William B. Worthen

Intoxicating Rhythms: Or, Shakespeare, Literary Drama, and Performance (Studies)

T past decade has witnessed, according to Patrick Cheney, a remarkably uncontroversial “‘return of the author’ in Shakespeare studies.”1 Stimulated by Lukas Erne’s fresh engagement with the evidence for Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist in 2003, Shakespeare studies have taken up the case for Shakespeare not only as an entrepreneurial writer for the stage, churning out actable material, but “as a self-conscious, literary author” who used print publishing to shape a career as a “literary dramatist” parallel to his career as a working playwright in the theater.2 Redressing “an increasingly dated view that threatens to reduce Shakespeare to ‘a man of the theatre’” and restoring a sense of Shakespeare fashioning dramatic works for a reading, as well as a spectatorial, audience Erne marshals evidence ranging from the frequency with which Shakespeare’s plays were published and republished during the first decade of his career in the 1590s (noting the increasing prominence of his name on various editions of those quarto volumes) to an ingenious argument for the essentially “literary,” printand reader-directed address of many of Shakespeare’s longer plays. Too long for performance, Erne argues, these plays—mainly the tragedies—may witness Shakespeare’s intended appeal to a reading public.3 As Charlotte Scott puts it, Erne’s Shakespeare “wrote differently for the stage and the page, including in the text to be read things that would normally be performed (mannerisms, entrances, exits, physical behaviour, expressions).”4