Against Attribution

“If you find a Christ figure in Shakespeare you fail this course.” “You’re like a butterfly; you touch on everything and alight on nothing.” “The Magi are the intellectuals in the story: they come late, compromised, bearing useless gifts.” Not what I, a first-year student at Fordham University, expected to hear from the Jesuit before me, the imposing Father Tim Healy…

Sightings of my bin-liner began on the first day of spring break. My cell phone buzzed with unusual frequency as incoming texts arrived from friends and colleagues, all sent from the security check-point in the Reno-Tahoe International Airport, and all accompanied by iPhone photos of the plastic bins that go through the x-ray scanners…

In its allusions to past, present, and even futuristic theater, the Thomas Jolly Richard III seemed a perfect beginning to the year of Shakespeare commemoration in France, focused as it is on his afterlife. I was surprised that most of the people I talked to in Paris interpreted this production simply as something intended to appeal to a young audience, and perhaps, therefore, selling out…

For many, including the friend who invited me to join her at the theater, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream should be staged in an Arthur Rackham world, replete with nineteenth-century fairies clothed in gossamer robes. Although my friend was deeply disappointed that Peter Brook’s famous 1970 production did not conform to her…

Shakespeare Quarterly has some exciting news to share. On January 1, 2019, Oxford University Press (OUP) will become the journal’s new publisher.

Both Ewan Fernie and Paul Kottman have recently published books that address the expansive topics of Shakespeare and freedom. In addition to each author reviewing the other’s book in our Fall 2017 issue, Fernie and Kottman answered a set of our questions to further explore the relationship between Shakespeare and freedom.

When his career appeared to have bottomed out in 2009, comedian Marc Maron turned in desperation to the medium of podcasting and created WTF with Marc Maron, a show that has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon with over six million downloads per month…

Dr. Barbara Mowat, our friend and colleague, coeditor of the Folger Shakespeare Library editions, consulting editor at Shakespeare Quarterly, former director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, former editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and former chair of the Folger Institute, passed away on November 24, 2017. She was 83….

One springboard for my recent book, The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare (which Ken Gross generously reviews in Shakespeare Quarterly 68.1), was what Randall McLeod has called a “Keatspearian” moment. On January 23^rd, 1818, John Keats wrote to Benjamin Bailey that he “sat down to read King Lear . . . and felt the greatness of the thing up to the writing of a Sonnet preparatory thereto.”…

I was at a matinee performance of Hamlet at the Stratford Festival in May of 2016, looking down at the action from way up in the balcony, surrounded by Canadian High School students. Two young women in front of me spent the afternoon making out. But I’d heard the story was good, and I wanted to see how things would turn out…

This essay argues that the Christianized popular astrology of the early modern English printed almanac provided Shakespeare a powerful intellectual construct through which to explore the relationship between nature, man, and the divine in King Lear. Though Edmund’s depiction of astrology as superstitious and deterministic has often been critically accepted, in fact…

Attribution scholarship goes back to the beginning of Shakespeare studies, but its presence has increased dramatically in recent work. When, in 2002, Brian Vickers began Shakespeare, Co-Author with the pronouncement that “No issue in Shakespeare studies is more important than determining what he wrote,” some readers might have thought he was overstating his case…