Shakespeare Quarterly

"The Elizabethan world was full of magic." In a new edition of Shakespeare Quarterly, Stephen Orgel writes about the Folger's "grimoire" and other books of secrets and spells from Shakespeare's England in "Secret Arts and Public Spectacles: The Parameters of Elizabethan Magic." Visit https://shakespearequarterly.folger.edu/essays/secret-arts-public-spectacles-parameters-elizabethan-magic/ to read more!

Explore Shakespeare Quarterly's brand new website, showcasing content from the journal’s current issue and offering exciting web exclusives from eminent Shakespeareans.

Shakespeare Quarterly: explore the new website Read an article about "Play the Knave," abstracts from our new " " issue, reflections from David Bevington, and a BAAAH-some story about "King Lear."

We didn't forget Winter! Our editorial staff has been working away on our upcoming Spring issue while also participating in wonderful celebrations of that Wonderful Will. So if you haven't had the pleasure of seeing our Winter cover yet, do enjoy now!

Our Fall Cover.

CALL FOR PAPERS: SQ Special Issue
: Shakespeare and the History of Media
Guest Editor: Douglas M. Lanier, University of New Hampshire

From the printing of play quartos to the development of Shakespeare apps, the history of Shakespeare and the history of media have been intimately entwined in a feedback loop of considerable cultural and technological influence. And, with the emergence of each new media format, the objects of our study (poet, playwright, play text, promptbook, screenplay etc.) morph—sometimes unpredictably—into things both various and new.
This special issue, guest edited by SQ Board Member Douglas Lanier, will investigate the myriad linkages between Shakespeare and the history of media with topics that might include the following: Shakespeare and the future of media; digital Shakespeare; Shakespeare data collection; Shakespeare, media, and the formation of community; Shakespeare and theater/movie/television technology; Shakespeare in 140 characters; Shakespeare and revisionist approaches to media history (post-McLuhan); Shakespeare as “transmedia” artist; autopoietic Shakespeare; Shakespeare and the history of photographic reproduction; Shakespearean mashups/samplings/applications.
We strongly encourage authors to consider selecting images, audio clips, and video clips to illustrate their articles. A gallery of these multimedia illustrations will be published on the Folger.edu web site.
In order to publish a variety of approaches to the topic, we ask that submitted papers be 7,500 words in length including notes. Papers selected from those submitted will be published in Shakespeare Quarterly Fall 2016. Deadline for submission: 1 January 2016.

Spring is here!

Article Abstracts for Fall 2014 issue:

Essays
Empirical Middleton: Macbeth, Adaptation, and Microauthorship
Gary Taylor

Since 1778, scholars have disagreed about the relationship between Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Middleton’s Witch. Allegedly empirical studies of the authorship of passages of Macbeth (3.5 and 4.1) have reached opposed conclusions. Although modern databases and more sophisticated attribution methods have succeeded in reaching consensus about whole plays and even plays divided between two authors, especially plays dating from the seventeenth century, they have been less successful with smaller blocks of text. Taylor’s essay presents the first survey of all lexical data (words, word strings of various lengths, collocations) in control passages in King Lear, Pericles, and A Mad World, My Masters, checked against databases of the entire Middleton and Shakespeare canons and then against databases of all early modern drama. Establishing the reliability of such comprehensive tests in identifying short passages of known authorship, the essay tests the suspect passages in Macbeth 3.5 and 4.1, using the same procedures and databases, concluding that there is overwhelming evidence against Shakespeare’s authorship and for Middleton as the adapter. Taylor relates this empirical conclusion to larger issues of style and epistemology in the Shakespeare and Middleton canons, concluding that Macbeth is the tragedy of a man who believed what he was told.

Michael Drayton, Shakespeare’s Shadow Shakespeare& #8217;s
Meghan C. Andrews

In this essay, Andrews argues that poet-playwright Michael Drayton was an important early reader and rewriter of Shakespeare and shows that their intertextual engagement was conditioned by their acquaintance at the Middle Temple, one of London’s four Inns of Court. Demonstrating that Drayton systematically imitated Shakespeare’s works throughout the 1590s, the essay focuses on the influence of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy on Drayton’s historical poetry; the author has discovered that lines from Drayton’s Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597) appear in the Folio texts of 2 and 3 Henry VI but not the early quarto and octavo texts of these plays. The shared lines suggest that Shakespeare either revised early drafts of his plays or circulated longer versions of them in manuscript. Either possibility points to a more literary Shakespeare than critics are used to, as does Drayton’s modeling himself on Shakespeare. Andrews traces their intertextual exchange, which centered on The Mirror for Magistrates’s depiction of history as a tragic cycle and elegiac representation of subjectivity, and the Middle Temple where they met. The Mirror was the Inns’ most famous literary work, and the author draws on recent historiographical research on sociability and institutions to contend that the Inns led Shakespeare and Drayton to see each other as resources for this particular type of writing; moreover, the Inns’ atmosphere structured their literary relationship, leading them to work in productive and amicable engagement. Ultimately, Andrews underscores the key role that social environments such as the Inns had in the production of early modern literature.

“Play Me False”: R**e, Race, and Conquest in The Tempest
John Kunat

Caliban’s slave status has most often been attributed to either his racial identity or the practice of colonialism. This essay argues instead that Shakespeare clearly attributes his enslavement to a specific act—the attempted r**e of Miranda. Under the jus gentium, this assault constituted an act of private war, in which Caliban was conquered by Prospero, who acquired absolute mastery over Caliban’s person with the right to either kill or enslave him. This process is repeated when Ferdinand commits an act of war by drawing his sword against Prospero. Like Caliban, he is defeated and enslaved, as the play makes clear when he is ordered to stack logs, the same menial task performed by his putative rival for Miranda. To work through the trauma of sexual assault upon which the history of the island is founded, Ferdinand must repeat Caliban’s actions under Prospero’s supervision and control. The parallel between the two men who seek to possess Miranda sexually also draws attention to the relationship established in the play between Europe and Africa, which is developed in both the marriage of Claribel to the King of Tunis and Prospero’s rivalry with Sycorax.

Explore this innovative Folger/JSTOR collaboration (which features many Shakespeare Quarterly articles)!

Understanding Shakespeare Understanding Shakespeare is a collaborative project between JSTOR Labs and the Folger Shakespeare Library. It’s a research tool that allows students, educators and scholars to use the text of Shakespeare’s plays to quickly navigate into the scholarship written about them—line by line.

Shakespeare Quarterly is pleased to welcome Jessica Frazier as our new managing editor! Jessica previously interned under the GW-SQ assistantship program (starting in 2012), while simultaneously completing her PhD in English at George Washington University. Additionally, Jessica holds a BA in English and French from Furman University and a MA in Literature from American University. Welcome, Jessica!

Shakespeare Quarterly is hiring! Apply to be SQ's new managing editor:

http://www.folger.edu/Content/About-Us/Employment-and-Internships/