The years 1709-14 were of great importance in the growth of Shakespeare’s reputation.  As we shall see, the plays as well as the poems, both authentic and spurious, were frequently printed and bought.  With the passing of the seventeenth-century folios and the occasional quartos of acting versions of single plays, Shakespeare could find a place in libraries and could be intimately known by hundreds who had hitherto known him only in the theater.  Tonson’s business acumen made Shakespeare available to the general reader in the reign of Anne; Rowe’s editorial, biographical, and critical work helped to make him comprehensible within the framework of contemporary taste.

When Rowe’s edition appeared twenty-four years had passed since the publication of the Fourth Folio.  As Allardyce Nicoll has shown, Tonson owned certain rights in the publication of the plays, rights derived ultimately from the printers of the First Folio.  Precisely when he decided to publish a revised octavo edition is not known, nor do we know when Rowe accepted the commission and began his work.  McKerrow has plausibly suggested that Tonson may have been anxious to call attention to his rights in Shakespeare on the eve of the passage of the copyright law which went into effect in April, 1710.[2] Certainly Tonson must have felt that he was adding to the prestige which his publishing house had gained by the publication of Milton and Dryden’s Virgil.

In March 1708/9 Tonson was advertising for materials “serviceable to [the] Design” of publishing an edition of Shakespeare’s works in six volumes octavo, which would be ready “in a Month.”  There was a delay, however, and it was on 2 June that Tonson finally announced:  “There is this day Publish’d ... the Works of Mr. William Shakespear, in six Vols. 8vo. adorn’d with Cuts, Revis’d and carefully Corrected:  With an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, by N. Rowe, Esq; Price 30s.”  Subscription copies on large paper, some few to be bound in nine volumes, were to be had at his shop.[3]

The success of the venture must have been immediately apparent.  By 1710 a second edition, identical in title page and typography with the first, but differing in many details, had been printed,[4] followed in 1714 by a third in duodecimo.  This so-called second edition exists in three issues, the first made up of eight volumes, the third of nine.  In all three editions the spurious plays were collected in the last volume, except in the third issue of 1714, in which the ninth volume contains the poems.

That other publishers sensed the profits in Shakespeare is evident from the activities of Edmund Curll and Bernard Lintot.  Curll acted with imagination and promptness:  within three weeks of the publication of Tonson’s edition, he advertised as Volume VII of the works of Shakespeare his forthcoming volume of the poems.  This volume, misdated 1710 on the title page, seems to have been published in September