David Scott Kastan is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He was an undergraduate at Princeton, graduating Summa Cum Laude and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received both his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His first teaching job was at Dartmouth College, but he left Dartmouth in 1987 to come to Columbia. He has also taught at University College London, and been a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Cairo, Copenhagen, and Budapest. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (1982); Shakespeare After Theory (1999); Shakespeare and the Book (2001); co-editor of Staging the Renaissance: Essays on Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (1991) and of The New History of Early English Drama (1997); and editor of Critical Essays on Shakespeare's Hamlet (1995) and A Companion to Shakespeare (1999). He serves as a General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare (the first American to do so in Arden's 100-year history), and his edition of 1 Henry IV for that series was published in 2002. An edition of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus was published by Norton in 2004, and an edition of Milton's Paradise Lost by Hackett in 2005. The five-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature was published under his editorship in 2006. In addition to the Barnes & Noble Shakespeare series, he is presently working on a book called "The Invention of English Literature," a project for which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2004. He was the winner of Columbia's Presidential Teaching Award in 2000, Columbia's first Faculty Mentoring Award in 2004, and he is presently chairing the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

This book is a authoritative account of Shakespeare's plays as they were transformed from scripts to be performed into books to be read, and eventually from popular entertainment into the centerpieces of the English literary canon. Kastan examines the motives and activities of Shakespeare's first publishers; the curious eighteenth-century schizophrenia that saw Shakespeare radically modified on stage at the very moment that scholars were working to establish and restore the "genuine" texts, and the exhilarating possibilities of electronic media for presenting Shakespeare now to new generations of readers. This is an important contribution to Shakespearean textual scholarship, to the history of the early English book trade, and to the theory of drama itself.