"Shakespeare::Marx && Community::writing" by Gabriel Egan
There are many attractive reasons for thinking it sheer folly to try to use the ideas of Karl Marx to explicate and illuminate the works of William Shakespeare. For Marx, the fundamental activity that determines that character of a society is the nature of the economic interactions between its members. For Shakespeare, such economic concerns only occasionally arise as important subjects within the plays. For Marx, it makes sense to understand people as undifferentiated classes. Shakespeare, on the other, repeatedly differentiates characters who stand in essentially the same economic relations to one another. Marx lived and made sense of a world in which machines were increasingly supplementing the labour of men and women. Shakespeare lived and made sense of a world in which humans and animals were the almost only source of motive power. Why, then, should we think that Marx can help us understand Shakespeare? [SLIDE] Or, to use a symbolic notation from computer programming, what is Marx in the context of Shakespeare?
I wrote a book on this topic 13 years ago with the simple title Shakespeare and Marx in which I tried to answer this question--how can Marx help us to understand Shakespeare?--by showing that several of Marx's central ideas are already orthodoxy in mainstream literary criticism, so that we are, as it were, already doing Marxist criticism of Shakespeare without knowing it. I wanted to explain what these several central ideas of Marx are, and how they are deeply embedded in what most professional literary critics already do. On reflection, this was perhaps not the most helpful way to tackle the question, because it focussed on the existing practices of literary criticism rather than showing what a Marxist approach can reveal to us that no other approach is capable of revealing. I want to try a different approach today and confine myself to two simple propositions. The first is the Marx gives us a way of thinking about why and how someone takes up the pen as a way of making their living as Shakespeare did--[SLIDE] or, 'writing in the context of community', and the second is that Marx gives us a useful way of thinking about the differences between people so that we are not simply speaking of classes of persons as undifferentiated masses. The doubled ampersand here forms what is known as a Boolean 'AND' expression that is false unless both sides are true. I need to convince you of the merit of considering Marx in the context of Shakespeare and of considering writing in the context of community. [BLANK]
Writing shortly after the end of the Second World War, the famous Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre addressed the question of just what a writer is doing in taking up the pen, in his book What is Literature?. If you know Sartre's other works, it will not surprise you that Sartre decided that writing is about freedom; indeed the word 'freedom' occurs 182 times in his book of about 96,000 words, which is about 20 times more often than the word 'freedom' occurs in everyday English from that period, according to the Google Books N-Gram Viewer. What kind of freedom does Sartre think that writing entails? All kinds, but in particular Sartre had changed his mind since writing Being and Nothingness of 1943, in which he took the now familiar Existentialist line that we all already free and must accommodate our thinking to an acknowledgement of that fact. In What is Literature?, Sartre took the much more clearly Marxist line that many people in the world are not really free in practice and that not only is this tough for them but in fact it makes freedom for each of us unattainable. We cannot be individually free when we are collectively free. "There is no art," Sartre now wrote, "except for and by others" (Sartre 1986, 30).
We have long known that Shakespeare wrote for others: for the actors in his theatre company and, through them, for the audiences that flocked to his plays, first at The Theatre in Shoreditch and later at The Globe on Bankside and The Blackfriars inside the city walls, making him and his fellow sharers in the Chamberlain's/King's Men rich and famous. In the past 15 years it has become clear that Shakespeare wrote also 'for' others in a way that makes him much more like the kind of writer Sartre was thinking about: one who communicates to a readership via print publication (Erne 2003; Erne 2013). Lukas Erne has proved that Shakespeare was far from indifferent to the publication of his plays, that Shakespeare set out to be a successful writer in the print medium, and that he entirely compassed that ambition. Erne did this not by discovering new facts but by counting the old facts in new ways. Such a quantitative approach is one I think we will be hearing a lot more from, hence my interest in computer programming notations and my counting of how often Sartre uses the word 'freedom'.
Paradoxically, a Shakespeare who also reaches a print readership is one with a broader communicative reach--not only playgoers but also readers--and at the same time a narrower one. Drama performed outdoors has the feeling of a social experience that unites spectators in their responses. Books are quite different. Aside from the fact that they could be enjoyed in private, books in Shakespeare's time were unlike the social experience of theatre because literacy was far from universal, being about 30% in rural areas and rising to perhaps 80% in London (Cressy 1980, 72-75). Books were relatively expensive: it cost a penny to see a play performed at the Globe in 1600 (Gurr 1992, 12), but typically six times as much to buy the printed book of the same play (Blayney 1997, 411). This is a reversal of the price differential we now enjoy in which books are cheap and theatre tickets are expensive. Added to that, the print runs of books were limited by the guild of publishers, the Stationers' Company, to just 1,500 copies (Arber 1875, 43), whereas twice that many spectators could squeeze into an open-air amphitheatre to watch a play (Wickham, Berry & Ingram 2000, 438, 615).
Yet, despite all this, print allowed more people to enjoy Shakespeare in more places. The printed versions of Shakespeare's plays enabled readers far from London to enjoy London plays. Print annhiliates distance. This affected not only readers outside London but playgoers too. We know that a travelling group of players in the Yorkshire dales around 1609, the Simpson troupe, were able to perform plays from the London theatre, including Shakespeare's, because they had bought copies of the books printed there (Sisson 1942; Boddy 1976; Egan 2018; Egan 2006; Keenan 2013). This cannot have been anticipated by Shakespeare and reminds us that while Shakespeare and his company could to a large extent control what happened during performances in their London theatres, once the plays reached print they were 'free' in the important additional sense of 'beyond their creators' control'. The recent discovery that Shakespeare intended to give up that control of his plays in this fashion makes him more modern an author than we previous thought, and makes one more in the Sartrean mold that Marx would have recognized as the condition of print.
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In The German Ideology (written 1845-46) Marx made the famous and paradoxical assertions that "In a real community, the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association" and "only in community . . . is personal freedom possible" (Marx & Engels 1974, 83). This might sound like double-speak, an excuse for submerging individuality beneath collective identification. Shakespeare provides an alternative and attractive way of thinking about this social nature of identity. In the second scene of Julius Caesar, Cassius asks "Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?" and is answered "No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself" but only by reflection (1.2.53-54). Cassius offers to be Brutus's mirror, telling him who he is by showing him how others see him. This sentiment has echoes throughout creative history; you may know the version of the same idea in the 1960s pop song "I'll be your mirror".
Cassius, of course, means to flatter Brutus by reflecting back a version of Brutus that suits his, Cassius's, own ends. If self-identity is social constructured, what safeguard have we against this distorting mirror of personal flattery? Shakespeare seems to think that collective assessment of someone is our bulwark against personal flattery: no one can fool all the people all the time. Ahough there are exceptions that you can probably think of for yourself, it is not usually the case in Shakespeare that collective assessment of a person is wrong. Reputation in Shakespeare is reliable because self-identity can safely be crowd-sourced. "Petruccio is my name, Antonio's son, | A man well known throughout all Italy" is an self-introductoin that receives the entirely unironic reply "I know him well. You are welcome for his sake" (The Taming of the Shrew 2.1.68-70). This sentiment of this exchange could be illustrated in dozens of examples from across the plays.
Shakespeares had good reason to think highly of reputation as an index of self-worth, since in his lifetime his own reputation seems to have been especially high. His name appeared on the covers of his books--and, undeservedly, on others' books--to help them sell, and several of his books became bestsellers in his own lifetime. The commendatory letters and verses at the beginning of the 1623 First Folio speak of warm personal and professional relationships as well as a high reputation. Indeed, people who knew him repeatedly called him "gentle Shakespeare", although Katherine Duncan-Jones chose to call her biography of him Ungentle Shakespeare and to explore some of his less laudable acts (Duncan-Jones 2010). As Hugh Craig recently showed, the word 'gentle' was one of Shakespeare's favourites words--he uses it about twice as often as often as other writers of his time (Craig & Kinney 2009, 16)--so perhaps this is a case of subliminal suggestion: his friends and colleagues unconsciously associated the man with the word that he used abnormally often. We have still a lot to learn about just how reading affects the mind.
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What of writers about Shakespeare today: what communities do they belong within and what role does reputation play in them? It very much depends on which country we are talking about. The world's first professional literary association was the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gessellschaft founded in 1864. The American Shakespeare Association was founded in 1972, but the British Shakespeare Association was not founded until 2002. This might well reflect significant differences in our collective sense of just how the Shakespeare scholar works in relation others in the same community. In particular, the American professionalization of literary studies since the Second World War, and the professional of Shakespeare studies in particular since the1970s, has led to some remarkable local distinctions regarding the means by which Shakespeare books and articles are presented to their readers.
The world's leading journal of Shakespeare studies, the American Shakespeare Quarterly, has an unwritten rule about locating one's work within other people's recent scholarship on the same topic. On the first or second page of each article, there must be a long footnote that situates the article in the context of other' recent writings. [SLIDE] Sometimes it takes two long footnotes [SLIDE]. But usually it's just one [SLIDE]. These three examples from recent issues are entirely typical. We might suppose that essential intellectual work is being done by these long footnotes in acknowledging what patent lawyers call prior art and in proving that the writer or writers know their field intimately. There is something else going on too, though: these notes are about naming and acknowledging the reputations of one's peers, and showing that one knows that one's own work would not have been possible without theirs. [BLANK SLIDE]
The same concern is seen in the books that Shakespeare scholars write, which usually have Acknowledgements sections that are even more overtly about writing in the context of community. Ten years ago at a meeting of Renaissance Society of America in Miami I took a break to look at the books on sale at the conference, and sampling at random I made quick counts of the numbers of people thanked in the Acknowledgements sections of 15 books. In that admittedly small sample, the number of people personally thanked for helping the writer ranged from 20 to 80, with an average of 42. That is a lot of people, and at the higher end of that scale, 80, the number of people thanked may well exceed the total world sales for a research monograph in our field. The community of peers that the writer acknowledges at the start of the book might exceed the likely number of readers of the book. It such a case, it would be more effective to thank each of them in person rather than to do so in writing. We can be reasonably sure that this bizarre phenomenon arises from the career structure of professional American Shakespearianism and not simply authorly diligence, because there is a distinct inverse law of numbers at work here: the most senior academics write the shortest Acknowledgements sections, or omit them altogether.
I first started to think about these matters concerning our writing community after the American scholars Douglas Bruster reviewed my book Shakespeare and Marx in the American journal Shakespeare Quartely in 2006. In his review Bruster reported that Egan
chooses not to enter into a meaningful conversation with those in Shakespeare studies who practice materialist criticism. Thus, [he] does not acknowledge the intellectual efforts of many who have labored, however differently from the author of this monograph, to understand Shakespeare in the wake of Marx. . . . [so there is no mention of] the work of various North American scholars: Michael Bristol, Barbara Correll, Hugh Grady, Richard Halpern, Louis Montrose, Sharon O'Dair, Annabel Patterson, Paul N. Siegel, Don Wayne, and Susan Wells (to name only a few) (Bruster 2006, 105-07)
Bruster was largely right that the book does not mention those people--in fact Richard Halpern is mentioned--but the omission was intentional. From the British perspective, American Shakespeare scholarship has these peculiar coterie habits, of beginning every article with a long footnote citing all the relevant research the author wants to reader to know she has read even though she will not be mentioning it again, and the habit in books of thanking every important person in the field. Not mentioning other people's work unless you want to explicitly agree or disagree with it is a British style, and an admirable one to my mind. What is at stake in this approach is the ideas themselves, not the approval or disapproval of the holders of these ideas. The American approach is not, I suggest, a notion of community but one of professional courtesy and obligation. The endeavour is, I think, to acknowledge professional status and not advance the debate of ideas. It is hierarchical, and not in a good way.
Contrary to popular misconception, hierarchy itself is not an unMarxist phenomenon. Quite the opposite: Marx insisted upon natural hierarchies and they emerge unbidden from his fundamental economic ideas. Take the Labour Theory of Value, as outlined in Marx's masterful pamphlet on "Value, Price and Profit: Addressed to Working Men" written in 1865. The value of a commodity is measured in the labour that went into making it, and Marx treated the labouring power of people as itself just such a commodity that is produced. That is, it takes labour in childrearing, education, clothing, housing, and feeding a human being to make a new labourer, and if one kind of labourer needs to have more labour put into her making--say in the form of additional education--then that labourer's own subsequent labour has an enhanced value. Thus
. . . as the costs of producing labouring powers of different quality differ, so must differ the values of the labouring powers employed in different trades. The cry for an equality of wages rests, therefore, upon a mistake, is an insane wish never to be fulfilled. (Marx 1899, 57).
Hierarchy at least in the sense of differentiated wages (we would say, earning power) is not inimical to Marxist thinking, it is essential to it. The great Marxist Shakespearian Margot Heinemann was wrong, I think, to suggest that the Conservative Party politican Nigel Lawson was misrepresenting Shakespeare when he quoted Ulysses's 'degree' speech from Troilus and Cressida (1.3.85-137) as a defence of hierarchy (Heinemann 1985, 203). One does not need to agree with Lawson's vicious austerity economics--which are still being pursued by his current successor as Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer--to see that Lawson was right that "The fact of differences, and the need for some kind of hierarchy . . . are expressed more powerfully there than anywhere else . . . in literature" (quoted in Heinemann 1985, 203). That is precisely what Shakespeare was expressing and Marx would have agreed with him on this point.
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Shakespeare himself said little about the craft of being a writer. In his plays, the word 'author' is most commonly used to mean the creator of some plot or scheme, as in "Don John is the author of all" (Much Ado About Nothing 5.2.89) and Hamlet is the "most violent author | Of his own just remove" (Hamlet 4.5.78-9). Just occasionally in Shakespeare the word 'author' means a writer of some kind, but on only three occasions does Shakespeare use it to refer to himself as a writer: "our humble author will continue the story with Sir John in it" (2 Henry 4 Epilogue.26), "Thus far with rough and all-unable pen | Our bending author hath pursued the story" (Henry 5, Epilogue 1.2), and "hither am I come | . . . not in confidence | Of author's pen" (Troilus and Cressida Prologue.22-24). Standing at the outer margins of the plays, these prologue and epilogue speakers are as much Shakespeare's fellows actors as they are characters within the drama, and because they have one foot outside the play--as the self-proclaimed performers of it--Shakespeare can give them lines that refer to himself. In each case, the self-directed references are self-deprecatory: he characterizes himself as a humble, unable, bending, author in whom the player lacks confidence.
There is something of the tone of poetical dedications in these epilogues and prologues. Shakespeare's two long narrative poems, written near the beginning of his career, announce their authorship in the published preliminaries and a time when plays, by contrast, were almost always published anonymously. Shakespeare signs the dedication of Venus and Adonis to the young Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley. In the typical manner of such dedications, it is sycophantic, calling the poem mere "vnpolisht lines" that are scarcely worth the attention of this well-connected young man (Shakespeare 1593, A2r). This is not a play aimed to please a popular audience in the theatre but a poem targeted explicitly at one young aristocrat, and implicitly at its readers. The obvious inference is that Shakespeare hope to received the patronage of Wriothesley, since patronage was a long-established way for a writer to maintain a living by his pen. This sort of life demanded a lot of fawning, which is just the kind of behaviour to which so many of Shakespeare's most attractive dramatic characters are attuned and about which they unremittingly and scathingly cynical.
Shakespeare's other long narrative poem Lucrece was published the following year, 1594, and is also dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, and in a way that again dispraises the work as "vntutord Lines" (Shakespeare 1594, A2r) and praises the young aristocrat. This time Shakespeare manages to get some rather poetic writing into the dedication: "What I haue done is yours, what I haue to doe is yours, being part in all I haue, deuoted yours". Indeed, we might detect beneath the flattery some real affection here, even romantic feelings. Whatever the motivation behind writing these two long narrative poems, publishing them and dedicating them to the Earl of Southampton was a conscious decision by Shakespeare since in each case he signed the dedication page and the printer was a childhood friend of his.
There were two distinct career paths lying before the young William Shakespeare in the early 1590s: he could be a dramatist for the popular stage or he could be a poet for an aristocratic patron. It is unlikely that he thought he could be both because in the early 1590s these were widely perceived to be incompatible activities and distinct career paths. Traditionally, poets spent their time living with their aristocratic patrons at court or at their country homes, keeping away from ordinary people and ordinary life. They might help out with the education of the aristocrat's children, but that was as close as they got to anything like a job. Shakespeare had before him a model for this life in his near-contemporary Samuel Daniel (1562/3-1619) who lived with a series of his patrons: first Sir Edward Dymoke, then Mary Sidney (Countess of Pembroke), and then Margaret Clifford (Countess of Cumberland); the inconveniences of this lifestyle are conveyed in Daniel's letters to friends (Pitcher 2004). Although Shakespeare may not have known it, Wriothesley was in fact in no position to offer him such a lifestyle, being financially desperate even though his long-term prospects were good (Honan 2004). In any event, Shakespeare chose the life of the indirectly patronized dramatic author rather than the directly patronized house poet.
Shakespeare had little opportunity to see the communities of readers that were formed by the mass publication of his works, beyond the few that would frequent the bookshops of St Paul's Churchyard as he must have done. At the start of Shakespeare's career, play publication was an anonymous activity, with the play's genre and theatre taking the author's place on attention-grabbing title-pages. During his lifetime this changed, but Shakespeare was essentially too early to see the great explosion of what we now call English Literature in print. Erne lists the first known collectors of volumes of Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists and although this exercise usefully dispels the idea that no one was serious about his writings until the eighteenth century it is noticeable that the collections start to become significant at the end of and shortly after Shakespeare's career, not at the height of it (Erne 2013, 194-232). Shakespeare would have known that he was selling well, but a community of his readers had scarcely begun to form before he stopped writing.
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Communities are people connected by social binds. For Shakespeare, the possible options for vertical and horizontal social bonds were considerably fewer than we enjoy today. The nature of family structures has of course changed since Shakespeare, a fact that Frederick Engels attributed to changes in the way that production is organized within and outside the home (Engels 1940). But one does not need to accept the idea the family relationships are shaped by wider social and productive organization to acknowledge that alternative fraternities existed for London citizens working in certain trades but not in others. There was no guild for actors, but according to Roslyn Knutson the actor companies behaved in a way that gave them something approaching an informal guild structure (Knutson 2001). In making this argument, Knutson was responding to Andrew Gurr characterization of the early modern playing companies as cut-throat, proto-capitalist enterprises, because they were essentially joint-stock companies organized along the same lines as the Virginia Company and the East India Company. In response, Knutson offers plenty of evidence that in fact the personal relationships between actors and writers belie this model of competitive behaviour: these professionals behaved in their collective rather than individual interests and the most recent biographical study has confirmed this (Brown 2017). They behaved, in other words, as a community.
I have said nothing so far on the most important recent discoveries about Shakespearian writing in the context of community, which is of course the extent which Shakespeare collaborated with other writers on the composition of his works. So I will end briefly with that point. Shakespeare's was an art exactly as Sartre put it: "for and by others". Until perhaps 30 years ago we thought that Shakespeare essentially wrote on his own, but the better we get at discriminating one person's writings from another's by examining their internal featurs the more we find this not to be the case. The New Oxford Shakespeare that has just appeared gives us the following chronological picture:
Arden of Faversham (1588) Anonymous and Shakespeare
Titus Andronicus (1589) Shakespeare, George Peele, Thomas Middleton
2 Henry VI (1590) Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and another(?)
3 Henry VI (1590) Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and another(?)
Edward III (1592) Anonymous and Shakespeare
1 Henry VI (1595) Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare
The Spanish Tragedy (1599) Thomas Kyd and Shakespeare
Sejanus (1603) Ben Jonson and Shakespeare
Sir Thomas More (1603-4) Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, Shakespeare, and Hand C
Measure for Measure (1604) Shakespeare and Middleton
All's Well that Ends Well (1605) Shakespeare and Middleton
Timon of Athens (1606) Shakespeare and Middleton
Macbeth (1606) Shakespeare and Middleton
Pericles (1608) Shakespeare and George Wilkins
Cardenio (1612) John Fletcher and Shakespeare
All Is True; or, King Henry VIII (1613) John Fletcher and Shakespeare
The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) John Fletcher and Shakespeare
These are the play in which we find clear evidence of non-Shakespearian hands, and there are seventeen of them, which is almost half the number of plays published in the 1623 First Folio, which still forms the bedrock of the Shakespeare canon, although almost half of these 17 were not included in that collection. What I have not distinguished here is just how these others' writings got combined with Shakespeare's. In some cases we have long known that the combination was by active collaboration. [SLIDE] For example, The Two Noble Kinsmenhas Fletcher's and Shakespeare's names on the title page of its first edition. But some of these writings-in-community cannot have been active collaborations. [SLIDE] Thomas Kyd had been dead for five years when Shakespeare (and others) wrote new additions to his old hit The Spanish Tragedy. [SLIDE] In the case of Thomas Middleton, we have clear evidence of active collaboration in Timon of Athens and of posthumous adaptation of Shakespeare by Middleton in Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, and Macbeth. [SLIDE] Lastly, but chronologically the earliest, we just do not know if Shakespeare actively collaborated on his earliest plays or simply took over existing plays by other men and refurbished them [SLIDE].
The fact that we can detect the different hands in these writings of mixed authorship shows that Shakespeare's individuality was not submerged in his active and/or passive collaborations. Rather they provided the conditions that enabled it to flourish. In the field of literary studies there has been since the 1960s a widespread prejudice against the individuality of the authorial voice and in favour of the idea of a collective cultural voice. The orthodox view is that the writer speaks only the language of the times, so that all writing is just what Roland Barthes called "a tissue of quotations" of what has been written before (Barthes 1977, 146). In this model of authorship, when writers collaborate they blend their voices so that their individuality is lost, and this is supposed to be a good thing (Masten 1997). These ideas came from 1960s French literary theory that was allegedly inspired by Marxism, but there is nothing in Marx that requires us to subsume individual creativity within the creativity of the group, as French poststructuralist theory implies. For Marx, the point of thinking about groups of individuals collectively--as classes--was to discover how the practicalities of production tend to treat people as if they really are all alike and so to find ways to abolish the systems that do that in order to find out who we really are and let real history begin. For "only in community", according to Marx, "is personal freedom possible" (Marx & Engels 1974, 83). Shakespeare's emergence within the community of early modern theatre in the mid-1590s illustrates that such a socialized notion of creativity is entirely compatible with attainment of the highest peaks of individual artistic achievement.
Works Cited
Arber, Edward, ed. 1875. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554-1640 AD. Vol. 2: Text. Entries of Books to 25 June 1595; Entries of Apprentices and Freemen, Calls on the Livery, and Fines to 2 July 1605. 5 vols. London. Privately printed.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London. Fontana.
Blayney, Peter W. M. 1997. "The Publication of Playbooks." A New History of Early English Drama. Edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York. Columbia University Press. 383-422.
Boddy, G. W. 1976. "Players of Interludes in North Yorkshire in the Early Seventeenth Century." North Yorkshire Country Records Office Journal 3. 95-130.
Brown, Paul. 2017. Early Modern Theatre People and Their Social Networks. Unpublished PhD thesis, De Montfort University.
Bruster, Douglas. 2006. "Review of Gabriel Egan Shakespeare and Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)." Shakespeare Quarterly 57. 105-07.
Craig, Hugh and Arthur F. Kinney. 2009. Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Cressy, David. 1980. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. 2010. Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life. Revised edition of _Ungentle Shakespeare_ (2001). The Arden Shakespeare. London. Methuen.
Egan, Gabriel. 2006. "'As it Was, Is, or Will be Played': Title-pages and the Theatre Industry to 1610." From Performance to Print in Early Shakespeare's England. Edited by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel. Redefining British Theatre History. London. Palgrave Macmillan. 92-110.
Egan, Gabriel. 2018. "Young Shakespeare's Aspirations." Early Shakespeare. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. TBA.
Engels, Frederick. 1940. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. Translated from the fourth edition (Moscow, 1934) by Alick West and Dona Torr. The Marxist-Leninist Libary. 20. London. Lawrence and Wishart.
Erne, Lukas. 2003. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Erne, Lukas. 2013. Shakespeare and the Book Trade. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Gurr, Andrew. 1992. The Shakespearean Stage 1574 - 1642. 3rd edition. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Heinemann, Margot. 1985. "How Brecht Read Shakespeare." Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester. Manchester University Press. 202-30.
Honan, Park. 2004. "Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (1573-1624)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Edited by H. C. G. Matthew, Brian Harrison and Lawrence Goldman. Oxford. Oxford University Press. n. pag..
Keenan, Siobhan. 2013. "The Simpson Players of Jacobean Yorkshire and the Professional Stage." Theatre Notebook 67. 16-35.
Knutson, Roslyn Lander. 2001. Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 1974. The German Ideology. Ed. C. J. Arthur. London. Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, Karl. 1899. Value, Price and Profit: Addressed to Working Men. Ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling. London. George Allen and Unwin.
Masten, Jeffrey. 1997. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. 14. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Pitcher, John. 2004. "Samuel Daniel (1562/3-1619)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Edited by H. C. G. Matthew, Brian Harrison and Lawrence Goldman. Oxford. Oxford University Press. n. pag..
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1986. What is Literature?. Tran. Bernard Frechtman. Introd. David Caute. London. Methuen.
Shakespeare, William. 1593. Venus and Adonis. STC 22354. London. Richard Field.
Shakespeare, William. 1594. Lucrece. STC 22345. London. Richard Field for John Harrison.
Sisson, C. J. 1942. "Shakespeare Quartos as Prompt-copies." Review of English Studies 18. 129-43.
Wickham, Glynne, Herbert Berry and William Ingram, eds. 2000. English Professional Theatre, 1530-1660. Theatre in Europe: A documentary history. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.