Shakespeare's Originality [Hardcover]

How original was Shakespeare and how was Shakespeare original? This lucid, innovative book sets about answering these questions by putting them in historical context and investigating how the dramatist worked with his sources: plays, poems, chronicles and prose romances.Shakespeare'sOriginalityunlocks its topic with rewarding precision and flair, showing through a series of case studies that range across the output-from the mature comedies to the great tragedies, fromRichard IIItoThe Tempestwhat can be learned about the artistry of the plays by thinking about these sources (including newly identified ones) after several decades of neglect. Discussion is enriched by such matters as Elizabethan ruffs and feathers, actors' footwork, chronicle history, modern theatre productions, debts to classical tragedy, scepticism, magic and science, the agricultural revolution, and ecological catastrophe. This is authoritative, lively work by one of the world's leading Shakespearians, accessible to the general reader as well as indispensable for students.

Introduction
1. Upstarts andMuch Ado
2. Shakespeare Afoot
3.King Learand its Origins
4.The Tempestto 1756

an elegant, far-reaching study --Times Literary Supplement

John Kerrigan, withShakespeare's Originality, has demonstrated his own originality with all the brilliance to which we have become accustomed in his writing ... profound in its scholarship across a remarkable breadth of fields, full of provocative new insights into texts we might be forgiven for having considered we knew well enough, and unrelenting in opening up intriguing new vistas for future Shakespeare work by himself and others. -- Peter Holland,Modern Philology

Kerrigan shows, through adroit readings ... that Shakespeare's genius lies in precisely how he adapts and plays with well-known texts and audience expectations, ..lm