The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Authorship

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Authorship draws together leading and emerging scholars of Shakespeare and early modern literature to consider anew how authorship worked in the time in which Shakespeare wrote, and to interrogate the construction of the Shakespeare-as-author figure. Composed of four main sections, it offers fresh analysis of the literary and cultural influences and forces that ’formed’ authors in the period; the ’mechanics’ of early modern authorship; the ’mediation’ of Shakespeare and others’ works in performance, manuscript, and print; and the critical and popular reimagining across times of Shakespeare as an author figure.

Diving into modern debates about early modern authorship, authority, and identity politics, contributors supply rich new accounts of the wider scene of professional authorship in early modern England, of how Shakespeare’s writings contributed to it, and of what made him distinctive within it. Looking beyond Shakespeare, the Handbook seeks to provide a vital testing ground for new research into early modern literature and culture more broadly.

Rory Loughnane, Reader in Early Modern Studies, University of Kent, Will Sharpe, Teaching Fellow in Shakespeare, University of Birmingham

Rory Loughnane is Reader in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. He is the author or editor of many books, including, most recently, Editing Archipelagic Shakespeare (with Willy Maley), and has edited more than ten of Shakespeare’s plays for the New Oxford Shakespeare. He is a General Editor of The Revels Plays series and the CADRE (Co-Authored Drama in Renaissance England) database, and a Series Editor of Routledge’s Studies in Early Modern Authorship and Cambridge’s Shakespeare and Text.

Will Sharpe is a full-time Teaching Fellow in Shakespeare at the University of Birmingham and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Universities of Warwick and Leeds. He contributed a monograph-length study on ’Authorship and Attribution’ to the RSC volume William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (2013), and edited All Is True: Or, King Henry VIII for The New Oxford Shakespeare (2016). He is a revising editor of the updated Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2015) and is editing Henry VI for the Arden Shakespeare Series. He is also one of the General Editors of Digital Renaissance Editions.