Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603 takes its cue from a group of poetic anthologies, published between 1599 and 1601, that featured Shakespeare's works. Some printed whole poems, old or new. Others chose short excerpts from his poems and plays, gathered alongside passages on similar topics by his rivals and contemporaries. In drawing up a canon of English poetry, and in extending that canon to popular drama, these anthologies were doing something new. Inother ways, they were exemplifying long-standing habits of early modern reading. From their schooldays onwards, Elizabethan readers were trained in the practice of commonplacing, taking excerpts from what they read and copying them into their notebooks.Appearing midway through his career, these anthologies mark a critical moment in Shakespeare's life. They testify to the reputation he had established as a poet and playwright by the end of the sixteenth century. But in extracting passages from their contexts, they also read Shakespeare in ways that Shakespeare might have imagined being read. Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603 rereads the formative works of Shakespeare's first decade in print, from Venus and Adonis (1593) toHamlet (1603), through the anthologies in which they were featured. It illuminates a previously neglected period in Shakespeare's career, what it calls his 'anthology period'. It explores what these anthologies made of Shakespeare, and what he made of being anthologized. And it shows how, from the early 1590s, hisworks were inflected by the culture of commonplacing and anthologizing in which they were written, and in which Shakespeare, no less than his readers, was schooled. Tregear reveals how Shakespeare appealed to the reading habits of his contemporaries, inviting and frustrating them in turn. Shakespeare used the practice of anthologizing to open up questions at the heart of his poems and plays: questions of classical literature and the schoolrooms in which it was taught; English poetry and its literary inheritance; poetry's relationship to drama; and the afterlife that he and his works might win-at least in parts.

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