Journal considers “Everything and Nothing: The many lives of William Shakespeare”

March 16, 2016

The new volume of the Journal of Early Modern Studies contains essays by scholars that consider issues of authorship, attribution, collaboration, and biography. It is a fascinating collection that contains cutting-edge studies from across the Shakespeare scholarship community and is a landmark publication that sets authorship studies at the very centre of Shakespearean criticism.

Abstract (from JEMS)

The [introductory] essay is devoted to an analysis of the contributions gathered in this issue ofJEMS. It begins with the scarcity (or total absence) of literary archives and autograph manuscripts for the English playwrights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and among them Shakespeare). Such a diagnosis leads to stress the conditions ruling the composition and publication of plays: collaborative writing, reuse of the same stories and commonplaces, use of the author’s name as a commodity, publication based on memorial reconstruction, prompt books, or corrupted copies, etc. The consequences of these practices (so different from the romantic textual ideology of the author’s singularity, originality and propriety) are discussed in relation with the criticism of the traditional criteria of attribution studies and the operations necessary for writing the literary biography of an author without (literary) archives and (quite) any autograph remains (whence the discussion about Shakespeare’s signatures, his holograph – or not – will, and his hand in the manuscript ofSir Thomas More). Two perspectives could enrich these issues: on the one hand, a literary geography of Shakespeare’s works mapping the publication and circulation of the performances, editions, and later translations of his plays; on the other hand, comparative approaches locating the specificity (or not) of English drama and Shakespeare’s plays within the European context of Spanishcomediasand Italiancommedia dell’arte.