Shakespeares Book Essays in reading, writing and reception

by Meek, Richard; Rickard, Jane; Wilson, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780719079054
• ISBN10: 0719079055
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-01
• Publisher: Manchester University Press

Summary

"The volume explores both Shakespeare's relationship with actual printers, patrons, and readers, and the representation of writing, reading, and print within his works themselves. The essays are theoretically, critically, and methodologically wide-ranging. What all of the contributors share, however, is a sense of the importance of books - the books Shakespeare read, the books he represented within his works, and the books within which his works were first read - to our understanding of Shakespeare's cultural significance, both for his contemporaries and for us. Shakespeare's Book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Renaissance literature, theatre and cultural history, textual bibliography, and the history of the book."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Richard Meek is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of York. Jane Rickard is Lecturer in Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds. Richard Wilson is Professor of English Literature at the University of Cardiff.

Table of Contents

'Th' world's volume' : printer, page and the literary field	p. 1
'An index and obscure prologue' : books and theatre in Shakespeare's literary authorship	p. 29
'A man in print'? : Shakespeare and the representation of the press	p. 59
'Penn'd speech' : seeing and not seeing in King Lear	p. 79
'A stringless instrument' : Richard II and the defeat of poetry	p. 103
Foucault's epistemic shift and verbatim repetition in Shakespeare	p. 123
'As sharp as a pen' : Henry V and its texts	p. 140
Shakespeare's deletions and false starts, mark 2	p. 165
The First Folio : 'my Shakespeare'/'our Shakespeare' : whose Shakespeare?	p. 187
The 'First' Folio in context : the folio collections of Shakespeare, Jonson and King James	p. 207
A new early reader of Shakespeare	p. 233
'Too long for a play' : Shakespeare beyond page and stage	p. 241
Afterword	p. 255
Index	p. 267
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