Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolaters, who insist on Shakespeare's timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians who view modern claims of Shakespeare's uniqueness as a distortion of his real professional life. In "Shakespeare Only", Knapp draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare's authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries actually understood it. He argues that Shakespeare tried to adapt his own singular talent and ambition to the collaborative enterprise of drama by imagining himself as uniquely embodying the diverse, fractious energies of the popular theater. Rewriting our current histories of authorship as well as Renaissance drama, "Shakespeare Only" recaptures a sense of the creative force that mass entertainment exerted on Shakespeare and that Shakespeare exerted on mass entertainment.

About the Author
Jeffrey Knapp is Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England.

Reviews
"Overturns the new historicist position that authorial production by a singular individual is a mid-18th-century notion.... Essential." (Choice)"



Book Information
ISBN 9780226445724
Author Jeffrey Knapp
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 397g
Dimensions(mm) 22mm * 14mm * 2mm