Why read Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes?

Book cover of Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Duree

Book description

Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a "collected works" of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Amy Lidster

Author

Lesser’s book is a bibliographical ‘detective story’ that I found captivating and is another model of the scholarship that I would like to emulate. It concentrates on a mysterious group of ten plays printed in 1619–most of which feature historical subjects and/or are by Shakespeare–and what we can learn about them, including why several were printed with false attributions and dates and how early readers might have encountered them.

I think Lesser’s book is an incredible achievement in handling complex, technical scholarship and an immense amount of archival research that is also so engrossing and accessible. As a reader, I…

From Amy's list on Shakespeare and history.