Shakespeare and Textual Failure

Histories of the Shakespearean text have tended to focus on success stories so as to craft narratives of achievement, completion, discovery and restoration from an admittedly messy, incomplete textual past. Investigating how textual phenomena around and adjacent to Shakespeare come to be named failures, this book shows that these so-called failures offer new frameworks for recuperating, reimagining and treating them as sites of new knowledge about textual making, history and historiography. Shakespeare and Textual Failure collects stories of textual failure related to the Shakespearean text and other early modern texts from the sixteenth century through the present. The essays take up diverse instances of textual failure, both granular (e.g., misprints and typos) and systemic (e.g., institutional biases). The eighteen contributed chapters together expand our understanding of how cases of actual and supposed failure — failure of textual transmission, of text technologies, of interpretation, of editorial decision-making, of preservation, of remediation, of funding, of human health, of the environment, of performance, of institutions — have shaped the textual record around Shakespeare and other early modern texts as well as the range of possible approaches to them. They show that revisiting textual phenomena labeled as ‘failures’ either in their own moment or subsequently can generate new methods of assessing the textual past and result in more nuanced and inclusive — as well as less teleological, or triumphalist — material, cultural and political histories of early modern texts.