selling Shakespeare. Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade.

Montaigne’s comment that “I and my book are one” could apply to Adam Hooks’s argument in Selling Shakespeare (although not in the way that Montaigne meant). As Hooks explains, this is “a story about how books and the booktrade shaped Shakespeare’s life and afterlife”. His story inverts the conventional narrative, exploring not what Shakespeare’s reputation did for stationers, but how stationers created Shakespeare’s reputation. In a compelling sequence of chapters, Hooks examines stationers’ economics and biographies, narrative poetry and its appearance in commonplace books, the link between sermons and poems as cognate literary forms in the stationer’s shop, the Pavier collection, and booksellers’ catalogues in the seventeenth century. He shows how booksellers were not just the first bibliographers and biographers of Shakespeare but also the first literary critics, creating “the genre of early modern drama as we know it”.