Generic Innovation in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Edward Gieskes is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He is the author of the monograph Representing the Professions (Delaware, 2006) and co-edited (with Kirk Melnikoff) Writing Robert Greene: New Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer (Ashgate, 2008). Recent publications include: “Material and Institutional Contexts of Early Modern Drama: An A-Z” in the Arden Handbook to Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama (Arden Shakespeare, 2022), “‘materia conveniente modis’: Ovid and Drama” in Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theater (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), “Rumour’s Household: Truth, Memory, Fiction, History” in Shakespeare and Memory (Routledge, 2017), and “Learning and Teaching Resources: History, Politics, and Edward II” (Arden Shakespeare, 2017).

• Acknowledgements List of Tables Introduction 1. “Chaucer (of all admired) the story gives”: Shakespeare, Medieval Romance, and Generic Innovation2. “Mirrours more then one”: Spenser, Shakespeare, and Generic Change3. “King Cambyses’ vein”: Generic Change in the 1580s and 1590s4. “Lies like truth”: History, Fiction, Genre, Innovation 5. “What’s aught but as ’tis valued”: “History,” Truth, and Fiction 6. “When the bad bleed”: Tenants to Tragedy Bibliography Index

Generic Innovation in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries casts the familiar category of genre in a new light. It will help scholars and students of early modern drama use that category as early modern dramatists did — with an emphasis on its creative potential, not its limitations.