Chapter 8 - Nineteenth-Century Popular Editions

Summary

This chapter takes up the issue of the expansion of the market for Shakespeare editions across the nineteenth century. A culture of home reading encouraged the practice of producing expurgated editions, which proved highly popular. A gradual broadening of the educational franchise had the effect of significantly raising the level of literacy in the UK, and this coincided with the cost efficiencies afforded by the industrialisation of printing, making it possible to serve a growing market with ever cheaper editions. The highly popular, inexpensive Globe Shakespeare is considered, together with subsequent editions which reduced the cost of complete works editions to unprecedentedly low levels (just sixpence, in the case of the Ward Locke edition). By the later decades of the nineteenth century Shakespeare was increasingly finding a place in school curricula, and some of the major schools editions – such as the Pitt Press and Clarendon editions – are considered in detail.