Shakespeare and Text

by John Jowett

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject.

Shakespeare and Text is an indispensable and unique guide to its topic. It takes Shakespeare readers to the very foundation of his work, explaining how his plays first took shape in the theatre where writing was part of a larger collective enterprise. As the resulting manuscripts are virtually all lost, the account then turns to the early modern printing industry that produced the earliest surviving texts of Shakespeare's plays. It describes the roles of publisher and printer, the controls exerted through the Stationers' Company, and the technology of printing. A chapter is devoted to the book that gathered Shakespeare's plays together for the first time, the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare and Text goes on to survey the major developments in textual studies over the past century. It builds on the recent upsurge of interest in textual theory, and deals with issues such as collaboration, the instability of the text, the relationship between theatre culture and print culture, and
the book as a material object. Later chapters examine the current critical edition, explaining the procedures that transform early texts in to a very different cultural artefact, the edition in which we regularly encounter Shakespeare.

Genres: Shakespeare, Nonfiction

229 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 2007

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

First book read for my MA and what a help! It gave me definitions, explanations and a general overview for textual studies - a subject I knew next to nothing about. Clear, well written and very helpful - it was written by my lecturer!

[Audrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found Jowett's ability to describe conflicting viewpoints very refreshing. My experience of textual criticism so far has been primarily of highly dogmatic people insisting (even if they're postmodernists and theoretically against such black-and-white thinking) that all textual scholarship not in accord with their own is ignorant, misguided, and deeply harmful to the unsuspecting reader at the other end of the edition. Jowett obviously has his own biases and advocates his own opinions, but he is capable of presenting both sides of the question fairly and admitting that the truth is ultimately unknowable. We are highly unlikely, after all, ever to find a Shakespeare manuscript, so any prevailing theory is really just speculation.

[Eugenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Up to chapter 3 with the undergrads. Not sure about using it in this kind of class, but we'll see if they do any better with it on Thursday. I think I would have to give up more lecture time to summarize it, which I resist doing because I'd rather be into the text proper.