If the seventeenth century saw the emergence
of the playwright as author and the eighteenth century witnessed the public
foregrounding of the editor, then we can say that the next century marked the
emergence of the reader as a significant figure in the history of the
transmission of Shakespeare’s texts. Of course, Shakespeare always had
readers—from the ‘private friends’ who Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia (1598), tells us enjoyed his ‘sugred sonnets’ in
manuscript before they appeared in print, so the subscribers who paid in
advance for copies of editions such as Pope’s and Johnson’s. But these readers
were always limited to a rather select band, largely because of the high price
of editions. A copy of the first edition of Pope's text, for example, would have
run to about £7, when the cost of binding is taken into account. Up through the
eighteenth century the price of books was kept artificially high by a system of
copyright which granted legal ownership to publishers in perpetuity. Publishers
traded ownership rights (and even fractions of such rights) at auction, and
they also bequeathed these rights to their families and associates. In 1774,
this situation altered radically when the House of Lord was asked t rule on the
precise meaning of the terms of a piece of copyright legislation that had been
passed in 1709, the exact provisions of the act having always been in dispute.
Against the expectations of the principal London publishers, the Lords ruled
that copyright was actually of limited duration only. The ruling had the effect
of creating a ‘public domain’ of older canonical text, which were freely
available to any publisher who wished to produce a competitively priced
edition. (Andrew Murphy, “The transmission of Shakespeare’s Texts” in Margreta
de Grazia and Stanley Wells, eds., The
New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare [2d ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010], 61-75, here, pp. 66-67)