Hunger, Appetite and the Politics of the Renaissance Stage. Matt Williamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. vi + 238 pp. $99.99.

Abstract

Switching the focus to the Jaggards presents new opportunities for thinking about the production and dissemination of the collection. For instance, to center printers over publishers subverts conventional narratives that publishers, not printers, were the motivating agents of publication. It would have been interesting to get a more in-depth discussion of this change in perspective as it prompts new questions about motivation and textual authority among agents of the book trade. In chapter 3, “Rips and Scrapes,” the misdated title pages are contextualized in the Jaggard printing house. The fascinating study of hand-inked changes to imprints shows that the altered dates of at least some of the title pages were made near to the time of printing. Overall, this rich study raises almost as many questions as it produces answers, a point Lesser readily acknowledges in his conclusion. For example, how common are some of these elements beyond the Shakespeare bubble? The book also raises issues of access and inclusivity in twenty-first-century bibliography. Lesser rightly argues for the need to examine all existing texts in person, but few scholars will have the resources to conduct such extensive, in-person research. Nevertheless, this riveting study provides compelling new takes on a foundational episode of Shakespeare book history and will reinvigorate scholarship on these texts.