Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 5 (2016), pp. 11-13 
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-18065

ISSN 2279-7149 (online)
www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems
2016 Firenze University Press

Editorial
The idea of this volume was born in 2014, when celebrations of Shakespeare 
centenaries started to take place. In the month of April, a Conference entitled 
‘Shakespeare 450’, celebrating the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of 
Shakespeare’s birth, organised by the Société Française Shakespeare, took 
place in Paris. On that occasion, the editors of the present volume chaired a 
seminar whose intent was to discuss issues of authorship, co-authorship and 
collaboration, the achievements (and pitfalls) of attribution studies, as well as 
the theme of biography, which we considered a different but complementary 
issue aiming at the construction of authorship, or at least of the Author. 

In the call for papers, we stressed the problematic nature of all these 
themes, both when oriented towards the reconstruction of texts and when 
directed towards the construction of the authorial persona. The contemporary 
increase in and technological development of attribution studies and the 
surge of biographies published during the last twenty years appeared to us 
as part of the same project of authentication: on the one hand, attribution 
studies – especially when computer-assisted – promise to identify that which 
is irrefutably (scientifically?) Shakespeare, the outcome of which possibly leads 
to the restoration of the ‘genuine’ text created by Shakespeare’s sole genius; 
on the other, biography aims at reaching the Author by giving body to an 
idea of the Person. 

At the same time, however, and in mute opposition to the mainstream 
tendency of attribution studies, a new ‘disintegration’ theory is gaining 
ground. This trend of study, rather than considering the texts themselves and 
identifying and isolating the various hands which may have taken part in their 
composition, re-reads the whole process of the production of plays, from plot-
writing to performance, intending to show that the writing of early modern 
English theatrical texts was, in the final analysis, a ‘play-patching’ (Stern 2009) 
by several hands working in collaboration. Thus, as has been argued in the 
case of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, which was an experience in which the 
apparently authorless text seemed to be created during performance as a joint 
collaboration of the players, the figure of a ‘collective author’ is emerging also 
as far as Shakespearean theatre is concerned. The idea is that of a ‘dispersal’ 
of authorship and of author-ity (Masten 1997), which tends to replace the 
doubling or tripling of identifiable and separable hands which is at the basis 
of attribution studies. However, as we evaluate this quasi-heretical point of 
view, we should acknowledge that the shift in perspective it suggests may 
have consequences on the way in which we regard and assess texts and on 
the way in which we describe the material organisation of the Elizabethan-
Jacobean theatrical enterprise; and it also – and more importantly – may 



william leahy, paola pugliatti12 

have consequences on the way in which we conceptualise the idea of the 
Author and authorship itself. In addition to these caveats, and as a further 
threat to the identification of the ‘genuine’ hand of the author, in the case of 
early modern texts, manuscripts of which have not been preserved, we should 
consider the additions and idiosyncratic options and habits introduced by what 
Roger Chartier calls ‘l’esprit de l’imprimeur’ (2015); that is, the intellectual 
component of the decisions taken in the printing house and the many and 
diverse traces it left on the printed text.

Traditionally, an Editorial should explain what each of the contributions 
achieves and how the issues discussed by authors and their points of view respond 
to the whole project. However, Professor Chartier has done this for us as editors 
in his superb Introduction, devoting space and attention to each of the texts, 
with an insight and knowledge of both general and particular problems that 
we would never be able to master. What remains for us, therefore, is simply a 
retrospective glance at the occasion on which our project took shape and an 
explanation of the way in which we decided to organise the whole volume. 

Speakers at the Paris seminar with their papers, and the audience with 
the numerous interventions from the floor gave life to an intense debate that 
confirmed the relevance and topicality of the issues proposed. Many of the 
papers presented on that occasion appear in this volume, with the addition 
of other essays gathered in the months that followed the Paris Conference. 
What became clear, both at the conference itself and subsequently, when 
collecting the various contributions for publication here, was that the aspects 
of Shakespeare studies which appeared in our call for papers – Authorship, 
Biography, Collaboration – are not only arenas of great contestation, but are 
indeed those which, at this moment in time, are at the forefront of progressive 
cultural and literary criticism of Shakespeare and his works. Further, the 
work being undertaken in these fields is so varied, so specific and so topical 
that the three proposed categories simply could not contain all of the essays 
submitted. It is for this reason that we have decided to ‘expand our brief ’ and 
organise our submissions into the four categories shown.

Naturally enough in the year of the 400th centenary of Shakespeare’s 
death, and after Roger Chartier’s ‘Introduction’, we begin the volume with 
‘Biography and Biographism’, a section which attends to and discusses many of 
the characteristics and properties of what is probably the most plenitudinous 
genre/sub-genre in the history of literature. It is very likely that this genre/sub-
genre will expand exponentially in this year of celebration of Shakespeare’s life 
and thus the essays within this section are a timely intervention in this whole 
(contested) field of study. This is followed by what would appear to be the 
more conventional study of ‘Authorship, Co-Authorship and Collaboration’, 
but which, given the contributions therein, is anything but conventional. This 
category is the register of emerging and significant approaches to the study 
of Shakespeare’s writings and indeed to the whole notion of authorship itself. 



editorial 13 

This field of study has become so fertile in recent years that the approaches 
taken to the subject matter here are many and varied. A number of these 
essays border on classification as ‘Attribution Studies’, our next section, a 
field which has seen a re-emergence of interest not witnessed since the great 
studies of the early twentieth century. We have categorised them thus in an 
attempt to identify and capture the essential theoretical underpinning of the 
various essays. Our final section, ‘Appropriation and Authorship’ discusses the 
construction of authorship by early readers and editors, in the process fusing 
our earlier groupings, the contributions therein looping back perhaps in a 
circular re-connection with our first section on biography in their (unstated) 
preoccupation with that most important of analytical concepts in the context 
of Shakespeare, the ‘author function’ (Foucault 1987). In this circularity and 
this plenitude, the many essays contained within this collection demonstrate 
that in this year of the marking of the fourhundredth centenary of the death 
of Shakespeare, more than one life (and the work of more than one author) 
will be celebrated and remembered. We will be commemorating not just 
the life of one man, perhaps not even the life of one man. Rather, we will be 
commemorating the historical, social, personal and cultural uses to which 
this man and his works have been put. We will be celebrating not the life, 
but rather ‘The Many Lives of William Shakespeare’.

We wish to express our gratitude to the friends and colleagues who 
presented and discussed their papers at the Paris seminar and agreed to 
publish them in the present volume, and also to those who later joined the 
project; to the numerous audience that, on that occasion, enlivened the debate 
with interventions that were in many cases passionately polemical, thereby 
convincing us that the topicality of the issues raised deserved publication in 
a substantial volume; to our referees for their constructive criticism that, in 
many cases, helped significantly to improve the quality of the articles; and 
to the Journal Manager, Arianna Antonielli, and her unique, dedicated team 
of student-editors that once again made the publication of JEMS possible.

Special thanks go to Luca Baratta, John Denton and Alessandro Melis 
for their invaluable collaboration.

William Leahy and Paola Pugliatti

Works Cited

Chartier Roger (2015), La main de l’auteur et l’esprit de l’ imprimeur, Paris, Gallimard.
Foucault Michel (1987 [1969]), ‘What is an Author?’, in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault 

Reader, trans. by J.V. Harari, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 101-120.
Masten Jeffrey (1997), Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship and Sexualities 

in Renaissance Drama, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Stern Tiffany (2009), Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, 

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.