Young Shakespeare's Young Hamlet Print, Piracy, and Performance

by Bourus, Terri

• ISBN13: 9781137465610
• ISBN10: 1137465611
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-10-16
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

One of the most vexing textual, theatrical, and interpretive puzzles in Shakespeare studies is the existence of three different versions of Hamlet. In this groundbreaking work, Shakespeare scholar Terri Bourus argues that this puzzle can only be solved by drawing on multiple kinds of evidence and analysis, including history of the book, theatre history, biography, performance studies, and close readings of textual variants. Combining the history of print culture with practical theatrical experience and special attention to Hamlet's women, Bourus presents here a case study of the "dramatic intersections" between Shakespeare's literary and theatrical working practices. In the process, she reshapes our assumptions about the beginning of Shakespeare's career and his artistic evolution.

Author Biography

Terri Bourus is an Equity Actor and Associate Professor of English Drama at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, USA. She is also the Director of the New Oxford Shakespeare Centre at IUPUI and one of the General Editors of the Oxford edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works, forthcoming in 2016. She has published on film/stage, the early modern book trade, and Shakespeare, and co-edited The Creation and Re-creation of Cardenio: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes ( 2013).

Table of Contents

1. "What do you read, my lord?": Piratical Publishers?

2. 'Remember me': Piratical Actors?

3. "My tables: meet it is I set it down": Piratical Reporters?

4. "Young Hamlet": How Old is Young?

5. "The chronicles and brief abstracts of the time": Young Shakespeare?

6. "My father's death": Revising Hamlet?