The various strands of Shakespeare scholarly publishing are explored in this chapter. The emergence of techniques for producing increasingly accurate facsimiles of early modern editions led to the appearance of multiple facsimile editions of the First Folio and of the early quartos. But the period was also marked by significant controversy, most particularly in the instance of John Payne Collier's claim to have uncovered an edition of the 1632 second folio with annotations in the hand of a seventeenth-century theatre functionary. The eventual debunking of Collier's claims destroyed his reputation. Of key importance in the period was the production of the Cambridge Shakespeare, under the primary editorship of William Aldis Wright. This was the first edition produced by university scholars and it offered the definitive scholarly text of its era (in addition to being spun off, commercially, into the Globe Shakespeare). The chapter closes by considering the launch of the Arden Shakespeare, initially under the general editorship of Edward Dowden. The Arden set the model for academic editions produced by a range of editors under the stewardship of a general editor; it has survived through a number of iterations over the course of more than a century.

This chapter takes up the issue of the expansion of the market for Shakespeare editions across the nineteenth century. A culture of home reading encouraged the practice of producing expurgated editions, which proved highly popular. A gradual broadening of the educational franchise had the effect of significantly raising the level of literacy in the UK, and this coincided with the cost efficiencies afforded by the industrialisation of printing, making it possible to serve a growing market with ever cheaper editions. The highly popular, inexpensive Globe Shakespeare is considered, together with subsequent editions which reduced the cost of complete works editions to unprecedentedly low levels (just sixpence, in the case of the Ward Locke edition). By the later decades of the nineteenth century Shakespeare was increasingly finding a place in school curricula, and some of the major schools editions – such as the Pitt Press and Clarendon editions – are considered in detail.