Jon Corelis:
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I suppose if by publishing we mean printed, we could say that Shakespeare
published very little during his lifetime.
>>
Um ... Sorry to be a bore, but *all his poetry was printed during his
life -- "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece" in about 1593 (Bill had
time on his hands since plague had closed the theatres), and the Sonnets,
possibly illicitly, possibly not, in 1608. Also "The Phoenix and the
Turtle" in some anthology or other.
When we come to the plays, roughly half (there were 36 altogether in the
First Folio in 1623) had been published earlier in individual volumes while
Shakespeare was alive. I don't have the exact figures to hand, but I think
he published more plays within a year or so of their production than anyone
else at the time. In one year -- I think it was 1601 -- about a third of
*all plays we have records of published by *everyone that year were by
Shakespeare.
(There was a reason for this -- in that particualr year, Shakespeare's
company had to raise money quickly in order to finance the rebuilding of the
Globe, so they flogged off as many texts of the plays as they thought the
public would buy. Which they did, pretty enthusiastically.)
Robin Hamilton
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