Aaron Pratt HARRY RANSOM CENTER

Before the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623 and the efforts of subsequent editors and critics, England’s printed playbooks were considered “riff raff,” connected more with the world of London’s popular theaters than with what we might think of as “capital-L” Literature. Or so we have been told. This lecture will offer the beginnings of a new narrative that places quartos at the center rather than on the periphery of literary culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Aaron T. Pratt is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center. With a Ph.D. in English from Yale University, he is a specialist in bibliography, the history of the book, and the literature and culture of early modern England. His academic work has appeared in a number of journals and edited collections, and he is currently working on a book to be titled Quarto Playbooks and the Making of Shakespeare.