Editing Archipelagic Shakespeare

This Element examines Irish, Scottish, and Welsh characters and place names for understanding Shakespeare and the editorial tradition.

Editing Archipelagic Shakespeare explores the power of names in Shakespeare's works, focusing on Irish, Scottish, and Welsh characters and places. It explores who chooses names, why, and how they affect playgoers and readers. This Element offers a comprehensive case study for non-anglophone and global studies of Shakespeare and early modern drama.Editing Archipelagic Shakespeare is a study of the power of names; more specifically, it is about the power of naming, asking who gets to choose names, for what reason, and to what effect. Shakespeare assigns names to over 1,200 characters and countless more sites and places, and these names, or versions of these names, have become familiar to generations of playgoers and play-readers. And because of their familiarity, Shakespeare's names, most frequently anglicized versions of non-English names, have been accepted and repeated without further consideration. Approaching names from an archipelagic perspective, and focusing upon how Irish, Scottish, and Welsh characters and places are written by Shakespeare and treated by editors, this Element offers an expansive, and far-reaching, case study for non-anglophone and global studies of Shakespeare, textual scholarship, and early modern drama.