CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Cambridge Elements in Shakespeare and Text

June 16, 2022 Claire M. L. Bourne

The spines of books of varying heights, colors, and ages. All the books relate to Shakespeare. — Image courtesy of Aaron T. Pratt, Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin).

Along with my co-editor Rory Loughnane (University of Kent), I am delighted to invite proposals for Cambridge Elements in Shakespeare and Text, a brand new series of short books about the textual histories, present, and futures of the Shakespearean text.

We are interested in work that thinks in new ways about textual matters around Shakespeare and stretches the boundaries of what might be considered “a Shakespearean text.” We especially welcome proposals from early career scholars and those with something to say about textual matters around Shakespeare from the vantage of fields outside book history.

SHAKESPEARE / TEXT: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing, & Performance

June 16, 2022 Claire M. L. Bourne

The image of a book cover with a black background and abstract flourescent shapes. The text reads: "The Arden Shakespeare / Arde Shakespeare Intersections / Shakespeare Slash Text / contemporary readings in textual studies, editing and performance"

One of the great highlights of the difficult last few years was editing Shakespeare / Text, a collection of twenty agenda-setting essays about the study and use of the Shakespearean text over time and in our time. The collection was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury under The Arden Shakespeare imprint. It is part of a new series called Arden Shakespeare Intersections, general edited by Sonia Massai, Farah Karim-Cooper, Lucy Munro, and Gordon McMullan.

Written by 21 leading experts on textual matters, each chapter challenges a single entrenched binary—such as book/theater, source/adaptation, text/paratext, canon/apocrypha, sense/nonsense, extant/ephemeral, material/digital and original/copy—that has come to both define and limit the way we read, analyze, teach, perform, and edit Shakespeare today.

OUT NOW! Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England

June 16, 2022 Claire M. L. Bourne

My first monograph Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

It is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography and tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived as the disposition of type on the page, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality—from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage—intelligible on the page.

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