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.
Contributors draw on methods from book history, bibliography, editorial theory, library science, the digital humanities, theater studies, and literary criticism, and the collection as a whole proposes that our understanding of Shakespeare—and early modern drama more broadly—changes radically when 'either/or' approaches to the Shakespearean text are reconfigured. The chapters in Shakespeare / Text make strong cases for challenging received wisdom and offer new, portable methods of treating 'the text', in its myriad instantiations, that (I hope) will be useful to scholars, editors, theater practitioners, teachers, and librarians.
The price point for Shakespeare / Text (still in hardback) remains high, but the collection will be reissued in affordable paperback in early 2023. In the meantime, you (or your institutional library) can purchase a copy of the hardback on Bloomsbury’s website (or wherever you buy books online).