The Authentic Shakespeare: and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage [Hardcover]

Collects fifteen important essays by one of the most prominent scholars of Shakespeare studies. Humanities at Stanford. Among his many publications are Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England, The Illusion of Power, Inigo Jones (with Sir Roy Strong), and The Jonsonian Masque. He has published numerous editions of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe, and is the general editor of the New Pelican 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, l“