If books make works and authors, they can also contribute to their dismemberment. This was the case with Shakespeare's poems and plays, which appeared as quotations in printed collections of commonplaces as early as 1600. Bel-vedere or, The Garden of Muses, the first collection of commonplaces composed entirely of quotations from writers of the time, includes one hundred and seventy-nine quotations from Shakespeare, ninety-one from The Rape of Lucretius and eighty-eight from five of his plays. The quotations are anonymous (but the names of the twenty-five authors used are given at the beginning of the work), limited to one or two lines and distributed between thematic headings. The large number of quotations from Lucretius's Rape attests not only to the poem's popularity, but also to the typographical practice which, in the 1594 edition of the text, used " inverted commas " at the beginning of the lines to indicate those passages which, because they stated universal truths, could be retained as commonplaces and extracted for re-use. In the same year, 1600, Englands Parnassus, another collection of commonplaces, also gave pride of place to Shakespeare, with thirty quotations from five plays, twenty-six from Venus and Adonis and thirty-nine from The Rape of Lucretia. The quotations are longer, consisting of several lines, and are attributed to their authors. They thus become quotations from Shakespeare, totally detached from the dramatic plot and the characters who speak them. Their raison d'être lies in the generality or, to borrow a word from Francis Goyet, the "sublime" of their utterance. The book of commonplaces, composed from the fragmentation of other books already published, is thus a book of universal wisdom and knowledge.
In the case of Don Quixote, the dissemination of the text outside the text takes other forms and, in particular, that of abridged editions of the story. Those published in England at the end of the 17th century were the subject of the 2008 lecture. Suffice it to say that Cervantes's story is thus subjected to a mode of publication that is in no way peculiar to him. The often drastic contraction of narrative episodes, and the transformation of dialogues between characters into narratives spoken by the narrator, illustrates the desire to reduce works so as to circulate them in briefer forms. Other novels, also very long, were the subject of abridgments, which replaced the epistolary form with a continuous, impersonal narrative. Such shortenings were not only the work of publishers concerned with the impatience of the public, but in another form, they were inaugurated by the authors themselves.
Richardson, after evoking and rejecting the possibility in the preface to Clarissa, condemned the abridged versions of his novels, such as The Path of Virtue Delineated: or, the History in Miniatures of the Celebrated Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison, Falimiarised and Adapted to the Capacities of Youth, published in London in 1756 and reprinted many times in its entirety or in separate volumes. On the other hand, he had previously proposed anthologies that brought together the moral lessons suggested by the novels. After adding a table of contents to the second edition of Clarissa in 1749, providing the reader with a summary of each letter, in 1751 he published a Collection of such of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Cautions, Aphorisms, Reflections and Observations contained in the History [Clarissa], as presumed to be of general Use and Service, Digested under Proper Heads, and in 1755 a Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. Five years later, the maxims gathered in the Collection were presented in the form of a copper-engraved deck of cards " Consisting of moral and diverting Sentiments, extracted wholly from the much admired Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison ". As in the old collections of commonplaces, also " digested under proper heads ", the novels' readings are detached from the narrative and formulated in the form of sentences and aphorisms, easily identifiable thanks to their ordering, from Absence to Zeal.
