The domination of the Shakespeare publishing field by the Tonson cartel came under challenge from various quarters over the course of the eighteenth century. This chapter charts the efforts of a number of English publishers to break the cartel's monopoly. The legal and regulatory background is traced and the various challenges across the century are registered, including initiatives launched by Thomas Johnson, Robert Walker, Thomas Cotes and John Bell. Attention is paid to the first English edition of Shakespeare published outside London: Thomas Hanmer's text, issued in conjunction with the university press at Oxford. The chapter concludes with a consideration of John Stockdale's editions which, in one configuration, offered the first single-volume text to have appeared since the end of the seventeenth century.

This chapter addresses the history, evolution, and status of Irish texts for young people as well as trajectories of Irish publishing of youth literature. The significance of Irish children’s literature and the importance of a national literature produced by Irish authors for young Irish readers have been increasingly recognised and confirmed over the last four decades, for example by the establishment of the Children’s Literature Association of Ireland in the 1980s and the creation of Laureate na nÓg in 2010. Since the turn of the millennium, the emergence and commercial success of Irish young adult (YA) fiction and its exploration of adolescent turbulence have extended the imaginative territories addressed by Irish youth literature. The momentum of YA fiction has generated valuable opportunities for considering how youth is positioned within Irish society. This chapter considers what these contemporary works tell us about childhood and young adulthood from an Irish perspective.