Heidi Craig – författare

Focusing on the production and reception of drama during the theatre closures of 1642 to 1660, Heidi Craig shows how the 'death' of contemporary theatre in fact gave birth to English Renaissance drama as a critical field. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English stage, drama thrived in print, with stationers publishing unprecedented numbers of previously unprinted professional plays, vaunting playbooks' ties to the receding theatrical past. Marketed in terms of novelty and nostalgia, plays unprinted before 1642 gained new life. Stationers also anatomized the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first anthologies and comprehensive catalogues of drama. Craig captures this crucial turning-point in English theatre history with chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia, and the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period, as well as a new incisive reading of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King.

Focusing on the production and reception of drama during the theatre closures of 1642 to 1660, Heidi Craig shows how the 'death' of contemporary theatre in fact gave birth to English Renaissance drama as a critical field. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English stage, drama thrived in print, with stationers publishing unprecedented numbers of previously unprinted professional plays, vaunting playbooks' ties to the receding theatrical past. Marketed in terms of novelty and nostalgia, plays unprinted before 1642 gained new life. Stationers also anatomized the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first anthologies and comprehensive catalogues of drama. Craig captures this crucial turning-point in English theatre history with chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia, and the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period, as well as a new incisive reading of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King.

This Element traces the history of Shakespearean bibliography from its earliest days to the present. With an emphasis on how we enumerate and find scholarship about Shakespeare, this Element argues that understanding bibliographies is foundational to how we research Shakespeare. From early modern catalogs of Shakespeare plays, to early bibliographers such as Albert Cohn (1827-1905) and William Jaggard (1868-1947), to present-day digital projects such as the online World Shakespeare Bibliography, this Element underscores how the taxonomic organization, ambit, and media of enumerative Shakespearean bibliography projects directly impact how scholars value and can use these resources. Ultimately, this Element asks us to rethink our assumptions about Shakespearean bibliography by foregrounding the labor, collaboration, technological innovations, and critical decisions that go into creating and sustaining bibliographies at all stages. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.