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An essential resource for the history of Shakespeare on the page, this book traces the historical intersection of textual theory and Shakespeare studies and analyzes current theoretical debates in the field.
List of contents
Series Editor's Preface Acknowledgements Introduction
Part One: Textual Studies Before 'Theory'1 Shakespeare's Texts From the Sixteenth to the
Nineteenth Century
The progress of an early modern play
The First Folio
Successive Folios
Early editions
Part Two: Twentieth-Century Theories2 The New Bibliography
3 The Advent of Poststructuralism
4 Textual and Other Theories
Part Three: Current Debates5 Authorship, Agency, and Intentionality
6 Attribution and Collaboration
External evidence
Internal evidence
Enlarging the canon
Theoretical implications
7 The (In)Stability of the Text
What if the printer went to lunch?
Why are some texts bad?
Why - and how and when - do some texts change?
8 Editing and Unediting
Editing Shakespeare
Editing collaborations
Unediting Shakespeare
Deciding on intervention
9 Book History and the Text
Shakespeare as literary dramatist
The creation of 'Shakespeare' through books
Readers, commonplacers and collectors
Women and Shakespeare books
Two material texts
10 Performance and the Text
Traces of early performance
Editing for performance
11 Textual Theories and Difficult Cases:
Hamletand
Pericles Shakespeare's texts and early editions
Enter the New Bibliography
The challenge of post-structuralism, or authorship,
authority, and intention
Textual and other theories
Attribution and collaboration
Printing unstable texts
Editing and unediting
Book history and the text
Performance and the text
Coda: The Immaterial Text12 Textual Studies After the Digital Turn
References
Index
About the author
Suzanne Gossett is Professor Emerita of English at Loyola University Chicago, USA. Her publications include essays on theatrical collaboration, Shakespeare's late plays, and textual editing. She is a General Textual Editor of the Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, and a General Editor of Arden Early Modern Drama. She has edited many plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including
Pericles and
All's Well That Ends Well for the Arden Shakespeare, Middleton's
A Fair Quarrel for the
Collected Middleton, and Beaumont and Fletcher's
Philaster for Arden Early Modern Drama. She is a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America and, together with Dympna Callaghan, she edited
Shakespeare in Our Time in honor of the 2016 anniversary year.
Summary
An essential resource for the history of Shakespeare on the page, this book traces the historical intersection of textual theory and Shakespeare studies and analyzes current theoretical debates in the field.
