Overview

There is no Shakespeare without text. Yet readers often do not realize that the words in the book they hold, like the dialogue they hear from the stage, has been revised, augmented and emended since Shakespeare’s lifetime. An essential resource for the history of Shakespeare on the page, Shakespeare and Textual Theory traces the explanatory underpinnings of these changes through the centuries. After providing an introduction to early modern printing practices, Suzanne Gossett describes the original quartos and folios as well as the first collected editions. Subsequent sections summarize the work of the ‘New Bibliographers’ and the radical challenge to their technical analysis posed by poststructuralist theory, which undermined the presumed stability of author and text. Shakespeare and Textual Theory presents a balanced view of the current theoretical debates, which include the nature of the surviving texts we call Shakespeare’s; the relationship of the author ‘Shakespeare’ and of authorial intentions to any of these texts; the extent and nature of Shakespeare’s collaboration with others; and the best or most desirable way to present the texts - in editions or performances. The book is illustrated throughout with examples showing how theoretical decisions affect the text of Shakespeare’s plays, and case studies of Hamlet and Pericles demonstrate how different theories complicate both text and meaning, whether a play survives in one version or several. The conclusion summarizes the many ways in which beliefs about Shakespeare’s texts have changed over the centuries.

Full Product Details

Author:   Prof. Suzanne Gossett (Loyola University Chicago, USA) ,  Dr Evelyn Gajowski (University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   The Arden Shakespeare
Dimensions:   Width: 12.80cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 19.60cm
Weight:   0.300kg
ISBN:  

9781350121232

ISBN 10:   1350121231
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   10 February 2022
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table 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 Theories 2 The New Bibliography 3 The Advent of Poststructuralism 4 Textual and Other Theories Part Three: Current Debates 5 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: Hamlet and 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 Text 12 Textual Studies After the Digital Turn References Index

Reviews

[A] clearly written and useful explanation of the state of Shakespeare and Textual Theory. * The Year's Work in English Studies * Gossett’s breadth of knowledge allows readers to move easily between Shakespeare’s time and the last two centuries of criticism … She treats the reader to stylistic clarity, grace in advancing her ideas, and economy of exposition. * Shakespeare Quarterly *

[A] clearly written and useful explanation of the state of Shakespeare and Textual Theory. * The Year's Work in English Studies *

Author Information

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.

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