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Jean-Christophe Mayer: Shakespeare’s Early Readers. A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Among Richard Temple’s “Bookes in ye 18 shelf behind ye door”, according to his manuscript catalogue of 1694, was “Shakespear Workes folio”: Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater owned almost every quarto of Shakespeare’s plays printed before 1602; the Danby manuscript now in the Huntington Library includes two therapeutic quotations from Othello amid a miscellany of recipes, household accounts and poems. Jean-Christophe Mayer’s wide-ranging account of readers of Shakespeare’s plays during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (he suggests there is little distinction between them in terms of the history of reading) is full of archival discoveries of marginalia, annotation, commonplacing, and commentary. Following the work of Lukas Erne which he acknowledges as a major influence, Mayer argues for the emergence of a “communal literary Shakespeare” through reading in the period before the Victorians annexed his works for the school system.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37307/j.1866-5381.2020.01.21
Lizenz: ESV-Lizenz
ISSN: 1866-5381
Ausgabe / Jahr: 1 / 2020
Veröffentlicht: 2020-05-21
Dokument Jean-Christophe Mayer: Shakespeare’s Early Readers. A Cultural History from 1590 to 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.