“He not having the fate to be executor to his own writings …”: Managing Posthumous Publication and Reputation before Shakespeare (with a Glance at the First Folio Edition of Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies [1623])

Before two friends of Shakespeare set out, and very successfully so, to establish Shakespeare as an author by publishing his plays posthumously in the First Folio, many humanist scholars had been the object of posthumous curation. Those who managed the posthumous publications and reputations of scholars included a range of figures close to the deceased, including family members, former students and those whom the scholar had hired as assistants. In her talk, Ann Blair will examine a few cases from the sixteenth century to highlight the various dynamics and motives involved in managing scholarly reputations and offer them as comparands from which to approach the First Folio (a copy of which was gifted to UBC Library earlier this year).

Ann Blair is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the History Department at Harvard University. She specializes in early modern European intellectual history and in book history. Her research focuses on methods of intellectual work among scholars and authors ca. 1500-1700, which she also compares with those of other times and places. Her publications include The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton University Press, 1997), Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010), and L’Entour du texte: la publication du livre savant à la Renaissance (2021). She also contributed to and co-edited, with Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing and Anthony Grafton, Information: A Historical Companion (2021).