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 Associate 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 (OUP, 2020) and has published extensively on book design and the history of reading. She is editing Henry the Sixth, 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.

Sonia Massai is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy, and Visiting Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College London, UK. With Amy Lidster, she is co-editor of Shakespeare at War: A Material History (2023) and co-curator of the Shakespeare and War exhibition at the National Army Museum (October 2023 – April 2024). Her other publications include her books on Shakespeare's Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance (2020) and Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (2007), her collections of essays on Hamlet for the Arden Shakespeare 'State of Play' series (The Arden Shakespeare, 2021), on Ivo van Hove (Methuen Drama, 2018), Shakespeare and Textual Studies (2015) and on World-Wide Shakespeares (2005), and critical editions of The Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (2014) and John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore for Arden Early Modern Drama (The Arden Shakespeare, 2011).

Farah Karim-Cooper is Head of Higher Education & Research, Shakespeare's Globe and Professor of Shakespeare Studies, King's College London, UK.

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Gordon McMullan is a professor of English at King's College London, UK.

Lucy Munro is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King's College London, UK. She is the author of Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (2005), Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674 (2013) and Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men (2020), and the editor of plays including Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed and Dekker, Ford and Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton.