For Kant, then, authors make books. But can't we reverse the proposition and think that, in many cases, it's the books that make the authors, by bringing together in a single object scattered texts that, bound together, become a "work"? Shakespeare is a case in point. During his lifetime, none of the poems or plays he wrote circulated as books. Usually published in quarto format, they were what the rules of the London booksellers' and printers' community defined as " pamphlets ", i.e. unbound pamphlets. Their assembly in a single volume was initially the work of collectors who brought together several pieces, but, as the example of John Harrington, godson of Elizabeth I and translator of the Orlando furioso, shows , they were not attached to the category of work, since the form of the collections was that of miscellanies bringing together plays by different authors (the eighteen Shakespearean quartos are scattered between six volumes in his library), nor to that of author, since in the manuscript tables of the volumes only four plays are explicitly attributed to Shakespeare: king Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, but also A Yorkshire Tragedy and A Puritan Widow, both held to be apocryphal from the eighteenth century onwards.
It was bookseller-publishers, not the author or collectors, who invented the Shakespearean corpus, made visible by the very materiality of the book that brings the pieces together. The first initiative was that of Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard, who in 1619, three years after Shakespeare's death, began a collection of his plays by publishing two parts of Henry VI and Pericles with continuous signatures, indicating the project of a single volume bringing together a series of works by the same author. Opposition from Shakespeare's former troupe , the King's Men , whose agreement was necessary for the publication of the plays in his possession, interrupted Pavier's enterprise. He did, however, publish seven other Shakespearean plays, but as bound " pamphlets " and with false dates intended to pass them off as old quartos.
The book that made Shakespeare, or at least Shakespeare's work, was the folio of 1623, edited by two of his former troupe-mates, Heminges and Condell, and published by a consortium of four London booksellers. The undertaking presupposed two operations, the very ones designated by Foucault as constitutive of the author-function. First, the delimitation of the corpus itself, based on two exclusions. The exclusion of the poems was the most paradoxical, since they were Shakespeare's most best-selling works (with nine editions of Venus and Adonis and four of The Rape of Lucretia) and the most explicitly attributed, with dedications to Southampton, signed by Shakespeare, for these two poems, and the presence of his name on the title page of the Sonnets in 1609. Moreover, in finally retaining only thirty-seven plays, Heminges and Condell excluded those they knew to have been written in collaboration (e.g. The Two Noble Cousins, written with Fletcher, as indicated on the title page of his 1634 edition) or whose authenticity they suspected despite the presence of Shakespeare's name or initials on their title pages (e.g., seven plays that were introduced into the Shakespearean corpus with the third folio in 1664, but did not remain there, with the exception of Pericles, probably composed in collaboration with George Wilkins and published with Shakespeare's name in 1609, 1611 and 1619). The delimitation of the work by the book will remain, as we have said, an essential issue for all editions of Shakespeare from the 18th century onwards, always caught between Pavier's Shakespeare by default, composed of ten plays, and the Shakespeare in excess of 1664, author of forty-four plays.
