Shakespeare Only

“Jeffrey Knapp’s Shakespeare Only is a decisive and brilliant advance in our understanding of Shakespeare and of his literary culture. The book sweeps away many wide-spread misconceptions about Renaissance authorship and provides detailed evidence for the ways Elizabethan and Jacobean readers and audiences actually thought about the creators of the plays they enjoyed. Above all, Knapp provides a remarkable, deeply compelling account of Shakespeare’s own strangely paradoxical conception of authorship. That conception, Knapp shows, entailed in the interest of ambition the abandonment of dreams of absolute sovereignty and an unprecedented plunge into collaboration and commonness.”

“Was Shakespeare one of a kind? The pursuit of this question leads Jeffrey Knapp on a wide-ranging study of Renaissance authorship. Amassing a formidable array of fact and argument, Shakespeare Only takes issue with the collaborative model of playwrighting currently in vogue among historicist critics, and argues persuasively that the single-author paradigm established itself in the theater earlier and more forcefully than has been thought. Knapp shows that the much-maligned ‘author-function’ plays a vital role not only in the production of Renaissance drama but in the plots of the plays themselves, where themes of death, resurrection, and inheritance frequently allegorize the vicissitudes of authorship. This is a sharply-argued intervention in current critical debates.”

“One of the profession’s finest historicists takes on one of that school’s most precious credos: the tenet that authorship as we know it did not exist in Shakespeare’s England. Knapp does not reject the historicist enterprise, however, in favor of an unreformed Bardolatory, but rather renders more vivid and precise our picture of just what dramatic authorship was and could be in the Renaissance. With erudition, tact, and the deepest sympathy for both the poetry and the praxis of England’s greatest playwright, Knapp delivers us a Shakespeare whose experiments with different authorial models, including collaborative ones, helped shape the form and pressure of his plays.”

“Knapp’s intriguing thesis is that Shakespeare consciously sought a singular status as an author by going against the dominant early modern elitism. Shakespeare, in this reading, understands that modern capitalist necessity of having a broad base for commercial and artistic success.”