ABSTRACT
Search engine optimization (SEO) now plays a significant role in online research. All academic publishers know this, of course, which is why authors must supply a list of ‘keywords’ to help direct web traffic to the publisher’s site. It goes almost without saying that the name of Shakespeare carries much greater online weight than any other early modern author. 1 Shakespeare was the third-most searched for author, early or otherwise, in 2015. 2 The SEO process only helps shed a light on what we already know about Shakespeare’s predominance in literary studies. Shakespeare sells. And connecting Shakespeare to any study of the early modern period makes it instantly more attractive to publishers, who are safe in the knowledge that such work can potentially reach a wider group of readers. That readership already exists, of course, and early modern literary criticism has always been weighted in an imbalanced way towards Shakespeare. All that has changed is the way in which the reader is directed towards what they might read.
