Shakespeare's Influence | The Publishing and Editing of Shakespeare's Plays
When we speak of publishing, we now think almost exclusively of the printed word. With Shakespeare it was not so; for him the term meant no more than "making public." Thus, King Lear proposes to "publish" his daughters' different dowries: he does so by announcing his decisions publicly to the court. Similarly, performance was the publication that Shakespeare sought for his plays, and with it he seems to have been entirely content.
For two poems, he had a different attitude. He published in print his Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) at the...
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