An international team of scholars covers every aspect of one of the most famous books in the English language.

In this lavishly illustrated book, one of the most important and influential scholars of the Renaissance stage brings together essays that have changed the way we think about the age of Shakespeare. His subjects are varied and interconnected: the theater as social phenomenon, the development of the stage as an architectural presence and a cultural institution, the changing use of setting and costume, the changing status of the acting profession, the complex relation of theater to the political life of the age. Most of all, The Authentic Shakespeare is about how the modern constructs the past, how the texts that were performed on the Elizabethan stage became the books and editions that are, for our time, Renaissance drama. Many essays in The Authentic Shakespeare have become classics. Collected here for the first time, they essential reading for students of the Renaissance stage and the history of the book.

This is the first dedicated account of the ways in which Shakespeare's texts were read in the two centuries after they were produced. A close examination of rare, often unpublished material offers a reconsideration of the role of readers in the history of Shakespeare's rise to fame.

Shakespeare and Textual Studies gathers contributions from the leading specialists in the fields of manuscript and textual studies, book history, editing, and digital humanities to provide a comprehensive reassessment of how manuscript, print and digital practices have shaped the body of works that we now call 'Shakespeare'. This cutting-edge collection identifies the legacies of previous theories and places special emphasis on the most recent developments in the editing of Shakespeare since the 'turn to materialism' in the late twentieth century. Providing a wide-ranging overview of current approaches and debates, the book explores Shakespeare's poems and plays in light of new evidence, engaging scholars, editors, and book historians in conversations about the recovery of early composition and publication, and the ongoing appropriation and transmission of Shakespeare's works through new technologies.

The Reader in the Book examines the history, archaeology, and sociology of the use of margins and other blank spaces in early modern books to shed light on reading practices, how books were read, and what early modern readerse wanted texts to tell them.

This book argues for editing Shakespeare's plays in a new way, without pretending to distinguish authorial from theatrical versions.

How did the popular drama of Shakespeare's age become literature? Every work that has survived from the theater of past ages has gone through some editorial process to make it available to readers. The book of the play is not the play on the stage; returning it to the stage for modern audiences is not a simple or straightforward process, nor can we simply read backwards from the texts that have come down to us to deduce what Shakespeare's or Jonson's (or Aristophanes's or Sophocles's) audiences saw. Editorial efforts since the first folio of 1623 have attempted to establish a correct, final text of Shakespeare's plays, as the folio promises "the true, original copies." Yet the text in the theater changed constantly, as the actors adapted the plays to take into account their changing audiences. The publisher of the folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays in 1647 acknowledges that his texts include more than the plays on the stage--"all that was acted and all that was not." In performance, the play at the Globe was not the play at court, nor was any play the same when it was revived in a subsequent season. Moreover, performances always involved improvisation on the part of the actors, and the continual response (often vocal and energetic) of the audience. This book is about what happens to plays when they become books.

An interdisciplinary history of standardized measurements. Measurement is all around us—from the circumference of a pizza to the square footage of an apartment, from the length of a newborn baby to the number of miles between neighboring towns. Whether inches or miles, centimeters or kilometers, measures of distance stand at the very foundation of everything we do, so much so that we take them for granted. Yet, this has not always been the case. This book reaches back to medieval Italy to speak of a time when measurements were displayed in the open, showing how such a deceptively simple innovation triggered a chain of cultural transformations whose consequences are visible today on a global scale. Drawing from literary works and frescoes, architectural surveys, and legal compilations, Emanuele Lugli offers a history of material practices widely overlooked by historians. He argues that the public display of measurements in Italy’s newly formed city republics not only laid the foundation for now centuries-old practices of making, but also helped to legitimize local governments and shore up church power, buttressing fantasies of exactitude and certainty that linger to this day. This ambitious, truly interdisciplinary book explains how measurements, rather than being mere descriptors of the real, themselves work as powerful molds of ideas, affecting our notions of what we consider similar, accurate, and truthful.

Early modern private prayer is skilled at narrative and drama. In manuals and sermons on how to pray, collections of model prayers, scholarly treatises about biblical petitions, and popular tracts about life crises prompting calls to God, prayer is valued as a powerful agent of change. Model prayers create stories about people in distinct ranks and jobs, with concrete details about real-life situations. These characters may act in play-lets, or appear in the middle of difficulties, or voice a suite of petitions from all sides of a conflict. Thinking of early modern private prayers as dramatic dialogues rather than lyric monologues raises the question of whether play-going and praying were mutually reinforcing practices. Could dramatists deploying prayer on stage rely on having audience members who were already expert at making up roles for themselves in prayer, and who expected their petitions to have the power to intervene in major events? Does prayer's focus on cause and effect structure the historiography of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II, Henry V, and Henry VIII?

What can the printed texts of plays from Shakespeare's time say about performance? How have printed plays been read and interpreted? This collection of essays considers the evidence of early modern printed plays and their histories of production and reception, examining a wide variety of cases, from early performance to the psychology of Hamlet.