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 essay challenges a single entrenched binary—such as book/theater, 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, theater studies, editorial theory, library science, the digital humanities, 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’ break down. 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 are useful to scholars, editors, theatre practitioners, teachers and librarians.