Shakespeare and London
Abstract
234 BOOK REVIEWS this might partially be attributable to the variable format (which was not restricted to easily perishable broadsides), variable pricing, and the subject matter (71). Hill’s quantitative approach to publishing enables her to slice the data different ways to shed different insights, as (for example) when she offers a breakdown of ‘how the demand for news from different countries fluctuated over the decades’ in Figure 2.2 (77). Poor survival rates distort our per- ceptions of the representation of themes, genres, and even readers’ attitudes, but analysing records of the intention to publish offers a helpful corrective: in the case of news, it demon- strates ‘the events which demanded more attention even if the coverage does not always survive’ (93). Applying this mode of analysis to religious texts is more challenging: privileged works and imported works were not registered, and in terms of format, cost, and use, religious works constitute ‘a large and varied genre’ (102). Instructional guides were read to pieces, and sea- sonal texts such as Christmas carols had a limited shelf-life; almost 81 per cent of sermons survive, by contrast (112), and religious texts ‘have some of the highest survival rates in the Register’ (131).