Carl H. Pforzheimer Endowment to conduct research at The Harry Ransom Center, Texas
Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays and yet its publication history remains unclear and understudied. Indeed, most libraries continue to catalogue some of the quartos under incorrect dates.
Julius Caesar was published in the 1623 first Shakespeare folio, but the first single-play edition was not published until 1684, when Henry Herringman and Richard Bentley brought out a quarto edition.
Another edition of Julius Caesar was published by the same stationers in 1691 and four undated quarto editions were also published. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, by the late seventeenth century, Hamlet and Julius Caesar had become the most frequently printed of Shakespeare’s plays, with editions produced both by stationers who held the rights in copy and by pirate publishers (Depledge 2018). My project has
two main aims. I will produce the first complete descriptive bibliography of Julius Caesar quartos in orderto provide a clear guide to the order of printing, number of editions, and number of issues and states for
each edition. My second aim is to use paper evidence to definitively date the undated quartos and identify the pirate publishers who financed their production. The results will be submitted as articles to Papers of
the Bibliographical Society of America (PBSA)