The promotion of a naturalised Shakespeare, which had started with the ‘First American Edition’ in 1795, continued with a second ‘complete works’ published in 1802 by Munroe & Francis of Boston. This mail-order subscription edition of sixteen ‘paper-covered parts’ cost the subscriber $-.35 per part, ‘payment on delivery’, amounting to a total price of just $5.60. As a result of these early, relatively low-cost American editions of Shakespeare there was a viable commercial market and a mass readership for the newly adopted Elizabethan playwright.

Before considering the probable reasons for the huge increase in the consumption of printed editions of Shakespeare's works, it is important to recognise that each edition represented an incidence of new marketing rather than new scholarship. Giles E. Dawson has shown that a large number of what appear to be new editions of Shakespeare are in fact reprints or re-presented versions of earlier scholarship. In evidence, Dawson has cited an 1823 edition of Shakespeare from publisher H. C. Carey & M'Carthy of Philadelphia that was reprinted at least thirty-six times by six different American publishers. Each new publisher would create a personalised title page, despite the fact that the text that followed was an exact copy of earlier work. One reason for this simple ‘re-presentation’ was to reduce distribution costs.