Abstract
The Introduction discusses the concept of authority from Shakespeare’s time to our own, considers examples of Shakespeare’s own explorations of authority, and provides a concise history of the ways in which Shakespeare has been constructed as cultural authority in different historical periods. It summarizes the chapters contained in the book, and argues that the book illuminates not only how Shakespeare became the archetypal figure of English cultural authority, but, perhaps more interestingly, why.
Works Cited
Austen, J. (2005 [1814]). Mansfield Park. (Ed.) John Wiltshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baldwin, T. W. (1944). William Shakspeare’s small Latine and lesse Greeke. Vol. 2. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Banham, M., Gibbs, J., & Osofisan, F. (Eds.). (2013). African theatre: Shakespeare in and out of Africa. Martlesham, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer.
Bate, J. (1989). Shakespearean constitutions: Politics, theatre, criticism, 1730–1830. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bate, J. (1993). Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Boaden, J. (1972 [1796]). A letter to George Steevens, Esq. containing a critical examination of the papers of Shakespeare. New York: AMS Press.
Burrow, C. (2004). Shakespeare and humanistic culture. In C. Martindale & A. B. Taylor (Eds.), Shakespeare and the classics (pp. 9–27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burrow, C. (2013). Shakespeare and classical antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clare, J. (1999 [1990]). Art made tongue-tied by authority: Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic censorship. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Cockeram, H. (1623). The English dictionarie: Or, an interpreter of hard English Words. London: Eliot’s Court Press for E. Weaver.
Da Cunha Resende, A. (Ed.). (2002). Foreign accents: Brazilian appropriations of Shakespeare. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
De Grazia, M. (1991). Shakespeare verbatim: The reproduction of authenticity and the 1790 apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dent, R. W. (1981). Shakespeare’s proverbial language: An index. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.
Dobson, M. (1992). The making of the national poet: Shakespeare, adaptation, and authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Donaldson, I. (2001). Looking sideways: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the myths of envy. Ben Jonson Journal, 8, 1–22.
Dryden, J. (1918 [1668]). An essay of dramatic poesy. (Ed.) Thomas Arnold. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Eliot, T. S. (1932). Selected essays 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Elyot, T. (1542). Bibliotheca Eliotæ. Eliots Librarie. London: T. Berthelet.
Engler, B. (2011). Shakespeare, sculpture and the material arts. In M. Thornton Burnett, A. Streete, and R. Wray (Eds.), The Edinburgh companion to Shakespeare and the arts (pp. 435–444). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Florio, J. (1598). A Worlde of Wordes. Or Most copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English. London: A. Hatfield for E. Blount.
Galey, A. (2014). The Shakespearean archive: Experiments in new media from the renaissance to postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garber, M. (2008). Profiling Shakespeare. New York: Routledge.
Gillespie, S. (2001). Shakespeare’s books: A dictionary of Shakespeare’s sources. London: Athlone Press.
Greenblatt, S. (2010). Shakespeare’s freedom. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Hawkes, T. (1986). That Shakespeherian rag: Essays on a critical process. London: Methuen.
Haynes, K. (2003). English literature and ancient languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hearn, K. (2014). Images of Ben Jonson. http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/k/essays/jonsons_images_essay/1.
Holderness, G. (1988a). All this. In G. Holderness (Ed.), The Shakespeare myth (pp. xi–xvi). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Holderness, G. (1988b). Bardolatry: Or, the cultural materialist’s guide to Stratford-upon-Avon. In G. Holderness (Ed.), The Shakespeare myth (pp. 2–15). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hopkins, D. (2004). “The English Homer”: Shakespeare, Longinus, and English “Neo-classicism”. In C. Martindale & A. B. Taylor (Eds.), Shakespeare and the classics (pp. 261–276). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ivic, C. (2017). Shakespeare and national identity. London: Bloomsbury.
Jarvis, S. (1995). Scholars and gentlemen: Shakespearean textual criticism and representations of scholarly labour, 1725–1765. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Johnson, S. (1755). A dictionary of the English language: In which the words are deduced from their originals, illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers. To which are prefixed a history of the language and an English grammar. London: W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, T. and L. Longman, C. Hitch, and L. Hawes.
Jonson, B. (1616). The workes of Beniamin Ionson. London: W. Stansby for R. Meighen.
Jonson, B. (2012). The Cambridge edition of the works of Ben Jonson. (Eds.) D. Bevington, M. Butler, and I. Donaldson. Vol. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klett, E. (2009). Cross-gender Shakespeare and national identity: Wearing the codpiece. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lanier, D. M. (2015). Commemorating Shakespeare in America, 1864. In C. Calvo & C. Kahn (Eds.), Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and cultural memory (pp. 140–160). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levith, M. J. (2004). Shakespeare in China. London and New York: Continuum.
Lipking, L. (1981). The life of the poet: Beginning and ending poetic careers. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Marlowe, C. (1969). The Jew of Malta. In J. B. Steane (Ed.), The complete plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marshall, G. (Ed.). (2012). Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martindale, C., & Martindale, M. (1990). Shakespeare and the uses of antiquity: An introductory essay. London and New York: Routledge.
Martindale, C., & Taylor, A. B. (Eds.). (2004). Shakespeare and the classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miola, R. S. (2000). Shakespeare’s reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murphy, A. (2010). Shakespeare for the people: Working-class readers 1800–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parker, G. F. (1988). Foul disproportion: Rymer on Othello. Cambridge Quarterly, 17, 17–27.
Parker, G. F. (1989). Johnson’s Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ritchie, F., & Sabor, P. (Eds.). (2012). Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, J. (2001). The intellectual life of the British working classes. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Rumbold, K. (2012). Shakespeare and the Stratford Jubilee. In F. Ritchie & P. Sabor (Eds.), Shakespeare and the eighteenth century (pp. 254–276). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rumbold, K. (2016). Shakespeare and the eighteenth-century novel: Cultures of quotation from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rymer, T. (1693). A short view of tragedy; it’s original, excellency, and corruption. With some reflections on Shakespeare and other practitioners for the stage. London: Richard Baldwin.
Ryuta, M., Carruthers, I., & Gillies, J. (Eds.). (2001). Performing Shakespeare in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Seary, P. (1990). Lewis Theobald and the editing of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Shakespeare, W. (1623). Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies published according to the true originall copies. (Eds.) J. Heminges and H. Condell. London: I. Jaggard and E. Blount.
Shakespeare, W. (1640). Poems. London: T. Cotes for J. Benson.
Shakespeare, W. (1986). Shakespeare’s sonnets and A lover’s complaint. (Ed.) J. Kerrigan. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Shakespeare, W. (2002). The complete sonnets and poems. The Oxford Shakespeare. (Ed.) C. Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
St. Clair, W. (2004). The reading nation in the romantic period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, G. (1989). Reinventing Shakespeare: A cultural history, from the restoration to the present. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
The Troublesome Raigne of Iohn King of England, with the discouerie of King Richard Cordelions Base sonne (vulgarly named, The Bastard Fawconbridge): also the death of King Iohn at Swinstead Abbey. (1591). London: [T. Orwin] for S. Clarke.
Tudeau-Clayton, M. (1998). Jonson, Shakespeare, and early modern Virgil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tudeau-Clayton, M., & Maley, W. (2010). This England, that Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the bard. London: Routledge.
Vickers, B. (1995 [1974]). William Shakespeare, the critical heritage. Vol. 2 1693–1733. London and New York: Routledge.
Weimann, R. (1995). Representation and performance: The uses of authority in Shakespeare’s theatre. In I. Kamps (Ed.), Materialist Shakespeare: A history (pp. 198–217). London: Verso.
Weimann, R. (1996). Authority and representation in early modern discourse. (Ed.) D. Hillman. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wilson, R. (1993). Will power: Essays on Shakespearean authority. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Halsey, K., Vine, A. (2018). ‘Dressed in a Little Brief Authority’: Authority Before, During, and After Shakespeare’s Plays. In: Halsey, K., Vine, A. (eds) Shakespeare and Authority. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57853-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57853-2_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57852-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57853-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)