1. Shakespeare, The Poems, ed. John Roe (The New Cambridge Shakespeare; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Dedication of Venus and Adonis to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, line 11. The important new editions of the narrative poems edited by Colin Burrow and Katherine Duncan Jones unfortunately were not published in time for me to consult them for this book. On the publication history of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece see F. T. Prince (ed.), Shakespeare, The Poems (1960, The Arden Shakespeare; London and New York: Routledge, 1988): pp. xi–xx; Roe (ed.), Shakespeare, The Poems, pp. 287–92, and Harry Farr, ‘Notes on Shakespeare’s Printers and Publishers with Special Reference to the Poems and Hamlet’, The Library, 4th series, 3:4 (March 1923): 225–50.
2. My figures are based on Peter Beal (ed.), Index of Literary Manuscripts. Volume 1: 1450–1625, part 2 (London and New York: Mansell and R. R. Bowker Company, 1980), pp. 452–63 and p. 633.
3. Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700, vol. 2, p. 540. Lucrece is not far behind Venus and Adonis in amassing 25 allusions before 1649, ahead of Othello’s 19 allusions; 1 and 2 Henry IV combined achieve 38 allusions, Romeo and Juliet 36, and Falstaff (treated by the compilers as a separate category) 32. For an overview of the early modern vogue of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, see Hyder Edward Rollins, (ed.), A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1938), pp. 447–61.
4. See for instance Wai-Chee Dimock, ‘Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader’, American Literature 63:4 (1991): 601–22; reprinted in Readers and Reading, ed. Andrew Burnett (London: Longman, 1995): 122–31, p. 123.
5. The history of the book is a rapidly expanding field of study, too extensive to document in one footnote. Kevin Sharpe’s Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000 ) provides an astute survey of the field (see esp. pp. 34–62); see also The Book History Reader, eds. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery ( London and New York: Routledge, 2002 );