Shakespeare And Text

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.

A cutting-edge and comprehensive reassessment of the theories, practices and archival evidence that shape editorial approaches to Shakespeare's texts.

Shakespeare / Text sets new agendas for the study and use of the Shakespearean text. Written by 20 leading experts on textual matters, each chapter challenges a single entrenched binary – such as book/theatre, source/adaptation, text/paratext, canon/apocrypha, sense/nonsense, extant/ephemeral, material/digital and original/copy – that has come to both define and limit the way we read, analyze, teach, perform and edit Shakespeare today. Drawing on methods from book history, bibliography, editorial theory, library science, the digital humanities, theatre studies and literary criticism, the collection as a whole proposes that our understanding of Shakespeare – and early modern drama more broadly – changes radically when 'either/or' approaches to the Shakespearean text are reconfigured. The chapters in Shakespeare / Text make strong cases for challenging received wisdom and offer new, portable methods of treating 'the text', in its myriad instantiations, that will be useful to scholars, editors, theatre practitioners, teachers and librarians.

Seventeen critics are represented in this collection of essays designed to illustrate the vitality and range of traditional and new approaches to Shakespeare studies.

Based on three lectures given by Professor Richard Proudfoot in October 1999 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of The Globe, The Arden Shakespeare's centenary and Professor Proudfoot's retirement from King's College; this enjoyable volume aims to give a general and non-specialist audience some sense of what scholarship has achieved in three critical areas of Shakespeare studies at the end of the twentieth century. Freshly and engagingly written, this lively volume will appeal to all those with an interest in Shakespeare studies.

This volume focuses on both the texts of Shakespeare's plays, and the many contexts in which they have been produced, from their first performances to contemporary reproductions. This book introduces nine of Shakespeare's major plays and focuses on the critical practices of close reading, historical contextualisation, and a lively question-and-answer teaching style. There is also detailed attention to Shakespeare on stage, on film, and in the new communications technologies and to new theoretical approaches to Shakespeare's plays.