ABSTRACT
In 1630, on Chancery Lane, a quarto of William Shakespeare’s Othello appeared in the shop ‘neere Serjeants Inne’.1 That same year, around the corner on Fleet Street just outside the Middle Temple Gate, a comedy featuring the exploits of Sir John Falstaff, one of the Elizabethan theatre’s most popular characters, was published in quarto for the rst time under a new title: The Merry Wives of Windsor.2 The very next year, also on Fleet Street, in the churchyard of St Dunstan’s in the West two additional Shakespeare plays in quarto appeared: the rst small format edition of The Taming of the Shrew and the rst quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost in over thirty years.3 Individually, the three publisher/booksellers responsible for these quartos, Richard Meighen (Merry Wives), Richard Hawkins (Othello), and John Smethwick (Taming and Love’s Labour’s) produced seemingly independent editions of these Shakespeare plays. However, not only did the three publishers produce these quartos in such close succession that it is possible they were for sale simultaneously, they were also all sold within yards of each other. With imprints announcing their sale at Smethwick’s stall in ‘Saint Dunstones Churchyard vnder the Diall’, Meighen’s ‘next to the Middle-Temple Gate’ and Hawkins’s ‘neere Sargeant’s Inne’, these quartos were both published and sold by three stationers whose bookstalls were nearly within shouting distance of each other in the heart of early modern London in the Inns of Court area between Fleet Street and Chancery Lane.
