First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1590-1790

First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1590-1790
Author: Faith D. Acker
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2020-09-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000190811

For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers’ responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets’ first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers’ interests in Shakespeare’s classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
Author: Brian Vickers
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 585
Release: 2024-11-01
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1040282830

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

Shakespeare Survey

Shakespeare Survey
Author: Allardyce Nicoll
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2002-11-28
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521523523

The first fifty volumes of this yearbook of Shakespeare studies are being reissued in paperback.

Studies in Shakespeare, Bibliography, and Theatre

Studies in Shakespeare, Bibliography, and Theatre
Author: James G. McManaway
Publisher: Associated University Presses
Total Pages: 442
Release: 1990
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780918016485

This volume is designed to pay homage to the scholarship of James G. McManaway, and at the same time to make the best of that scholarship available to a wider audience. Twenty-one essays testify to the distinguished career of this editor, scholar, and teacher. Illustrated.

Shakespeare, Co-author

Shakespeare, Co-author
Author: Brian Vickers
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2004
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780199269167

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.