Who were Shakespeare's first readers and what did they think of his works? Offering the first dedicated account of the ways in which Shakespeare's texts were read in the centuries during which they were originally produced, Jean-Christophe Mayer reconsiders the role of readers in the history of Shakespeare's rise to fame and in the history of canon formation. Addressing an essential formative 'moment' when Shakespeare became a literary dramatist, this book explores six crucial fields: literacy; reading and life-writing; editing Shakespeare's text; marking Shakespeare for the theatre; commonplacing; and passing judgement. Through close examination of rare material, some of which has never been published before, and covering both the marks left by readers in their books and early manuscript extracts of Shakespeare, Mayer demonstrates how the worlds of print and performance overlapped at a time when Shakespeare offered a communal text, the ownership of which was essentially undecided.
Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith offers a complete review of current scholarship on Shakespeare and religion and a fresh perspective on the vexed question of the dramatist's religious orientation. It throws new light on the issue by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context recently uncovered by modern historians and theatre scholars. The book argues in particular that faith was more of a quest than a quiet certainty for the playwright.
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