Shakespeare and Textual Theory

Suzanne Gossett is Professor Emerita of English at Loyola University Chicago, USA. Her publications include essays on theatrical collaboration, Shakespeare’s late plays, and textual editing. She is a General Textual Editor of the Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, and a General Editor of Arden Early Modern Drama. She has edited many plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Pericles and All’s Well That Ends Well for the Arden Shakespeare, Middleton’s A Fair Quarrel for the Collected Middleton, and Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster for Arden Early Modern Drama. She is a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America and, together with Dympna Callaghan, she edited Shakespeare in Our Time in honor of the 2016 anniversary year.

• Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part One: Textual Studies Before ‘Theory’1 Shakespeare’s Texts From the Sixteenth to theNineteenth Century The progress of an early modern play The First Folio Successive Folios Early editions Part Two: Twentieth-Century Theories2 The New Bibliography 3 The Advent of Poststructuralism 4 Textual and Other Theories Part Three: Current Debates5 Authorship, Agency, and Intentionality 6 Attribution and Collaboration External evidence Internal evidence Enlarging the canon Theoretical implications 7 The (In)Stability of the Text What if the printer went to lunch? Why are some texts bad? Why – and how and when – do some texts change? 8 Editing and Unediting Editing Shakespeare Editing collaborations Unediting ShakespeareDeciding on intervention 9 Book History and the Text Shakespeare as literary dramatist The creation of ‘Shakespeare’ through books Readers, commonplacers and collectors Women and Shakespeare books Two material texts 10 Performance and the Text Traces of early performance Editing for performance 11 Textual Theories and Difficult Cases: Hamletand Pericles Shakespeare’s texts and early editions Enter the New Bibliography The challenge of post-structuralism, or authorship,authority, and intention Textual and other theories Attribution and collaboration Printing unstable texts Editing and unediting Book history and the text Performance and the text Coda: The Immaterial Text12 Textual Studies After the Digital Turn References Index

[A] clearly written and useful explanation of the state of Shakespeare and Textual Theory.