Remembering Shakespeare

by David Scott Kastan, Kathryn James

"To be or not to be." "My kingdom for a horse." "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day." How is it that Shakespeare is so well remembered? In this richly illustrated book, David Scott Kastan and Kathryn James explore Yale University's extraordinary collection of works by or relating to William Shakespeare. They chart the winding course by which the playwright has been remembered, often in unexpected ways, for some four centuries. Many of the rare items illustrated and discussed in the book have never before been publicly displayed. The authors examine such treasures as the earliest known manuscript of Macbeth , a sixteenth-century reader's notes on Shakespeare, and a proof copy of Walt Whitman's "Shakespeare-Bacon's Cipher," to show how various, idiosyncratic acts of memory over hundreds of years have given us the texts, and even the person, we remember as "Shakespeare."

Distributed for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Exhibition Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (02/01/12-06/04/12)

80 pages, Paperback

Published March 27, 2012

About the author

David Scott Kastan, the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University, is one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare.

George M. Bodman Professor Emeritus of English

David Kastan

Ph.D., University of Chicago
B.A., Princeton University

Although I teach broadly across the field of Renaissance literature, my primary academic concern has been with the relations of literature and history in early modern England, considered from a variety of perspectives. This interest has in large part focused on the production, transmission, and reception of texts (a focus that I like to think of as “the new boredom”). I am one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare, for which I edited 1 Henry IV, and I edited both Milton’s Paradise Lost and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus for other publishers. I was the co-editor of the Bantam Shakespeare and the series editor for the Barnes and Noble Shakespeare. In addition, I edited The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, and also (with John Cox), A New History of Early English Drama and (with Peter Stallybrass) Staging the Renaissance. Among my scholarly publications are Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, Shakespeare after Theory, Shakespeare and the Book, and A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion. Recently I have begun writing about the visual arts, including of number of essays written for art museum catalogues. My most recent book, entitled On Color, written with the painter Stephen Farthing, was published by Yale University Press in 2018. I am now working on a book tentatively entitled In Search of Rembrandt, as well as a book (perhaps) to be called The Problem of Beauty.