The Texts of Shakespeare - by Stephen Orgel (Hardcover)

About the Book

Renowned Shakespearean Stephen Orgel reveals how Shakespeare's scripts were transformed from popular drama into the greatest monument of English literature, a triumph of both editorial intervention and marketing.

Book Synopsis

How did plays from the popular theatre, written by an author better known as a poet, become the greatest literary monument in English? Renowned Shakespearean Stephen Orgel reveals how the transformation of Shakespeare's scripts was a triumph of both editorial intervention and marketing.

By no means the most admired playwright of his time, Shakespeare's most popular work during his lifetime and for decades afterwards was the long poem Venus and Adonis, first published in 1593. It wasn't until 1598 that Shakespeare's name appeared on the title page of a book, so how did Shakespeare's plays become the benchmark of English Renaissance drama? By examining the process of transformation from performance script to published book Orgel provides an accessible story of the making of Shakespeare's reputation in print and of how the publication of his plays in a grand folio in 1623 made a radical claim for his plays as literature, in effect declaring his plays modern classics.

With chapters on the poems, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Pericles and Macbeth, this book offers a number of case studies illustrating a variety of problems of dealing with the quartos, as well as how different a 'good' text of a play was for Shakespeare's readers and for modern scholars. It closes with an account of the production of the first folio, which, with the precedent of the Ben Jonson folio of 1616, effectively conferred classic status on this popular contemporary dramatist.

Review Quotes

Here, from one of the greatest scholars of our time, is a wonderful introduction for anyone and everyone who wants to begin to understand how Shakespeare's plays became books and how that changes how we view them, whether studying them in class, working on the plays in the theatre or just being curious.
Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA

I have always thought that Stephen Orgel is the greatest Shakespeare scholar since Malone. The Texts of Shakespearemakes me think I have given Malone too much credit. Orgel has thought longer, harder and better than any scholar about how we should think about the texts of Shakespeare, clarifying what they are, stripping away the mystifications and sentimentality that have impeded our understanding of them, and reminding us in the process of precisely why they remain so precious.
David Kastan, Yale University, USA

About the Author

Stephen Orgel is J. E. Reynolds Professor in Humanities, Emeritus, in the Department of English at Stanford University, USA. He is the author and editor of over 20 books and innumerable articles on Shakespeare and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including The Globe In Print (2024) and Impersonations (1996).