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. For these scholars, the bardolatrous emphasis on "Shakespeare only" blinds us to the inescapably social nature of Renaissance drama. Jeffrey Knapp shows how these seemingly antithetical perspectives on Shakespeare can and should be combined. In Shakespeare Only, Knapp draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare's authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries 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.
Industry Reviews
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 Was Shakespeare one of a kind? The pursuit of this question leads Jeffrey Knapp on a wide-ranging study of Renaissance authorship. Amassing a formidable array of fact and argument, Shakespeare Only takes issue with the collaborative model of playwrighting currently in vogue among historicist critics, and argues persuasively that the single-author paradigm established itself in the theater earlier and more forcefully than has been thought. Knapp shows that the much-maligned "author-function" plays a vital role not only in the production of Renaissance drama but in the plots of the plays themselves, where themes of death, resurrection, and inheritance frequently allegorize the vicissitudes of authorship. This is a sharply-argued intervention in current critical debates. --Richard Halpern, Johns Hopkins University (Richard Halpern, Johns Hopkins University ) One of the profession's finest historicists takes on one of that school's most precious credos: the tenet that authorship as we know it did not exist in Shakespeare's England. Knapp does not reject the historicist enterprise, however, in favor of an unreformed Bardolatory, but rather renders more vivid and precise our picture of just what dramatic authorship was and could be in the Renaissance. With erudition, tact, and the deepest sympathy for both the poetry and the praxis of England's greatest playwright, Knapp delivers us a Shakespeare whose experiments with different authorial models, including collaborative ones, helped shape the form and pressure of his plays. --Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine (Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine )
