Marlowe and Shakespeare

Robert Sawyer is Professor of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University. Author of Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare, he is also co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation, and Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare. A section of Chapter 7 was awarded a Calvin Hoffman Prize in 2013.

Chapter 1 Introduction: "The Rivals of My Watch".- Chapter 2: "Locating the Earliest 'Critics'".- Chapter 3: The Seventeenth Century: "Collaboration, Co-Authorship and the Death of the Author(s)".- Chapter 4: The Long Eighteenth Century: "Limbs Torn Asunder, Borrowing the Bones, Identifying the Corpus".- Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century: "The Space(s) of the Critical Rivalry in London".- Chapter 6: The Twentieth Century: "Formalization, Polarization, and Fictionalization".- Chapter 7: The Twenty-First Century: "Trauma, Drama, and Conspiracy".-

“Robert Sawyer’s Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry takes the complex meaning of the term ‘rival’ in the early modern period as something between ‘competitor’ and ‘partner’ or even ‘collaborator’ to survey the way the two playwrights have been viewed in relation to one another … . The book will be very valuable to graduate students, in particular, who wish to learn the critical history of their field and to any scholar interested in the cultural history of literary criticism.” (Henry S. Turner, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 58 (02), 2018)