Shakespearian Bibliography And Textual Criticism

The literary critic tends to think that the textual scholar or bibliographer has not much to say that he would care to hear, so there is a gulf between them.

'Textual Shakespeare' reassesses the Bard as a writer in the light of the late-20th century revolution in bibliography and textual studies. Reviewing debates in textual theory and practice, Holderness concludes that 'Shakespeare' is not a writer but a collection of documents.

This volume in the Writers Lives series offers a reassessment of Shakespeare and his creative output from his earliest work through his 'mature' drama and the late plays, taking into account our current knowledge of Shakespeare's biography and consensus on key textual, critical and theatrical issues. William Baker offers a comprehensive but accessible introduction to Shakespeare's work and places it in the contexts of what is known of his life and activities. Avoiding speculation of a biographical, critical or textual nature, he focuses instead on an account of what is known of Shakespeare and his achievement at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

An examination of forty-one Shakespearean play texts, the 'bad quartos' or 'memorial reconstructions'.