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Shakespeare & Beyond

Who decides what’s in a canon? Jeremy Lopez on English literary history

A select collection of old plays
A select collection of old plays

This year marks Jeremy Lopez’s first in succeeding Gail Kern Paster as editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, the academic journal of Shakespeare studies published by the Folger. We revisit this profile of him by Amy Arden from the Fall 2013 issue of Folger Magazine.


Scholar Jeremy Lopez spent his fellowship year at the Folger investigating the beginnings of English literary history and how the choices made by eighteenth-century literary historians influenced literary tastes. Who decided which old texts of plays and poems and ballads were saved for posterity and which were buried in obscurity? And how does that color our understanding of Shakespeare?

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Jeremy Lopez, Professor of English at the University of Toronto, is the new editor of Shakespeare Quarterly

Shakespeare is a household name in almost every household one might think of. But when most people are asked to name Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the answer might well be a shrug or even a look of incomprehension, despite the fact that Shakespeare was only one playwright among many in a bustling and highly competitive theatrical world. For better or for worse, scholars and anthologizers, and by extension, readers and theatergoers have drawn two circles when it comes to early English drama. One belongs to Shakespeare. One belongs to everybody else.

Jeremy Lopez, associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, is questioning the history of this dichotomy drawn between Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights in an upcoming book, Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama, due out from Cambridge in early 2014. The goal: to rethink the contours of English drama apart from Shakespeare.

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Lopez’s 2014 book, “Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama”

“Everything is compared to Shakespeare, and I don’t think there is any way around that. It’s a great thing, to have a common currency for criticism. You have to go through Shakespeare to get to non-Shakespeare,” Lopez explains.

By moving outside a Shakespeare-based repertoire, Lopez is taking a look at which plays were considered better than others, what kind of criteria were used in making those judgments, and especially how the works selected to represent the early modern era might change.

Comments

Interesting article, but the most interesting with the note on Christopher Marlowe’s death. I admit I read to the bottom hoping to learn more. How about something on that?

Tish Wells — July 29, 2018