The Authentic Shakespeare

"These essays on Shakespeare and related subjects by Stephen Orgel represent thirty years' worth of intelligence, originality, breadth of vision, and brilliant clarity. Orgel is in the most pleasurable of senses a radical thinker. Whether his subject is politics or textuality, gender or genre, poetics or performance, he has always asked the most fundamental questions, rethought our most uninvestigated assumptions, and delivered something basic, new, and true--always in the voice of the most delightful conversationalist. To read _The Authentic Shakespeare_ is to be in the company of one's most articulate and smartest literary companion." -- Leonard Barkan, Princeton University
"Stephen Orgel's original and imaginative mode of historical inquiry has dealt with English renaissance literature on and off the stage for a good many years. This fine and elegantly written book puts right some errors, and adjusts many perspectives, arising from interpretive conceits in a way that is more imaginative and intellectually energetic than most theoretical dallyings. Whether writing of Shakespeare, Jonson, surprisingly on Marlowe, or on issues of authorship, authority, authenticity and plagiarism, he is always pointed, pragmatic, skeptical and wise. All students of English poetry and drama should read it, no matter what their period of concern." -- John Hollander, Yale University
"Whether writing of Shakespeare, Jonson, surprisingly on Marlowe, or on issues of authorship, authority, authenticity and plagiarism, Orgel is always pointed, pragmatic, skeptical and wise. All students of English poetry and drama should read it, no matter what their period of concern." -- John Hollander, Yale University
"Stephen Orgel's original and imaginative mode of historical inquiry has dealt with English renaissance literature on and off the stage for a good many years. This fine and elegantly written book puts right some errors, and adjusts many perspectives arising from interpretive conceits in a way that is more imaginative and intellectually energetic than most theoretical dallyings. Whether writing of Shakespeare, Jonson, surprisingly on Marlowe, or on issues of authorship, authority, authenticity and plagiarism, Orgel is always pointed, pragmatic, skeptical and wise. All students of English poetry and drama should read it, no matter what their period of concern." -- John Hollander, Yale University
"This is an epochal collection. Its essays have animated, provoked, and directed the study of the early modern stage for the past thirty years. Each of them startled when it first appeared; some are now canonical, others continue to be controversial. Yet each essay remains exemplary for its erudition, imagination, and sheer elegance-and perhaps most distinctively, for the author's refusal to take any assumption about his subject on trust." -- Margreta de Grazia, University of Pennsylvania
"This impressive collection of fifteen essays by Stephen Orgel, written over an astonishingly creative lifetime, enables us now to savor once again the revisionist delights of "The Spectacles of State," "Prospero's Wife," "Marginal Jonson," "Tobacco and Boys," and so many others that have changed our whole way of thinking about the Renaissance stage as architecture and as cultural institution, the acting profession, the task of the editor, and the poetics of spectacle. To revisit this achievement is to stand in admiration of the focus and the breadth of the author's investigation of English Renaissance drama. This book is truly Stephen Orgel's own best monument." -- David Bevington Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities, University of Chicago