Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing offers a rich account of Shakespeare's artistic development in, against, and beyond collaboration. We see him afresh as a poetic innovator in continual flux, and in continual artistic debt: an author shaped by others in a collaborative network of intellectual influence and dynamic interchange, and, the book argues, one that he helped substantially to create. In considering collaboration as a practice defining almost all of his earliest works, it shows that he was particularly active in its development in the early theatre scene of his nascent career, changing our sense of his development as a creative artist quite radically. Chapters exploring collaboration via theatre history, book history, and attribution debates complement the central three chapters detailing the different phases of Shakespeare's collaborative work, which reorient our shifting sense of what it meant to him, and what he gained from it, at these other key moments of his artistic career. In reconstructing the circumstances and outcomes of his pairings with other dramatists, and scrutinizing more closely their artistic contributions, Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing reconsiders the ways in which they influenced and challenged him to adapt and experiment with his writing in ways that go beyond the features of his solo-authored canon. In undertaking a rigorous appreciation of the structures and poetics of his co-authored works, this book presents them as distinctive works of art that transform our understanding of Shakespeare the poet, dramatist, and enduring cultural icon.

Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing offers a rich account of Shakespeare's artistic development in, against, and beyond collaboration. In undertaking a rigorous appreciation of his co-authored works, it presents them as distinctive works of art that transform our understanding of Shakespeare the poet, dramatist, and enduring cultural icon.

Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing offers a rich account of Shakespeare's artistic development in, against, and beyond collaboration. In undertaking a rigorous appreciation of his co-authored works, it presents them as distinctive works of art that transform our understanding of Shakespeare the poet, dramatist, and enduring cultural icon.

Recent work in Shakespeare studies has brought to the forefront a variety of ways in which the collaborative nature of Shakespearean drama can be investigated: collaborative performance (Shakespeare and his fellow actors); collaborative writing (Shakespeare and his co-authors); collaborative textual production (Shakespeare and his transcribers and printers). What this leaves unaccounted for is the form of collaboration that affects more than any other our modern reading experience of Shakespeare's plays: what we read as Shakespeare now always comes to us in the form of a collaborative enterprise - and is decisively shaped by the nature of the collaboration - between Shakespeare and his modern editors. Contrary to much recent criticism, this book suggests that modern textual mediators have a positive rather than negative role: they are not simply 'pimps of discourse' or cultural tyrants whose oppressive interventions we need to 'unedit' but collaborators who can decisively shape and enable our response to Shakespeare's plays. Erne argues that any reader of Shakespeare, scholar, student, or general reader, approaches Shakespeare through modern editions that have an endlessly complicated and fascinating relationship to what Shakespeare may actually have intended and written, that modern editors determine what that relationship is, and that it is generally a very good thing that they do so.

Shakespeare and Text is built on the research and experience of a leading expert on Shakespeare editing and textual studies. The first edition has proved its value as an indispensable and unique guide to its topic. It takes Shakespeare readers to the very foundation of his work, explaining how his plays first took shape in the theatre where writing was part of a larger collective enterprise. The account examines the early modern printing industry that produced the earliest surviving texts of Shakespeare's plays. It describes the roles of publisher and printer, the controls exerted through the Stationers' Company, and the technology of printing. A chapter is devoted to the book that gathered Shakespeare's plays together for the first time, the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare and Text goes on to survey the major developments in textual studies over the past century. It builds on the recent upsurge of interest in textual theory, and deals with issues such as collaboration, the instability of the text, the relationship between theatre culture and print culture, and the book as a material object. Later chapters examine the current critical edition, explaining the procedures that transform early texts in to a very different cultural artefact, the edition in which we regularly encounter Shakespeare. The new revised edition, which builds on Jowett's research for the New Oxford Shakespeare, engages with scholarship of the past decade, work that has transformed our understanding of textual versions, has opened up the taxonomy of Shakespeare's texts, and has significantly extended the picture of Shakespeare as a co-author. A new chapter describes digital text, digital editing, and their interface with the traditional media.

No issue in Shakespeare studies is more important than determining what he wrote. For over two centuries scholars have discussed the evidence that Shakespeare worked with co-authors on several plays, and have used a variety of methods to differentiate their contributions from his. In thiswide-ranging study, Brian Vickers takes up and extends these discussions, presenting compelling evidence that Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus together with George Peele, Timon of Athens with Thomas Middleton, Pericles with George Wilkins, and Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen with JohnFletcher.In Part One Vickers reviews the standard processes of co-authorship as they can be reconstructed from documents connected with the Elizabethan stage, and shows that every major, and most minor dramatists in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline theatres collaborated in getting plays written andstaged. This is combined with a survey of the types of methodology used since the early nineteenth century to identify co-authorship, and a critical evaluation of some 'stylometric' techniques.Part Two is devoted to detailed analyses of the five collaborative plays, discussing every significant case made for and against Shakespeare's co-authorship. Synthesizing two centuries of discussion, Vickers reveals a solidly based scholarly tradition, building on and extending previous work,identifying the co-authors' contributions in increasing detail. The range and quantity of close verbal analysis brought together in Shakespeare, Co-Author present a compelling case to counter those 'conservators' of Shakespeare who maintain that he is the sole author of his plays.

Developed in partnership with The Royal Shakespeare Company, this is the first edition for over a hundred years of the fascinatingly varied body of plays that has become known as 'The Shakespeare Apocrypha'. As a companion to their award-winning The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, renowned scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, supported by a dynamic team of co-editors, now provide a fascinating insight into ten plays in which Shakespeare may have had a hand. A magisterial essay by Will Sharpe provides a comprehensive account of the Authorship and Attribution of each play. Combining outstanding textual scholarship with elegant writing and design, this unique collection allows us to revisit the question of what is Shakespearean. It is an indispensable book for students, teachers, performers, scholars and lovers of Shakespeare everywhere.