ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how print culture helped William Shakespeare's readers to remember him, and how the myriad printed versions of Shakespeare's works encouraged specific kinds of reading and remembering. It provides a brief survey of the intersection between Shakespeare studies and the history of the book, and offers one set of answers to these questions in the form of a case study of nineteenth-century American readers of Shakespeare. The chapter describes the 'distorting' and 'preserving' reconstruction of Shakespeare through anthologies and schoolbooks, two print genres that fragmented Shakespeare's plays into memorable quotations. It discusses the presence of Shakespeare in American commonplace books, personal collections in which readers transcribed quotations from books they read. Both earlier and later commonplace books form an important source of evidence for the history of reading. Although they reflect only a fraction of the texts a given person read, they can reveal the range of sources a person consulted and the active process of a reader's mind.
