Making Shakespeare: From the Renaissance to the Twenty-First Century

(5 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The oldest printed copy of a Shakespeare play that still survives is an edition of Titus Andronicus published in 1594. A striking feature of the text is that nowhere in the text is Shakespeare's name mentioned. The author of the play is, in effect, Anonymous. In our own time, by contrast, Shakespeare probably has the highest level of recognition of any writer who has ever lived. There are theatre companies dedicated to performing his works; theatres have been constructed to match what is thought to be the likely structural layout of Shakespeare's own theatres, so that we can see the plays performed in something approximating their original stage milieu; there is a library (the Folger, in Washington DC) which aims to assemble as much Shakespeare-related material in a single location as possible; a postgraduate institution (the Shakespeare Institute, in Stratford-on-Avon) has been set up, dedicated to the academic study of his work. The aim of this module is, in essence, to tell the story of how we get from Anonymous Shakespeare to Shakespeare the World's Most Famous Writer. We will examine the cultural and social contexts through which Shakespeare's reputation and popularity were forged, beginning with the publishing and textual context of his own period. Along the way, we will look at the impact of cheap printing on theatrical performance; cultures of collecting Shakespeare editions; the emergence of the Shakespeare tourist industry; the effect of the expansion of literacy in the nineteenth century in creating a wider readership for Shakespeare; the impact of contemporary technologies on the way in which the Shakespeare text is disseminated and received in our own time.