Description:
Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare's timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians who view modern claims of Shakespeare's uniqueness as a distortion of his real professional life. In Shakespeare Only, Knapp draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare's authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries actually understood it. He argues that Shakespeare tried to adapt his own singular talent and ambition to the collaborative enterprise of drama by imagining himself as uniquely embodying the diverse, fractious energies of the popular theater. Rewriting our current histories of authorship as well as Renaissance drama, Shakespeare Only recaptures a sense of the creative force that mass entertainment exerted on Shakespeare and that Shakespeare exerted on mass entertainment.
Brief description:
Jeffrey Knappis Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England.
Review Quotes:
"Jeffrey Knapp's Shakespeare Only is a decisive and brilliant advance in our understanding of Shakespeare and of his literary culture. The book sweeps away many wide-spread misconceptions about Renaissance authorship and provides detailed evidence for the ways Elizabethan and Jacobean readers and audiences actually thought about the creators of the plays they enjoyed. Above all, Knapp provides a remarkable, deeply compelling account of Shakespeare's own strangely paradoxical conception of authorship. That conception, Knapp shows, entailed in the interest of ambition the abandonment of dreams of absolute sovereignty and an unprecedented plunge into collaboration and commonness."
--Stephen Greenblatt