Shakespeare's Early Readers
eBook - PDF

Shakespeare's Early Readers

A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Shakespeare's Early Readers

A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800

About this book

Who were Shakespeare's first readers and what did they think of his works? Offering the first dedicated account of the ways in which Shakespeare's texts were read in the centuries during which they were originally produced, Jean-Christophe Mayer reconsiders the role of readers in the history of Shakespeare's rise to fame and in the history of canon formation. Addressing an essential formative 'moment' when Shakespeare became a literary dramatist, this book explores six crucial fields: literacy; reading and life-writing; editing Shakespeare's text; marking Shakespeare for the theatre; commonplacing; and passing judgement. Through close examination of rare material, some of which has never been published before, and covering both the marks left by readers in their books and early manuscript extracts of Shakespeare, Mayer demonstrates how the worlds of print and performance overlapped at a time when Shakespeare offered a communal text, the ownership of which was essentially undecided.

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Yes, you can access Shakespeare's Early Readers by Jean-Christophe Mayer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-title page
  3. Title page
  4. Copyright page
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. List of Illustrations
  8. Acknowledgements
  9. Conventions and Abbreviations
  10. Introduction
  11. Chapter 1 Literacy and the Circulation of Plays
  12. Chapter 2 Life in the Archives: Shaping Early Modern Selfhood
  13. Chapter 3 Readers and Editors: A Concordia Discors
  14. Chapter 4 Early Modern Theatrical Annotators and Transcribers
  15. Chapter 5 Commonplacing: The Myth and the Empirical Impulse
  16. Chapter 6 Passing Judgement on Shakespeare
  17. Conclusion
  18. Select Bibliography
  19. Index