Ebook: Shakespeare and the Institution of Theatre: The Best in this Kind (Palgrave Shakespeare Studies)

In this highly original book, Erica Sheen rethinks an approach that has been central to Shakespearean studies since the rise of New Historicism in the 1980s. Challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that the institutional form of early modern theatre was that of a market, she takes her starting point from sixteenth-century developments in the law of property, and offers innovative readings of Shakespeare's plays which demonstrate his adaptation of legal principles of ownership to the creative labour by which his work, and that of the Chamberlain's Men, came to be recognised in their own time as 'the best in this kind'. She extends this analysis to questions about the nature of dramatic action and spectatorship that are fundamental to our understanding of the distinctive quality of Shakespeare's work. This imaginative study will encourage its readers to change the way they think about hitherto familiar plays and critical problems.