Content area
Full Text
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries?
JOHN WEBSTER: THE WHITE DEVIL. By Stephen Purcell. The Shakespeare Handbooks: Shakespeare's Contemporaries series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; pp. 184.
JOHN FORD: 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE. By Martin White. The Shakespeare Handbooks: Shakespeare's Contemporaries series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; pp. 176.
THOMAS MIDDLETON AND WILLIAM ROWLEY: THE CHANGELING. By Jay O'Berski. The Shakespeare Handbooks: Shakespeare's Contemporaries series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; pp. 168.
THE CAMBRIDGE INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. By Tom Rutter. Cambridge Introductions to Literature series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; pp. 168.
PERFORMING EARLY MODERN DRAMA TODAY. Edited by Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; pp. 262.
BRITISH DRAMA, 1533-1642: A CATALOGUE (Volumes I-III). By Martin Wiggins, in association with Catherine Richardson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012; pp. 1664.
From Algernon Charles Swinburne's The Age of Shakespeare (1908) and Contemporaries of Shakespeare (1919) to more recent studies like Jonathan Hart's Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2011), Warren Cherniak's The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2011), and Kevin Quarmby's The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2012), "Shakespeare and his contemporaries" has been a persistent phrase in scholarly examinations of early modern dramaturgy.1 It also permeates the modern academy: at the time of writing, "Shakespeare's contemporaries" forms the title of or is conspicuously mentioned in the rubric of available classes at a number of universities and colleges across the world, most conspicuously in the UK.2 Furthermore, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), arguably the most substantial disseminator of performed early modern plays in the twenty-first century, includes a section on Shakespeare contemporaries on its website.3
The formation "Shakespeare and his contemporaries" implies a certain hierarchy: the Bard first, and other playwrights defined in relation to their contemporaneousness with him. Its persistence over centuries is primarily due to the predominance of the Shakespearean canon in Western theatre and culture more generally. As Shakespeare biographer Peter Holland writes:
For if Shakespeare has often seemed to some to be the prerogative of English high culture, then throughout the world Shakespeare, his image, and his works have been appropriated for every kind of popular cultural usage, signs both of his cultural authority and of the cultural contestation his works provoke. . . . There...