ABSTRACT
Chapter 5, "The Printer's Tale: Books, children, and the prefatory construction of Shakespearean authorship", builds on the previous chapter's concern with canonical value by addressing what James Mabbe called Shakespeare's 'printed worth'. The chapter explores the role of The Winter's Tale in the early development of Shakespeare's reputation in print as an immortal father of literature, focusing on the play's relationship to the influential preliminaries to the First Folio of 1623, where it was first printed. It argues that the play's recurring print metaphors are part of Shakespeare's wider appropriation of paratextual rhetoric as a means to engage with concepts of paternal likeness, legitimacy, immortality and theatricality. In turn, these aspects of The Winter's Tale impacted the themes and language of the First Folio's paratexts, which have historically shaped critical and public ideas about Shakespeare's literary value.
