Reproducing Renaissance Drama

Value

£145,280

Description

The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been edited continuously for four centuries, and different editions have reshaped and reinterpreted these texts for new audiences. Distinguished from previous scholarship in scale, scope, and methodology, this innovative two-stage project explores the editing and publishing of English Renaissance plays from the eighteenth century to the present, combining quantitative and qualitative methods for macro- and micro-scopic analysis. After construction of a comprehensive bibliographical database of editions, the project will then analyse the data computationally to identify latent patterns (in plays, authors, genres, editors, types of edition, and so on). To complement and contextualise these findings, the project will employ traditional literary-critical methods of close reading and archival research.

Impact

A monograph of this research is contracted to the Arden Shakespeare Studies in Language and Digital Methodologies series, and the bibliographical database will be made open-access to enable new scholarship, streamline existing editorial processes, and help students, educators, and theatre practitioners locate suitable play-texts.