of Shakespeare. As these essays show, though born of individual, immediate interests, such publications were nevertheless remarkably enduring and influential: Benson’s Poems and the 1655 Lucrece were standard reading and critical editions for the next fifty years, while the Fourth Folio was the basis for Rowe’s Works and subsequent eighteenth-century editions. And it was nothing less than exasperation with unwieldy eighteenth-century editions that led to the separation of textual and critical commentary and to the development of the annotated single-text edition. Depledge and Kirwan’s collection makes a provocative and ultimately persuasive case for the contingency of Shakespeare’s canonization, yet this points to a larger question that is sometimes not fully answered: why was Shakespeare, and not another poet-playwright, eventually positioned at the center of English literary culture? As the editors note, from the 1640s to 1670s, Shakespeare was less popular than Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, but by the end of the period he eclipsed them. Post-1640 stationers published works by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, presumably for reasons as various and idiosyncratic as the reasons why they published Shakespeare. Without attending to these other texts, it is hard to tell if and why stationers favored Shakespeare’s texts to make money, cement their literary reputations, or forward their political agendas. Happily, as Cheney’s afterword notes, the collection provides a template for thinking about other early modern poetplaywrights in print in later periods. The far-reaching implications of Canonising Shakespeare thus extend beyond Shakespeare studies into the field of early modern literature more generally, inviting scholars to consider how the idiosyncratic and partisan decisions of stationers and editors have shaped the canons we study.

中文翻译：

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莎士比亚的罗马三部曲：古代世界的暮光之城 作者：Paul A. Cantor

莎士比亚。正如这些文章所显示的，尽管这些出版物是出于个人的、直接的利益而产生的，但它们仍然非常持久和有影响力：本森的诗歌和 1655 年的卢克雷丝是接下来五十年的标准阅读和评论版本，而第四对开本是罗的作品的基础以及随后的十八世纪版本。正是对笨拙的 18 世纪版本的恼怒导致文本和评论评论的分离以及带注释的单文本版本的发展。Depledge 和 Kirwan 的收藏为莎士比亚被封圣的偶然性提出了一个具有挑衅性和最终说服力的案例，但这指向了一个有时没有完全回答的更大的问题：为什么是莎士比亚，而不是另一位诗人剧作家，最终定位在英国文学文化的中心？正如编辑所指出的那样，从 1640 年代到 1670 年代，莎士比亚不如琼森、博蒙特和弗莱彻那么受欢迎，但在这一时期结束时，他使他们黯然失色。1640 年后的文具商出版了莎士比亚同时代人的作品，其原因可能与他们出版莎士比亚的原因一样多样和独特。如果不注意这些其他文本，就很难判断文具商是否以及为什么喜欢莎士比亚的文本来赚钱、巩固他们的文学声誉或推进他们的政治议程。令人高兴的是，正如切尼的后记所指出的那样，该系列为思考后期出版的其他早期现代诗人剧作家提供了一个模板。