Shakespeare and Text is built on the research and experience of a leading expert on Shakespeare editing and textual studies. The first edition has proved its value as an indispensable and unique guide to its topic. It takes Shakespeare readers to the very foundation of his work, explaining how his plays first took shape in the theatre where writing was part of a larger collective enterprise. The account examines the early modern printing industry that produced the earliest surviving texts of Shakespeare's plays. It describes the roles of publisher and printer, the controls exerted through the Stationers' Company, and the technology of printing. A chapter is devoted to the book that gathered Shakespeare's plays together for the first time, the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare and Text goes on to survey the major developments in textual studies over the past century. It builds on the recent upsurge of interest in textual theory, and deals with issues such as collaboration, the instability of the text, the relationship between theatre culture and print culture, and the book as a material object. Later chapters examine the current critical edition, explaining the procedures that transform early texts in to a very different cultural artefact, the edition in which we regularly encounter Shakespeare. The new revised edition, which builds on Jowett's research for the New Oxford Shakespeare, engages with scholarship of the past decade, work that has transformed our understanding of textual versions, has opened up the taxonomy of Shakespeare's texts, and has significantly extended the picture of Shakespeare as a co-author. A new chapter describes digital text, digital editing, and their interface with the traditional media.
More troubled and troubling than King Henry IV Part 1, the play continues the story of King Henry's decline and Hal's reform. Though Part 2 echoes the structure of the earlier play, it is a darker and more unsettling world, in which even Falstaff's revelry is more tired and cynical, and the once-merry Hal sloughs off his tavern companions to become King Henry V. James C. Bulman's authoritative edition provides a wealth of incisive commentary on this complex history play.
The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on Shakespeare and textual studies by an international team of leading scholars. It contains chapters on all the major areas of current research, notably the Shakespeare manuscripts; the printed text and paratext in Shakespeare's early playbooks and poetry books; Shakespeare's place in the early modern book trade; Shakespeare's early readers, users, and collectors; the constitution and evolution of the Shakespeare canon from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century; Shakespeare's editors from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century; and the modern editorial reproduction of Shakespeare. The Handbook also devotes separate chapters to new directions and developments in research in the field, specifically in the areas of digital editing and of authorship attribution methodologies. In addition, the Companion contains various sections that provide non-specialists with practical help: an A-Z of key terms and concepts, a guide to research methods and problems, a chronology of major publications and events, an introduction to resources for study of the field, and a substantial annotated bibliography. The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies is a reference work aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars and libraries, a guide to beginning or developing research in the field, an essential companion for all those interested in Shakespeare and textual studies.
Premodern critical race studies, long intertwined with Shakespeare studies, has broadened our understanding of the definitions and discourse of race and racism to include not only phenotype, but also religious and political identity, regional, national, and linguistic difference, and systems of differentiation based upon culture and custom. Replete with fresh readings of the plays and poems, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race brings together some of the most important scholars thinking about the subject today. The volume offers a thorough overview of the most significant theoretical and methodological paradigms such as critical race theory, feminist, and postcolonial studies; a dynamic look at intersections of race with queer, trans, disability, and indigenous studies; and a vibrant array of new approaches from ecocriticism, to animality, and human rights, from book history, to scholarly editing, and repertory studies; and an exploration of Shakespeare and race in our contemporary moment through discussions of political activism, pedagogy, visual arts, film, and theatre. Woven through the collection are the voices of practicing theatre professionals who have grappled with the challenges of race and racism both in performance and in the profession itself.
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international journal committee to the publication of essays and reviews relevant to drama and theatre history to 1642. This issue includes eight new articles and reviews of fourteen books.
The authors of this book ask how digital research tools are changing the ways in which practicing editors historicize Shakespeare's language. Scholars now encounter, interpret, and disseminate Shakespeare's language through an increasing variety of digital resources, including online editions such as the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), searchable lexical corpora such as the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) or the Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) collections, high-quality digital facsimiles such as the Folger Shakespeare Library's Digital Image Collection, text visualization tools such as Voyant, apps for reading and editing on mobile devices, and more. What new insights do these tools offer about the ways Shakespeare's words made meaning in their own time? What kinds of historical or historicizing arguments can digital editions make about Shakespeare's language? A growing body of work in the digital humanities allows textual critics to explore new approaches to editing in digital environments, and enables language historians to ask and answer new questions about Shakespeare's words. The authors in this unique book explicitly bring together the two fields of textual criticism and language history in an exploration of the ways in which new tools are expanding our understanding of Early Modern English.
Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. These records provide information that is not available in other forms about the popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most interested audiences. Tracing the course of dramatic extracting from the earliest stages in the 1590s, through the prolific manuscript circulation at the universities, to the closure and reopening of the theatres, Estill gathers these microhistories to create a comprehensive overview of seventeenth-century dramatic extracts and the culture of extracting from plays. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays explores new archival evidence (from John Milton’s signature to unpublished university plays) while also analyzing the popularity of perennial favorites such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The study of dramatic extracts is the study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts, particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. As D. F. McKenzie puts it, “different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways.” By providing careful analyses of these rich source texts, this book shows how active play-viewing and play-reading (that is, extracting) ultimately led to changing the plays themselves, both through selecting and manipulating the extracts and positioning the plays in new contexts. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing offers a rich account of Shakespeare's artistic development in, against, and beyond collaboration. In undertaking a rigorous appreciation of his co-authored works, it presents them as distinctive works of art that transform our understanding of Shakespeare the poet, dramatist, and enduring cultural icon.