OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Shakespeare and Text is an indispensable and unique guide to its topic. It takes Shakespeare readers to the very foundation of his work, explaining how his plays first took shape in the theatre where writing was part of a larger collective enterprise. As the resulting manuscripts are virtually all lost, the account then turns to the early modern printing industry that produced the earliest surviving texts of Shakespeare's plays. It describes the roles of publisher and printer, the controls exerted through the Stationers' Company, and the technology of printing. A chapter is devoted to the book that gathered Shakespeare's plays together for the first time, the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare and Text goes on to survey the major developments in textual studies over the past century. It builds on the recent upsurge of interest in textual theory, and deals with issues such as collaboration, the instability of the text, the relationship between theatre culture and print culture, and the book as a material object. Later chapters examine the current critical edition, explaining the procedures that transform early texts in to a very different cultural artefact, the edition in which we regularly encounter Shakespeare.

About the Author
John Jowett is Reader in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. He is a member of the editorial boards of Arden Early Modern Drama, the Malone Society, and the Oxford Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, and is an editor of the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works. He has edited Richard III and Timon of Athens for the Oxford Shakespeare series, and has published widely on textual culture and textual theory. Current projects include an edition of Sir Thomas More for the Arden Shakespeare.

Reviews
...a lucid, insightful, and most welcome addition to the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series...excellent, accomplished, and usefully controversial book by one of the most consistently brilliant editors of Shakespeare in our time. * Sonia Massai, The Review of English Studies *
Useful to undergraduates who are keen to extend and complicate their sense of the Shakespeare text. * Times Higher Education Supplement *
an informative and authoritative introductory guide to the textual complexities surrounding Shakespeare's dramatic works which, while broad in range, offers an impressively detailed analysis of his subject. * Elizabeth Ford, Notes and Queries *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199217069
Author John Jowett
Format Paperback
Page Count 238
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Dimensions(mm) 203mm * 135mm * 14mm