Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Epigraph
- Prologue
- Introduction
- PART ONE THE PARADOX
- PART TWO THE APPROPRIATION
- 3 Beginning the appropriation of Shakespeare and the ‘First American Edition’ of his works
- 4 Jacksonian energy – Shakespearean imagery
- 5 Context for appropriation in nineteenth-century America
- 6 The American heroic and ownership of Shakespeare
- 7 Shakespeare as a fulcrum for American literature
- 8 The American Scholar and the authorship controversy
- 9 Last scenes in the final act of appropriation
- Epilogue
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 2
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Context for appropriation in nineteenth-century America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Epigraph
- Prologue
- Introduction
- PART ONE THE PARADOX
- PART TWO THE APPROPRIATION
- 3 Beginning the appropriation of Shakespeare and the ‘First American Edition’ of his works
- 4 Jacksonian energy – Shakespearean imagery
- 5 Context for appropriation in nineteenth-century America
- 6 The American heroic and ownership of Shakespeare
- 7 Shakespeare as a fulcrum for American literature
- 8 The American Scholar and the authorship controversy
- 9 Last scenes in the final act of appropriation
- Epilogue
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 2
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The master of our Thought, the Land's first Citizen.
Bayard TaylorThe 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.
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- Information
- Shakespeare and the American Nation , pp. 99 - 121Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004