Generic Innovation in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Revises current thinking about how genre operates in early modern theatreDiscusses generic change and innovation across a broad range of genresDiscusses both well-known plays and lesser-known texts to make its case about genre and changePresents an historical account of generic changeThis book investigates generic change in early modern theatre across multiple genres, unlike much other scholarship, attempting to understand change and innovation in terms of competition within the dramatic field. It draws on the work of Bakhtin and Bourdieu as well as theatre history, book history, and literary criticism to advance its argument about generic change and innovation.

Edward Gieskes is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He is the author of the monograph Representing the Professions (Delaware, 2006) and co-edited (with Kirk Melnikoff) Writing Robert Greene: New Essays on England's First Notorious Professional Writer (Ashgate, 2008). Recent publications include: Material and Institutional Contexts of Early Modern Drama: An A-Z in the Arden Handbook to Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama (Arden Shakespeare, 2022), 'materia conveniente modis': Ovid and Drama in Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theater (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Rumour's Household: Truth, Memory, Fiction, History in Shakespeare and Memory (Routledge, 2017), and Learning and Teaching Resources: History, Politics, and Edward II (Arden Shakespeare, 2017).