Shakespeare's Originality

by John Kerrigan

Overview

How original was Shakespeare and how was Shakespeare original? This lucid, innovative book sets about answering these questions by putting them in historical context and investigating how the dramatist worked with his sources: plays, poems, chronicles and prose romances. Shakespeare's Originality unlocks its topic with rewarding precision and flair, showing through a series of case studies that range across the output-from the mature comedies to the great tragedies, from Richard III to The Tempest—what can be learned about the artistry of the plays by thinking about these sources (including newly identified ones) after several decades of neglect. Discussion is enriched by such matters as Elizabethan ruffs and feathers, actors' footwork, chronicle history, modern theatre productions, debts to classical tragedy, scepticism, magic and science, the agricultural revolution, and ecological catastrophe. This is authoritative, lively work by one of the world's leading Shakespearians, accessible to the general reader as well as indispensable for students.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198793755
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/25/2018
Series:	Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures
Pages:	182
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

John Kerrigan, Professor of English 2000, University of Cambridge

John Kerrigan was born and brought up in Liverpool. After Oxford, he went to Cambridge where he is Professor of English 2000 and a Fellow of St John's College. He has lectured all over the world, with visiting positions in Japan, India, New Zealand, and the USA. Among his publications are widely-acclaimed books and essays about tragedy since antiquity, Shakespeare, seventeenth-century literature, and modern poetry.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Upstarts and Much Ado2. Shakespeare Afoot3. King Lear and its Origins4. The Tempest to 1756

Editorial Reviews

"an elegant, far-reaching study" —Times Literary Supplement

"Lightly edited from the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures he delivered in 2016, this little collection of Professor Kerrigan's thought-provoking essays is as entertaining as it is erudite" — Gayle Gaskill, St. Catherine University, Renaissance Quarterly

"John Kerrigan, with Shakespeare's Originality, has demonstrated his own originality with all the brilliance to which we have become accustomed in his writing ... profound in its scholarship across a remarkable breadth of fields, full of provocative new insights into texts we might be forgiven for having considered we knew well enough, and unrelenting in opening up intriguing new vistas for future Shakespeare work by himself and others." — Peter Holland, Modern Philology

"Kerrigan shows, through adroit readings ... that Shakespeare's genius lies in precisely how he adapts and plays with well-known texts and audience expectations, ... his analysis of King Lear ... is a masterclass in intertextual hermeneutics. [This] book is important because it undermines facile notions of Shakespeare's genius, as well as our modern concept of creativity. It shows how subtly nuanced Shakespeare's use of source material always is, and how, by its transmission through his quill, the commonplace and hackneyed could burst forth with shining originality." — Stav Sherev, Catholic Herald

"Kerrigan writes stylishly yet cites sources scrupulously. His fine-grained, punctilious reading conjures a new model of how academic writing can be pleasing." —Nicholas Birns, Choice

"based on learning both wide and deep .... It's bracing to watch Kerrigan perform these intellectual gymnastics ... one emerges with a real sense of new understanding. ... He is a highly respected scholar with a welcome ability to uncover fresh approaches to standard texts rather than indulging in the graceful rearrangement of commonplaces that often constitutes Shakespeare studies. Nobody should deny him his own originality.'" —Paul Dean, The New Criterion

"Read John Kerrigan's intense, condensed account of the playwright's creative borrowing ... Kerrigan, one of the world's leading Shakespeare scholars, ... takes us beyond Shakespeare's primary sources into the deeper texture of his allusions and passages of imitation. ... The reward is a vivid sense of how original it was to borrow. ... The book is unrepentantly erudite, but the erudition is as diverting as it can be daunting. ... the trust in our literary curiosity is intoxicating. Who wants Shakespeare to be made easy when he was so beautifully and originally complex?" — John Mullan, The Guardian

"John Kerrigan is, to my mind, one of the most incisive and subtle contemporary writers on Shakespeare. [...] Kerrigan is exceptionally good at unpicking how ideas of originality change. [...] In his conclusion, Kerrigan says... "I hope that this book has shown [...] how much light and shade and depth and nuance are needed to comprehend Shakespeare's use of sources [...]". Hurrah to that, and would that each and every university took it as policy." — Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

"Kerrigan delves deep into the the question of originality and its historical importance ... A consummate study, in-depth and full of insight." —Patrick J. Murray, History Today

From the Publisher