The popularity of Shakespeare from the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth owed much to the performances of individual actors and the efforts of the many publishers who worked to distribute Shakespeare’s works; but it owed something, too, to the technologies of mass production that helped to distribute Shakespeare’s works to the wide extent that they enjoyed.

This edition of Shakespeare’s works–put together by William Pickering and known, thanks to his efforts, as the Pickering edition–remains with us today as the evidence of one publisher’s attempts to cater cheaper, smaller editions of Shakespeare to broader, more popular audiences.