Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama
Canon, Collaboration and Text

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

James Purkis (Author)

9781107552104, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 September 2018

324 pages, 14 b/w illus.
23 x 15.3 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

'This is a temperate, scrupulous and exhaustive study, which deserves a longer review. … [Purkis's] meticulously detailed analyses, which represent a significant advance in our understanding of dramatic manuscripts generally, and Shakespeare's professional activities in particular.' Paul Dean, English Studies

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.

Introduction
Part I. Text, Collaboration, Evidence: 1. The theatrical text and the new bibliography: John a Kent and John a Cumber
2. 'Foul papers', 'prompt books', and textual sufficiency: The Captives
3. Attribution, collaboration, and The Second Maiden's Tragedy
Part II. Shakespearean Coincidences: 4. Curious coincidences: the collaborations of Sir Thomas More
5. Singularly Shakespearean: attributing the Hand-D addition of More
6. Canon, apocrypha, and Sir Thomas More
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Theatre: technical & background skills [ANH]