What do you think?
Rate this book
Shakespeare Only
Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare's timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians who view modern claims of Shakespeare's uniqueness as a distorition of his real professional life. In Shakespeare Only, Knapp draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare's authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries actually understood it. He argues that Shakespeare tried to adapt his own singular talent and ambition to the collaborative enterprise of drama by imagining himself as uniquely embodying the diverse, fractious energies of the popular theater. Rewriting our current histories of authorship as well as Renaissance drama, Shakespeare Only recaptures a sense of the creative force that mass entertainment exerted on Shakespeare and that Shakespeare exerted on mass entertainment.
396 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
1 person is currently reading
13 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 7, 2026
Knapp’s intriguing thesis is that Shakespeare consciously sought a singular status as an author by going against the dominant early modern elitism. Shakespeare, in this reading, understands that modern capitalist necessity of having a broad base for commercial and artistic success.
― Clio
The readings of the plays . . . are wide-ranging, sometimes iconoclastic, and, in many instances, fascinating.
Literature and History
/////
Shakespeare Only is a major revisionary study. This historically contextualized account of Shakespeare’s sense of authorship alters our understanding not only of him and his chief rival, Ben Johnson (who gets illuminating treatment throughout as Shakespeare’s foil), but also, more broadly, of the changing nature of English Renaissance dramatic authorship. Jeffrey Knapp argues that Shakespeare, embracing the commercial theater in which he was playwright, actor, and stockholder, staked his claim to greatness on a literary versatility attuned to his diverse audience.
As befits a book on Shakespeare’s masterful variety, Knapp brings to bear a range of scholarly virtues rarely found together: an imaginative yet healthily skeptical approach to historical evidence, a command of theoretical debates with an eye alert to obfuscations and unwarranted assumptions, and an extremely subtle critical handling of literary texts and their implications.
Joshua Scodel ― Modern Language Quarterly
― Clio
The readings of the plays . . . are wide-ranging, sometimes iconoclastic, and, in many instances, fascinating.
Literature and History
/////
Shakespeare Only is a major revisionary study. This historically contextualized account of Shakespeare’s sense of authorship alters our understanding not only of him and his chief rival, Ben Johnson (who gets illuminating treatment throughout as Shakespeare’s foil), but also, more broadly, of the changing nature of English Renaissance dramatic authorship. Jeffrey Knapp argues that Shakespeare, embracing the commercial theater in which he was playwright, actor, and stockholder, staked his claim to greatness on a literary versatility attuned to his diverse audience.
As befits a book on Shakespeare’s masterful variety, Knapp brings to bear a range of scholarly virtues rarely found together: an imaginative yet healthily skeptical approach to historical evidence, a command of theoretical debates with an eye alert to obfuscations and unwarranted assumptions, and an extremely subtle critical handling of literary texts and their implications.
Joshua Scodel ― Modern Language Quarterly
Displaying 1 of 1 review