Reading Shakespeare in Early Modern England (1590-1800): Tracing and Interpreting the Archival Evidence

Les premiers lecteurs de Shakespeare (1590-1800): Rechercher en interpréter les traces trouvées dans les archives.

Jean-Christophe Mayer (1)

1 IRCL - Institut de recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Age Classique, et les Lumières.

Archival evidence reveals that Shakespeare’s works were read, annotated and extracted by their early readers. The interpretation of this evidence poses a number of methodological problems, which will be first highlighted. Then, we shall try to paint a picture (as accurate as possible) of who these readers were and how they read ‘their’ Shakespeare. This talk will focus especially on early readers who included extracts of his works in their manuscript commonplace books and miscellanies. We shall try to underline a number of patterns in this relatively widespread practice, but also reveal some idiosyncrasies. The underlining and of course complex question behind this presentation will be ‘what did early readers think of Shakespeare?’. In a second part, we will look at a number of free online resources that allow students and scholars to search for and access digitized manuscripts, as well as websites providing courses on early modern palaeography. Questions from the audience will be welcome after each part of the presentation.

Mots clés: Shakespeare; Early modern theatre; literary extracting; online resources to find manuscrpits

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Jean-Christophe Mayer. Reading Shakespeare in Early Modern England (1590-1800): Tracing and Interpreting the Archival Evidence: Accessing and Searching Online Manuscript Resources. Reading Shakespeare, Dr Beatrice Monterdoro, Nov 2020, Zurich (par visio-conférence: Covid 19), Switzerland. pp.16. ⟨halshs-03098221⟩