You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Now in a new edition, Lukas Erne's groundbreaking study argues that Shakespeare, apart from being a playwright who wrote theatrical texts for the stage, was also a literary dramatist who produced reading texts for the page. Examining the evidence from early published playbooks, Erne argues that Shakespeare wrote many of his plays with a readership in mind and that these 'literary' texts would have been abridged for the stage because they were too long for performance. The variant early texts of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Hamlet are shown to reveal important insights into the different media for which Shakespeare designed his plays. This revised and updated edition includes a new and substantial preface that reviews and intervenes in the controversy the study has triggered and lists reviews, articles and books which respond to or build on the first edition.
Shakespeare and the Book Trade follows on from Lukas Erne's groundbreaking Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist to examine the publication, constitution, dissemination and reception of Shakespeare's printed plays and poems in his own time and to argue that their popularity in the book trade has been greatly underestimated. Erne uses evidence from Shakespeare's publishers and the printed works to show that in the final years of the sixteenth century and the early part of the seventeenth century, 'Shakespeare' became a name from which money could be made, a book trade commodity in which publishers had significant investments and an author who was bought, read, excerpted and collected on a surprising scale. Erne argues that Shakespeare, far from indifferent to his popularity in print, was an interested and complicit witness to his rise as a print-published author. Thanks to the book trade, Shakespeare's authorial ambition started to become bibliographic reality during his lifetime.
A full edition of the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet (1597), with helpful commentary.
This important collection brings together leading scholars to examine crucial questions regarding the theory and practice of editing Shakespeare's plays. In particular, the essays look at how best to engage editorially with evidence provided by historical research into the playhouse, author's study and printing house. How are editors of playscripts to mediate history, in its many forms, for modern users? Considering our knowledge of the past is partial (in the senses both of incomplete and ideological) where are we to draw the line between legitimate editorial assistance and unwarranted interference? In what innovative ways might current controversies surrounding the mediation of Shakespeare's drama shape future editorial practice? Focusing on key points of debate and controversy, this collection makes a vital contribution to a better understanding of how editorial practice (on the page and in cyberspace) might develop in the twenty-first century.
This is the first book in more than thirty years on the playwright who is arguably Shakespeare's most important tragic predecessor. In Lukas Erne's book, The Spanish Tragedy - the most popular of all plays on the English Renaissance stage - receives the extensive scholarly and criticaltreatment it deserves, including a full reception and modern stage history. Yet as Erne shows, Thomas Kyd is much more than the author of a single masterpiece. Don Horatio (partly extant in The First Part of Hieronimo), the lost early Hamlet, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia all belong to whatemerges in this study for the first time as a coherent dramatic oeuvre.
"Bel-vedére, or The Garden of the Muses is an early modern printed commonplace book consisting of 4,482 one- or two-line passages of decasyllabic verse, arranged under topical headings, including at least 240 quotations of William Shakespeare, 232 of Edmund Spenser, and 51 of Christopher Marlowe. It appeared in 1600 and received a second edition in 1610. It has never been properly edited (a facsimile reprint was produced in 1875). The book is of exceptional importance for the early reception history of early modern authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser and Marlowe, for the late Elizabethan practice of commonplacing, for the rising status of English literature (including dramatic literature) ...
Kidnie brings current debates in performance criticism in contact with recent developments in textual studies to explore what it is that distinguishes Shakespearean work from its apparent other, the adaptation.
This book is a translation of German versions of both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. The introductions to each play place these versions of Shakespeare's plays in the German context, and offer insights into what we can learn about the original texts from these translations. English itinerant players toured in northern continental Europe from the 1580s. Their repertories initially consisted of plays from the London theatre, but over time the players learnt German, and German players joined the companies, as a result of which the dramatic texts were adapted and translated into German. A number of German plays now extant have a direct connection to Shakespeare. Four of them are so close in plot, character constellation and at times even language to their English originals that they can legitimately be considered versions of Shakespeare's plays. This volume offers fully edited translations of two such texts: Der Bestrafte Brudermord / Fratricide Punished (Hamlet) and Romio und Julieta (Romeo and Juliet). With full scholarly apparatus, these texts are of seminal interest to all scholars of Shakespeare's texts, and their transmission over time in print, translation and performance.
This second edition of Erne's groundbreaking study includes a new preface that reviews the controversy the book has triggered.
A cutting-edge and comprehensive reassessment of the theories, practices and archival evidence that shape editorial approaches to Shakespeare's texts.