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List of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Text
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Stamp of the Bard
‘My dear Keats’: Impressions of ‘WS’
Metaphors and Material Readings
The Structure of this Book
1. Technology, Language, Physiology
Sealing, Coining, Printing: Interrelated Technologies
The Language of Impression and Early Modern Metaphor Theory
Early Modern Physiology: Imprinting and Imprinted Subjects
2. ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’: Commoditised Character and the Technology of Theatrical Impression in Coriolanus
Valuing the Imprint of ‘Character’: Theatre, Charactery, Criticism
Translating Plutarch, Coining Coriolanus
Metatheatrical Impressions: Burbage’s ‘Painting’ and the Technology of Wounds
Sealing Knowledge: The Theatrical Contract and the Imprint of Silence
3. ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’: Sealing and Poetics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare’s ‘special impress’: Materialising and Gendering Dream’s Poetry
Seals in Early Modern Material Culture, Rhetoric and Drama
The ‘transfigured’ Audience: Signs and Seals of Poetic Transformation in Dream
4. ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’: Measure for Measure, Counterfeit Coinage, and the Politics of Value
Counterfeiting in the Name of the King: Jacobean Coinage and the King’s Men
Metatheatrical Counterfeiting: The Duke’s Economy of Value
Adapting ‘old-coined gold’: Canonical Value and the Stamp of Thomas Middleton
5. The Printer’s Tale: Books, Children, and the Prefatory Construction of Shakespearean Authorship
The Infant-Text and the Prefatory ‘Shake-scene’
Dramatic Paratexts, Theatricality and the ‘paper stage’
‘[T]he fathers face’: Prefacing Shakespeare’s Book, 1623
The Printer’s Tale Retold: Paternal Likeness in The Winter’s Tale and the Preliminaries of the First Folio
Conclusion
Impressions Past, Present and Future: Shakespearean Drama in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Shakespeare and the ‘print of goodness’: The Ethics of the Imprint
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Harry Newman is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Summary
Impressive Shakespeare reassesses Shakespeare’s relationship with "print culture" in light of his plays’ engagement with the language and material culture of three interrelated "impressing technologies": wax sealing, coining, and typographic printing.
Additional text
Harry Newman’s suggestive analysis of techniques and tropes of sealing, coining and printing produces a revelatory account of Shakespearean creative poetics. It’s sustainedly startling in its rereading of familiar lines - but the chapter I found most original is on Measure for Measure: Newman is the first critic to attempt to interpret the play’s authorial status as part of its own thematic and linguistic interrogation of illegitimacy and counterfeiting. He makes authorship matter in a literary and creative, rather than a quantitative and statistical, sense. Impressive Shakespeare is a brilliant scholarly debut.- Emma SmithEditor, Shakespeare SurveyProfessor of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College, Oxford
