Shakespeare, Malone and the Problems of Chronology


Book Description

In 1778 Edmond Malone published his first contribution to Shakespeare scholarship, An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written. He revised and republished it in 1790 and began a further revision of it which was printed posthumously in 1821. This Element will be on the three versions of Malone's Attempt and the way they created, shaped, focused, directed, and misdirected, our idea of the chronology and sequence of Shakespeare's plays. By showing Malone's impressive, fallible choices, adopted or adapted by later editors, it reveals how current Shakespeare editions are, in good and bad ways, Malonian at heart.




Shakespeare / Play


Book Description

What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play – from jests and games to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of Shakespeare plays today? Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across 5 'acts', interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', 4 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a 'curtain call'), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.




The Phenomenology of Play


Book Description

Eugen Fink's deep engagement with the phenomenon of play saw him transcend his two towering mentors, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, to become a crucial figure in early 20th-century phenomenology. The Phenomenology of Play draws on Fink's concept of play to build a picture of his philosophy, from its foundations to its applications. The book's three sections focus on the building blocks of Fink's phenomenology of play, how his work maps onto the broader history of philosophy, and finally how his writing can be applied to contexts from education and care to politics and religion. This rich account of Fink's contribution to theories of play demonstrates its immense value and fundamental importance to human existence. Relating Fink's work to that of his contemporaries and predecessors like Husserl, Heidegger, Schiller, Gadamer, Nietzsche and Sartre shows the range and importance of his ideas to modern European thought. The Phenomenology of Play also features newly translated material including notes from conversations between Fink and Heidegger, and Fink's own essay 'Mask and Cothurnus' on ancient theatre – which shed new light on his philosophical enquiries.




Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England


Book Description

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an annual volume committed to the publication of essays and reviews related to English drama and theater history to 1642. An internationally recognized board of scholars oversees the publication of MaRDiE. Readers who wish to deepen their understanding of early drama will find that the journal publishes wide-ranging discussions not only of plays and early performance history, but of topics pertaining to cultural history, as well as manuscript studies and the history of printing.




Antedating Shakespeare's Poems and Plays


Book Description

The academic community treats the chronology of Shakespeare’s works as settled. He supposedly served an apprenticeship collaborating on plays in the 1580s, wrote two great poems in the early 90s, three plays a year from the mid-90s, some problem plays around the turn of the century, then his greatest tragedies, and finally some “romances” late in his career. This investigation highlights the flaws in the consensus view: over-reliance on precarious stylometrics, dubious identification of topical relevance, and unfounded conviction that composition preceded publication, performance, or first mention by only a short interval. Concentrating on his poems and six of his plays, the study ascribes parallels in others’ literary works to their authors’ imitation or parodying of Shakespeare, not vice versa. The importance of patronage circles rather than London theatre companies to writers, players, and printers is spelled out. The conclusion is that Shakespeare’s works must be radically antedated.




Theatre History, Attribution Studies, and the Question of Evidence


Book Description

Over the past decade, attribution scholars have come to a consensus that Shakespeare wrote some of the additions printed in the 1602 quarto of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. This new development in textual studies has far-reaching consequences for established theatre-historical narratives. Accounting for Shakespeare's involvement in The Spanish Tragedy requires us to rethink the history of two major theatre companies, the Admiral's and the Chamberlain's Men, and to reread much of the documentary record of late Elizabethan theatre. Modelling what a theatre-historical response to new attributionist arguments might look like, the author offers an in-depth reinterpretation of Philip Henslowe's records of new plays, develops a novel account of how theatre companies copied and adapted plays in one another's repertories (including a reconsideration of the 'Ur-Hamlet' and the two Shrew plays), and reconstructs an early modern cluster of Hieronimo plays that also allows us to reimagine Ben Jonson's career as an actor.










The Fictional Lives of Shakespeare


Book Description

Modern biographies of William Shakespeare abound; however, close scrutiny of the surviving records clearly show that there is insufficient material for a cradle to grave account of his life, that most of what is written about him cannot be verified from primary sources, and that Shakespearean biography did not attain scholarly or academic respectability until long after Samuel Schoenbaum published William Shakespeare A Documentary Life in 1975. This study begins with a short survey of the history and practice of biography and then surveys the very limited biographical material for Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare gradually attained the status as a national hero during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were no serious attempts to reconstruct his life. Any attempt at an account of his life or personality amounts, however, merely to "biografiction". Modern biographers differ sharply on Shakespeare’s apparent relationships with Southampton and with Jonson, which merely underlines the fact that the documentary record has to be greatly expanded through contextual description and speculation in order to appear like a Life of Shakespeare.




Four Shakespearean Period Pieces


Book Description

In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism. Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present. In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project. To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.