Documents of Shakespearean Performance:
Stage, Page, and Manuscript in Early Modern England

“Gathering Shakespeare: Consolidating the Apocrypha”
Dr. Peter Kirwan (University of Nottingham)

14 January 2013
5:30 – 7:30 p.m.
Room 234
Institute of English Studies
Senate House
London

From the middle of the seventeenth century, a disparate group of early modern plays began to appear together in collections with increasingly regularity, their gathering justified only by the plays’ dubious associations with the name of Shakespeare. As a result, much modern scholarship continues to treat the plays of the ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’ as a relatively homogeneous group, subject to the same narratives of piracy, forgery, accident or authorship despite their heterogeneous origins. This paper separates out the genuinely unifying features of the early disputed plays from their specific, unique aspects, and in doing so challenges the presumptions of standardised practices that govern Apocrypha-formation narratives. Engaging with the form and purpose of early collections of disputed plays, the paper suggests new ways for reading the Apocrypha within print culture.

Documents of Shakespearean Performance: Stage, Page, and Manuscript in Early Modern England (series)
Since the publication of Tiffany Stern’s ground-breaking Shakespeare in Parts (2007) and Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (2009), the question of how Shakespeare’s plays were transmitted from manuscript to print has re-emerged as central to discussions of Shakespeare and the printed book. These seminars will feature leading and emerging scholars in Shakespeare studies and focus attention on the impact that the “new” theatre history has had on how we now understand the origins and histories of early printed play texts.

Admission is free and all are warmly invited to attend
http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/seminars/316/