Impressive Shakespeare

Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama

Harry Newman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781472465320
• eBook ISBN: 9781317118329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Impressive Shakespeare reassesses Shakespeare's relationship with "print culture" in light of his plays' engagement with the language and material culture of three interrelated "impressing technologies": wax sealing, coining, and typographic printing. It analyses the material and rhetorical forms through which drama was thought to "imprint" early modern audiences and readers with ideas, morals and memories, and—looking to our own cultural moment—shows how Shakespeare has been historically constructed as an "impressive" dramatist. Through material readings of four plays— Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale —Harry Newman argues that Shakespeare deploys the imprint as a self-reflexive trope in order to advertise the value of his plays to audiences and readers, and that in turn the language of impression has shaped, and continues to shape, Shakespeare's critical afterlife. The book pushes the boundaries of what we understand by "print culture", and challenges assumptions about the emergence of concepts now central to Shakespeare's perceived canonical value, such as penetrating characterisation, poetic transformation, and literary fatherhood.

Harry Newman's suggestive analysis of techniques and tropes of sealing, coining and printing produces a revelatory account of Shakespearean creative poetics. It's sustainedly startling in its rereading of familiar lines - but the chapter I found most original is on Measure for Measure: Newman is the first critic to attempt to interpret the play's authorial status as part of its own thematic and linguistic interrogation of illegitimacy and counterfeiting. He makes authorship matter in a literary and creative, rather than a quantitative and statistical, sense. Impressive Shakespeare is a brilliant scholarly debut.

- Emma Smith

Editor, Shakespeare Survey

Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College, Oxford

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the text
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: the stamp of the Bard
• 1 Technology, language, physiology
• 2 ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’: commoditised character and the technology of theatrical impression in Coriolanus
• 3 ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’: sealing and poetics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• 4 ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’: Measure for Measure, counterfeit coinage, and the politics of value
• 5 The printer’s tale: books, children, and the prefatory construction of Shakespearean authorship
• Conclusion: canon, reproduction, ethics
• Works Cited
• Index