The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 15.0305  Wednesday, 4 February 2004

[1]     From:   Sebastian Perry <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Wednesday, 4 Feb 2004 01:09:27 -0000
        Subj:   Re: SHK 15.0296 A Lover's Complaint & John Davies of Hereford

[2]     From:   Clifford Stetner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
        Date:   Wednesday, 4 Feb 2004 02:42:09 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 15.0066 A Lover's Complaint & John Davies of Hereford


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Sebastian Perry <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Wednesday, 4 Feb 2004 01:09:27 -0000
Subject: 15.0296 A Lover's Complaint & John Davies of Hereford
Comment:        Re: SHK 15.0296 A Lover's Complaint & John Davies of Hereford

Katherine Duncan-Jones writes:

 >First: on bibliographical evidence for a book's popularity. Print-runs
 >were restricted by law, to 200 or 250- hence the re-publication of
 >very popular works, such as Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, sometimes
 >as often as three or four times in a single year.

Without in any way wishing to enmesh myself in the Lover's Complaint
thread, I wouldn't mind some clarification on this particular point.
Does this figure refer to all kinds of publications, playbooks included?
I notice that Peter Blayney assumes a print-run of 800 copies of a
hypothetical play in his essay 'The Publication of Playbooks' [in Cox &
Kastan eds, _A New History of Early English Drama_ (1997)], and
envisages subsequent runs of a bestseller in quantities as large as
1,200 and 1,500. Would these amounts have been permissible?

Many thanks,
Seb Perry.

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Clifford Stetner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Wednesday, 4 Feb 2004 02:42:09 -0500
Subject: 15.0066 A Lover's Complaint & John Davies of Hereford
Comment:        Re: SHK 15.0066 A Lover's Complaint & John Davies of Hereford

I don't see how Shakespeare could have written the anacreontic sonnets
173 and 174, following Spenser and others, and not have written a
complaint to conclude the cycle. I think Gerald Downs picks the weakest
examples from what are much stronger arguments than he pretends. Sonnets
8, 12, 22, 66 and others are better support for the authority of the
1609 order than the one example he quotes of 20.

In addition to Spenser's anacreontics and Epithalamion, published at the
conclusion of the Amoretti, Roger Kuin (in discussing John Kerrigan's
edition of Shk's Sonnets), comments on the fact that:

"...since Samuel Daniel's 1592 Delia there had been a number of books,
each comprising a sonnet-sequence; something short and Hel     

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