William Shakespeare is perhaps the most frequently quoted author of the English-speaking world. His plays, in turn, "quote" a wide variety of sources, from books and ballads to persons and events. In this dynamic study of Shakespeare's plays, Douglas Bruster demonstrates that such borrowing can illuminate the world in which Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights lived and worked, while also shedding light on later cultures that quote his plays.

In contrast to the New Historicism's sometimes arbitrary linkage of literary works with elements drawn from the surrounding culture, Quoting Shakespeare focuses on the resources that writers used in making their works. Bruster shows how this borrowing can give us valuable insight into the cultural, historical, and political positions of writers and their works. Because Shakespeare's plays have often been quoted by other writers, this study also examines what subsequent uses of Shakespeare's plays reveal about the writers and cultures that use them. In this way, Quoting Shakespeare insists that literary production and reception are both integral to a historical approach to literature.

Illuminates the world in which Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights lived and worked

About the Author
Douglas Bruster is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare.

Reviews
"Bruster presents a timely and original analysis. Quoting Shakespeare makes an important and badly needed contribution to the field of early modern studies. His approach to the way we write cultural history represents a salutary alternative to the critique of domination that characterises much recent work."--Michael D. Bristol, author of Big-Time Shakespeare. "Bruster vividly demonstrates how Shakespeare, more inventively than other authors, borrows and transforms. Bruster's approach illuminates some ways in which reading a text inter-textually illuminates the author's relation to cultural, historical, and political contexts. The book helps us to understand the intensively composite nature of Shakespearean and other early modern texts, both dramatic and non-dramatic. In doing so, it also provides a methodological coherence by drawing on feminist, cultural materialist, and 'new' historicist criticism."--David Bevington, editor of The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque



Book Information
ISBN 9780803213036
Author Douglas Bruster
Format Hardback
Page Count 268
Imprint University of Nebraska Press
Publisher University of Nebraska Press
Weight(grams) 567g