Argues that the Exclusion Crisis of 1678-82 should be considered the watershed moment in Shakespeare's authorial afterlife.

A collection of essays exploring John Milton's rise to popularity and his status as a canonical author. The volume considers Milton's 'authorial persona' in the context of his relationships with his contemporary writers, stationers, and readers.

This wide-ranging collection reflects on the various motivations that caused the Folio to come into being in 1623, 7 years after Shakespeare's death, and on how the now iconic book has been continually reimagined after its initial publication to the present day. In honour of its original publication, Shakespeare's First Folio 1623-2023: Text and Afterlives brings together a remarkable set of ground-breaking essays by an international group of scholars. From the beginning, the publication that came to be called the 'First Folio' was defined by the tension between the book as text and the book as a material object. In this volume, the individual contributions move between these two meaningsin that they consider precursors to the First Folio in the form of reader-assembled volumes; the poetic identity of Shakespeare; and how misfortunes and successes in the early modern printing house shaped Shakespeare's text. Chapters examine the unpredictable and often surprising subsequent histories of the book that has even been given a sacred status and become the basis of Shakespeare's unique position in the history of literature. They consider: the afterlife of the text, in relation to the reception of Shakespeare's First Folio in Spain; its presence in and influence on James Joyce's Ulysses; the role that Meisei University of Japan's Shakespeare Collection has played in the education and research of the institution; and what the collection of 82 copies at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, tells us about the ongoing role of these books within the study of Shakespeare and the early modern period.

This bold and compelling revisionist history tells the remarkable story of the forgotten lives and labours of Shakespeare's women editors.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 75 is 'Othello'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/collections/shakespeare-survey This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic and save and bookmark their results.

This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.

In 1623 a team of stationers published what has become the most famous volume in English literary history: William Shakespeare's First Folio. Who were these publishers and how might their stories be bound up with those found within the book they created? Ben Higgins offers a radical new account of the First Folio by focusing on these four publishing businesses that made the volume. By moving between close scrutiny of the Folio publishers and a wider view of their significance within the early modern book trade, Higgins uses Shakespeare's stationers to explore the 'literariness' of the Folio; to ask how stationers have shaped textual authority; to argue for the interpretive potential of the 'minor' Shakespearean bookseller; and to examine the topography of Shakespearean publication. Drawing on a host of fresh primary evidence from a wide range of sources, including court records, manuscript letters, bookseller's bills, and the literature itself, Shakespeare's Syndicate illuminates our understanding of how this landmark volume was made and what it has meant to scholars since. Moreover, it models exciting new ways of working with stationers and of reading the event of early modern publication itself. This innovative study demonstrates that despite four hundred years of history, the volume at the centre of Shakespeare's canon continues to generate new stories.

Eugen Fink's deep engagement with the phenomenon of play saw him transcend his two towering mentors, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, to become a crucial figure in early 20th-century phenomenology. The Phenomenology of Play draws on Fink's concept of play to build a picture of his philosophy, from its foundations to its applications. The book's three sections focus on the building blocks of Fink's phenomenology of play, how his work maps onto the broader history of philosophy, and finally how his writing can be applied to contexts from education and care to politics and religion. This rich account of Fink's contribution to theories of play demonstrates its immense value and fundamental importance to human existence. Relating Fink's work to that of his contemporaries and predecessors like Husserl, Heidegger, Schiller, Gadamer, Nietzsche and Sartre shows the range and importance of his ideas to modern European thought. The Phenomenology of Play also features newly translated material including notes from conversations between Fink and Heidegger, and Fink's own essay 'Mask and Cothurnus' on ancient theatre – which shed new light on his philosophical enquiries.

From early medieval times to the present, this diverse collection of thirty-one essays sets literary texts in their historical contexts.