| Sumario: | The 1710 Copyright Act had well-attested effects on the expensive collected editions of Shakespeare published by the Tonson publishing house, leading the publishers to periodically publish ostensibly new editions in a bid to extend their rights for longer than the twenty-one years granted by the act. This led the Tonsons to commission a series of famous editors, Rowe, Pope, and Theobald, to introduce a number of textual innovations in all of the plays, but with a particular focus on Hamlet. However, as this article argues, the Copyright Act also had a strong influence on four understudied single-text editions of Hamlet published between 1710 and 1723 by Thomas Johnson and Mary Wellington. All four of these editions offer evidence that the act incentivized both legitimate and illicit publishers to break from tradition and invest in highly detailed and labor-intensive editorial treatments of the play. These editions contain evidence of extensive textual innovation in relation to conflation and emendation: areas traditionally associated only with Rowe, Pope, and Theobald. The study of these neglected editions complements and broadens our knowledge of editing during the early eighteenth century and offers a new perspective on editing and textual development in the wake of the Copyright Act.
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