This book explores collaboration, theatre practice, and Shakespeare's canon by analysing the evidence of manuscripts used in early modern playhouses.

Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn’t have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Condell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They’ll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.

Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. This is the first book to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays.

How did Shakespeare write his plays and how were they revised during their passage to the stage? James Purkis answers these questions through a fresh examination of often overlooked evidence provided by manuscripts used in early modern playhouses. Considering collaboration and theatre practice, this book explores manuscript plays by Anthony Munday, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Heywood to establish new accounts of theatrical revision that challenge formerly dominant ideas in Shakespearean textual studies. The volume also reappraises Shakespeare's supposed part in the Sir Thomas More manuscript by analysing the palaeographic, orthographic, and stylistic arguments for Shakespeare's authorship of three of the document's pages. Offering a new account of manuscript writing that avoids conventional narrative forms, Purkis argues for a Shakespeare fully participant in a manuscript's collaborative process, demanding a reconsideration of his dramatic canon. The book will greatly interest researchers and advanced students of Shakespeare studies, textual history, authorship studies and theatre historians.

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

This collection of essays examines medieval and early modern drama in the context of a rich and varied manuscript culture. Focusing on the production, performance, and reception of dramatic documents made in Britain between 1400 and 1700, the essays in this book shed new light on the role of dramatic manuscripts in a range of different social and literary spheres. From extant manuscripts of England's mystery cycles to miscellanies kept by seventeenth-century readers, the documents discussed in this volume reflect a culture of producing and using drama in ways that have been overlooked by the recent critical focus on drama and print by theatre historians and literary critics. By showing the various continuities, exchanges, lendings, and borrowings between medieval and early modern scribal practices, as well as between manuscript and print practices, this volume interrogates accepted critical narratives about the way that drama has been historicized.

Not one of Shakespeare's plays exists in manuscript form until a failing bookseller discovers a long-lost, early version of HAMLET. In an attempt to trace the puzzling manuscript's origins, its new owner finds he can't trust the identity of play's author and soon has doubts about his own. But by then, the race to stage the new HAMLET is on, taking a toll on everyone involved. In the end, the new play leaves audience and actors alike wondering about the unexpected and moving consequences of the play they've just experienced.