Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama

Description

For one hundred years the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries has been consistently represented in anthologies, edited texts, and the critical tradition by a familiar group of about two dozen plays running from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy to Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by way of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Webster. How was this canon created, and what ideological and institutional functions does it serve? What preceded it, and is it possible for it to become something else? Jeremy Lopez takes up these questions by tracing a history of anthologies of 'non-Shakespearean' drama from Robert Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) through those recently published by Blackwell, Norton, and Routledge. Containing dozens of short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book will benefit those who seek a broader sense of the period's dazzling array of forms.

Jeremy Lopez is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (2003), the editor of New Critical Essays: Richard II (2012) and has written numerous articles on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. From 2003 to 2013 he served as theatre review editor for Shakespeare Bulletin, and he is currently, with Paul Menzer (Mary Baldwin College), editor of the on-line early modern studies journal The Hare.

'This is a remarkable book: confidently and wittily written, exhaustively and widely researched, timely, provocative, enlightening and highly original. The strength of Lopez's argument is that he resists the impulse to shape his own anthology, offering instead a history and a method of critical enquiry and appreciation that completely destabilise current practice.' Richard Cave, Royal Holloway, University of London 'By moving beyond a Shakespeare-based repertoire, Lopez is taking a look at which plays were considered better than others, what kind of criteria were used in the making of those judgements, and especially how the works selected to exemplify the early modern era might change.' Amy Arden, Folger Magazine