New Releases by Stephen Orgel

How did plays from the popular theatre, written by an author better known as a poet, become the greatest literary monument in English? Renowned Shakespearean Stephen Orgel reveals how the transformation of Shakespeare''s scripts was a triumph of both editorial intervention and marketing. By no means the most admired playwright of his time, Shakespeare''s most popular work during his lifetime and for decades afterwards was the long poem Venus and Adonis, first published in 1593. It wasn''t until 1598 that Shakespeare''s name appeared on the title page of a book, so how did Shakespeare''s plays become the benchmark of English Renaissance drama? By examining the process of transformation from performance script to published book Orgel provides an accessible story of the making of Shakespeare''s reputation in print and of how the publication of his plays in a grand folio in 1623 made a radical claim for his plays as literature, in effect declaring his plays modern classics. With chapters on the poems, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Pericles and Macbeth, this book offers a number of case studies illustrating a variety of problems of dealing with the quartos, as well as how different a ''good'' text of a play was for Shakespeare''s readers and for modern scholars. It closes with an account of the production of the first folio, which, with the precedent of the Ben Jonson folio of 1616, effectively conferred classic status on this popular contemporary dramatist.

How did the popular drama of Shakespeare''s age become literature? Every work that has survived from the theater of past ages has gone through some editorial process to make it available to readers. The book of the play is not the play on the stage; returning it to the stage for modern audiences is not a simple or straightforward process, nor can we simply read backwards from the texts that have come down to us to deduce what Shakespeare''s or Jonson''s (or Aristophanes''s or Sophocles''s) audiences saw. Editorial efforts since the first folio of 1623 have attempted to establish a correct, final text of Shakespeare''s plays, as the folio promises "the true, original copies." Yet the text in the theater changed constantly, as the actors adapted the plays to take into account their changing audiences. The publisher of the folio of Beaumont and Fletcher''s plays in 1647 acknowledges that his texts include more than the plays on the stage--"all that was acted and all that was not." In performance, the play at the Globe was not the play at court, nor was any play the same when it was revived in a subsequent season. Moreover, performances always involved improvisation on the part of the actors, and the continual response (often vocal and energetic) of the audience. This book is about what happens to plays when they become books.

"Elegant, deeply learned, and intellectually adventurous, its implications extend far beyond the boundaries of the Stuart and Caroline masque. It is an indispensable, exploration of political art and aestheticized politics. . . . a classic." --Stephen Greenblatt, University of California, Berkeley "A triumph of scholarship, insight, and explication, Oregel''s book is truly a classic in the field of Renaissance studies. Anyone interested in Renaissance culture will find here a masterful analysis of its celebration of royal power." --Coppelia Kahn, Brown University "As knowing of art, theatrical and political history as it is sensitive to poetry, Orgel''s book is learned, lively, and beautifully clear." --John Hollander, Yale University "A foundational text for the New Historicist Perspective in English Renaissance literary and cultural studies . . . as informative and suggestive as it was when new; in the clarity and grace of its writing, the breadth and precision of its arguments, the aptness and resonance of its examples, it is unsurpassed as an introduction to the dialectic of theatrical illusion and state authority--of play and power--in the culture of Elizabethan and Stuart England." --Louis Montrose, University of California, San Diego "Elegant, deeply learned, and intellectually adventurous, its implications extend far beyond the boundaries of the Stuart and Caroline masque. It is an indispensable, exploration of political art and aestheticized politics. . . . a classic." --Stephen Gre

The Idea of the Book and the Creation of Literature explores the intersection of literary history and the history of the book. For several millennia, books have been the material embodiment of knowledge and culture, and an essential embodiment for any kind of knowledge involving texts. Texts, however, do not need to be books-they are not even necessarily written. The oldest poems were composed to be recited, and only written down centuries later. Much of the most famous poetry of the English Renaissance was composed in manuscript form to circulate among a small social circle. Plays began as scripts for performance. What happens to a play when it becomes a book, or to a collection of poems circulated among friends when it becomes a volume of sonnets? How do essays, plays, poems, stories, become Works? How is an author imagined? In this new addition to the Oxford Textual Perspectives series, Stephen Orgel addresses such questions and considers the idea of the book not simply as a container for written work, but as an essential element in its creation.

In his own time, Shakespeare was not a monument, but a man of the theater whose plays were less finished artifacts than works in process. In contrast to a book, a thing we have come to think of as final and achieved, a play is a work for performance, with each performance based only in part on a text we call a script. That script may well have had imperfections that the actors may or may not have noticed as they turned it into a performance. There were multiple versions of the scripts and never a "final" one. Every revival of a play—indeed, every subsequent performance—was and always will be different. Nevertheless, when we study Shakespeare, we are likely to come to him via printed texts that are scripts masquerading as books, and the impulse is to turn them into finished artifacts worthy of their author''s dignity. In The Invention of Shakespeare, and Other Essays Stephen Orgel brings together twelve essays that consider the complex nature of Shakespearean texts, which often include errors or confusions, and the editorial and interpretive strategies for dealing with them in commentary or performance. "There is always some underlying claim that we are getting back to ''what Shakespeare actually wrote,''" Orgel writes, "but obviously that is not true: we clarify, we modernize, we undo muddles, we correct or explain (or explain away) errors, all in the interests of getting a clear, readable, unproblematic text. In short, we produce the text that we want him to, or think he must have written. But one thing we really do know about Shakespeare''s original text is that it was hard to read."

In Wit''s Treasury, Stephen Orgel, one of our foremost interpreters of Renaissance literature and culture, charts how the conflict between Christian principles and classical manners and morals yielded the rich creative tension out of which emerged an unprecedented flowering of English drama, lyric, and the arts.

The Reader in the Book is concerned with a particular aspect of the history of the book, an archeology and sociology of the use of margins and other blank spaces. One of the most commonplace aspects of old books is the fact that people wrote in them, something that, until very recently, has infuriated modern collectors and librarians. But these inscriptions constitute a significant dimension of the book''s history, and what readers did to books often added to their value. Sometimes marks in books have no relation to the subject of the book, merely names, dates, prices paid; blank spaces were used for pen trials and doing sums, and flyleaves are occasionally the repository of records of various kinds. The Reader in the Book deals with that special class of books in which the text and marginalia are in intense communication with each other, in which reading constitutes an active and sometimes adversarial engagement with the book. The major examples are works that are either classics or were classics in their own time; but they are seen here as contemporaries read them, without the benefit of centuries of commentary and critical guidance. The underlying question is at what point marginalia, the legible incorporation of the work of reading into the text of the book, became a way of defacing it rather than of increasing its value-why did we want books to lose their history?

Why did Queen Elizabeth I compare herself with her disastrous ancestor Richard II? Why would Ben Jonson transform Queen Anne and her ladies into Amazons as entertainment for the pacifist King James? How do the concept of costume as high fashion and as self-fashioning, as disguise and as the very essence of theatre, relate to one other? How do portraits of poets help make the author readers want, and why should books, the embodiment of the word, be illustrated at all? What conventions connect image to text, and what impulses generated the great art collections of the early seventeenth century? In this richly illustrated collection on theatre, books, art and personal style, the eminent literary critic and cultural historian Stephen Orgel addresses himself to such questions in order to reflect generally on early modern representation and, in the largest sense, early modern performance. As wide-ranging as they are perceptive, the essays deal with Shakespeare, Jonson and Milton, with Renaissance magic and Renaissance costume, with books and book illustration, art collecting and mythography. All are recent, and five are hitherto unpublished.

Orgel''s writings on Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and the English court both unpack the notions often taken for granted - the authority of text, character, playwright - and explore the relationship between the stage drama and the state drama.

In this beautifully illustrated book, one of the foremost Shakespeareans of our time explores the ways in which Shakespeare has been imagined from his time to ours. Drawing on performance history, textual history and the visual arts (including a fascinating chapter on portraiture), Imagining Shakespeare displays throughout the cultural versatility, elegance, lucidity and wit which have become the hallmarks of Stephen Orgel''s style.

Why was England the only country in Europe to maintain an all-male public theater in the Renaissance? Stephen Orgel uses this question as the starting point of a fresh and stimulating exploration of the representation of gender in Elizabethan drama and society. At once provocative and witty, lucid and stylish, Impersonations will reshape our understanding of the Renaissance theater, and make us rethink our own inadequate categories of gender, power and sexuality.