Donatella Pallotti, Paola Pugliatti (general editors). William Leahy, Paola Pugliatti (eds), Journal of Early Modern Studies 5: The Many Lives of William Shakespeare. Biography, Authorship and Collaboration.

The aim of this volume is to discuss issues of authorship, co-authorship and collaboration, the achievements (and pitfalls) of attribution studies and the different, but complementary issue of biography. These themes, which are on the forefront of Shakespeare studies today, have problematic aspects both when oriented towards the reconstruction of the Shakespearean text and when directed towards the construction of the authorial persona; and are equally at the origin of the frustration which characterizes both textual studies and biographical investigation; for, as Roger Chartier writes in his introductory essay, ‘what is missing are the traces of his esthetic creation, those of his thoughts and feelings, the first drafts of his works, the letters, the personal diaries, or the memoirs which make genetic criticism and literary biography possible.’ Against this frustration, the contemporary increase in and technological development of attribution studies and the surge of biographies published during the last twenty years, appear as part of the same project of ‘authentication’: on the one hand, attribution studies promise to identify and restore the ‘genuine’ text created by Shakespeare’s sole genius; while, on the other, biography aims at reaching the Author by giving body to an idea of Person. At the same time, however, a quasi-heretic trend of ‘disintegration’ studies re-reads the whole process of the production of plays stressing its collaborative character and constructing the figure of a ‘collective author’ also as far as Shakespeare’s dramatic work is concerned. The volume is divided into four sections: ‘Biography and Biographism’, in which are discussed many of the characteristics of this plenitudinous (and contested) sub-genre of Shakespeare studies; ‘Authorship, Co-Authorship and Collaboration’ where emerging approaches to the study of the Shakespearean text are discussed; the ‘Attribution Studies’ section discusses, often in a controversial perspective, a field of studies which has seen a re-emergence of interest mainly owing to computerized analysis; finally, the section on ‘Appropriation and Authorship’ discusses the construction of Shakespeare as Author by early readers and editors, especially as regards his poems. In this four-hundredth centenary of the death of William Shakespeare, therefore, the volume celebrates more than one life of one man: it commemorates the historical, social, personal and cultural uses to which this man and his works have been put.