How To Do Things With Shakespeare (eBook)

Laurie Maguire is a Fellow of Magdalen College and Reader in English at Oxford University. Her books include Shakespearean Suspect Texts (1996), Studying Shakespeare (2004), Where There's a Will There's a Way (2006), and Shakespeare's Names (2007). Maguire has published widely on Renaissance drama, textual problems, performance, and women's studies.

Notes on Contributors.

Introduction: Laurie E. Maguire (Magdalen College, University of
Oxford).

Part I How To Do Things with Sources.

1. French Connections: The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Montaigne and
Shakespeare: Richard Scholar (Oriel College, Oxford).

2. Romancing the Greeks: Cymbeline's Genres and Models:
Tanya Pollard (Brooklyn College, City University of New York).

3. How the Renaissance (Mis)Used Sources: The Art of
Misquotation: Julie Maxwell (Lucy Cavendish College,
Cambridge).

Part II How To Do Things with History.

4. Henry VIII, or All is True: Shakespeare's
"Favorite" Play: Chris R. Kyle (Syracuse
University).

5. Catholicism and Conversion in Love's Labour's
Lost: Gillian Woods (Wadham College, Oxford).

Part III How To Do Things with Texts.

6. Watching as Reading: The Audience and Written Text in
Shakespeare's Playhouse: Tiffany Stern (University College,
Oxford).

7. What Do Editors Do and Why Does It Matter?: Anthony B. Dawson
(University of British Columbia).

Part IV How To Do Things with Animals.

8. "The dog is himself": Humans, Animals, and
Self-Control in The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Erica Fudge.

(Middlesex University).

9. Sheepishness in The Winter's Tale: Paul Yachnin (McGill
University).

Part V How To Do Things with Posterity.

10. Time and the Nature of Sequence in Shakespeare's
Sonnets: "In sequent toil all forwards do contend":
Georgia Brown (independent scholar).

11. Canons and Cultures: Is Shakespeare Universal? : A. E. B.
Coldiron (Florida State University).

12. "Freezing the Snowman": (How) Can We Do
Performance Criticism?: Emma Smith (Hertford College, Oxford).

Index

"The contributors to Laurie Maguire's book show by doing.... They are unusually present in what they write, speaking directly to their presumed student readers. This is in some ways the sort of writing we associate with school textbooks, and it is all the better for that." (Times Literary Supplement, October 2008)

"Doing things with literature: scholarly articles are not the only
way to go. Aristotle uses a lecture, Horace a letter, Sidney a mock
oration. Laurie Maguire and the contributors to this book engage in
a genial conversation that invites students in. Like all good
conversations, this one admits first-person candor, keeps things
lively by changing the subject five times, welcomes disagreements,
and waits for what the reader-listener is going to do in
response."

-Bruce Smith, University of Southern California, Los
Angeles

"This collection of essays on How To Do Things with
Shakespeare, edited by Laurie Maguire, takes a wonderfully
fresh and unusual approach to its subject. The essays about
individual works center in some cases on texts too often neglected:
Cymbeline, Henry VIII, Love's Labour's Lost,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona,and The Winter's Tale,
along with the more familiar A Midsummer Night's Dream,
The Merchant of Venice, and the Sonnets. The topics are
equally arresting in their freshness of approach: how to do things
with sources, history, texts, animals, posterity. Animals! This is
Maguire's splendid approach to the question she has put to herself,
what the next stage in 'body' criticism might be. To provide an
answer, she calls on Erica Fudge to ask such questions as, Can
animals feel shame? Can they lose bladder control? as in the case
of Lance's fabulous dog in The Two Gentlemen. Paul Yachnin
addresses such puzzles by thinking about Renaissance ideas of sheep
and what they can tell us about personhood. The question, How to do
things with texts? is perhaps less off-beat, but it here produces
no less innovative answers from Tiffany Stern: not the usual
explanation of how quartos differ from folios and all that, but
instead pioneering textual analysis of how the language of books is
used to describe staging, and, conversely, how the language of the
stage can be used to describe reading. Anthony Dawson asks in what
way our thinking about the nature of texts has changed in recent
years and how that change affects the actual process of editing.
Source study is rescued from the low estate into which it has
fallen recently by three new and flexible ways of thinking about
influence. Similar pairings of approaches offer delight and
revelation about every topic in this engaging and highly readable
book. The studies are admirably cross-disciplinary and
cross-cultural. This is a companion to Shakespeare with a
difference. Vive la différance!"

-David Bevington, University of Chicago