Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of his Text

First published in 1915, this controversial textual analysis overturned earlier views about the reliability of the Quartos of Shakespeare's plays.

Originally presented as a series of lectures in Cambridge, this 1915 publication considers the measures taken to prevent book piracy in early modern England. It argued, controversially but convincingly, that the early Quartos of Shakespeare's plays are more closely related to the original manuscript than had previously been supposed.Originally delivered in November 1915 as a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge, this close textual analysis of Shakespeare overturned the conventional methods of Shakespearean bibliography. In this careful study, Pollard, a bibliographer and literary scholar, called into question the long-held assumption that the early Quartos were of little bibliographical value because of the errors, mis-spellings and mis-lineations. By emphasizing the efforts made to impede printing piracy in early modern England, Pollard argued that the Quartos are much closer to Shakespeare's manuscripts than previous scholarship had allowed. Pollard, along with J. Dover Wilson, W. W. Greg and R. B. McKerrow, was instrumental in establishing the theoretical framework of New Bibliography, and on its publication the book was greeted with what is described in the introduction as 'friendly controversy'. First published in 1915, the book was revised for republication in 1920. This reissue is of the 1967 reprint.