Baugh And Cable Play In Shakespeare's Life

Superior Essays
The printing press made life better for people in many ways. It made it easier to publish written material and led to an expanding market of people learning and desiring to read. As Baugh and Cable indicate, by Shakespeare’s time “…it is probable that not less than a third and probably as many as half of the people could at least read.” (199). Baugh and Cable give another interesting statistic as consequence of the printing press, “The number of books printed before the year 1500 reaches the surprising figure of 35,000. The majority of these, it is true, were in Latin… But in England, over 20,000 titles in English had appeared by 1640” (199). The numbers of this fact are staggering, in 100 years almost as many books were printed as in the 1500 years before. While some didn’t agree with printing in English, the printers found it a profitable market. This is detailed in A History of The …show more content…
Shakespeare seems to have thought as his work as means of entertainment and not literature. Because of this, many of the plays we have today are bad quartos. An article by Professor Mahood titled Shakespeare 's Wordplay, goes over the history of these bad quartos, which were “memorial reconstructions of the play for provincial performance by a reduced company, or the botched text reproduced by a single actor for unauthorized publication.” Romeo and Juliet is even considered one of these. Mahood suggests that one of the ways a bad quarto can be distinguished, is from it’s less sophisticated use of wordplay. Instances of wordplay that ‘got laughs’ were retained, but subtler wordplay got lost (Mahood, 11). These bad quartos are significant in showing that Shakespeare did not think of himself as a literary writer, but as a playwright, an entertainer whose work was meant to be performed and watched, which helps explain his unique use of punctuation and

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