Making Shakespeare (YALE UNIVERSITY)

David Scott Kastan
This seminar focuses on the various ways in which the scripts Shakespeare wrote were turned into plays to be acted; into playbooks to be sold, purchased, and read; and, improbably given their subliterary origin, ultimately into the most iconic works of literature written in English. The course focuses on the specifics of the theater world in which Shakespeare wrote; on the nature of book production, circulation, and consumption in early modern England; and on the history and theory of editing Shakespeare.