Shakespeare / Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance

Shakespeare / Text sets new agendas for the study and use of the Shakespearean text. Written by 20 leading experts on textual matters, each chapter challenges a single entrenched binary - such as book/theatre, source/adaptation, text/paratext, canon/apocrypha, sense/nonsense, extant/ephemeral, material/digital and original/copy - that has come to both define and limit the way we read, analyze, teach, perform and edit Shakespeare today.

Drawing on methods from book history, bibliography, editorial theory, library science, the digital humanities, theatre studies and literary criticism, the collection as a whole proposes that our understanding of Shakespeare - and early modern drama more broadly - changes radically when ’either/or’ approaches to the Shakespearean text are reconfigured. The chapters in Shakespeare / Text make strong cases for challenging received wisdom and offer new, portable methods of treating ’the text’, in its myriad instantiations, that will be useful to scholars, editors, theatre practitioners, teachers and librarians.

Claire M. L. Bourne is Assistant Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Her teaching and research focus on early modern drama, book history, textual editing, and theatre studies. She is the author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (2020) and has published extensively on book design and the history of reading. She is editing Henry VI, Part 1, for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series, and is collaborating with Jason Scott- Warren (University of Cambridge) on a series of projects related to the Free Library of Philadelphia’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio annotated by John Milton