Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton

Many readers and students do not recognise the extent to which modern standard editions of Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe and other Renaissance authors have been filtered through eighteenth century and Victorian sensibilities. In Unediting the Renaissance Leah Marcus reveals the vast array of possibilities opened up by ‘unediting’ these texts. With carefully researched scholarship and lively, elegantly argued rhetoric, Marcus show how much the texts of early modern authors have altered and rigidified over time. She also demonstrates how modern interpretations and performances of their work can be injected with new energy by a recognition of the possiblities closed off by modern standard editions. A lively critique of current theoretical practices, Unediting the Renaissance is a provocative work which will initiate much debate about what makes a text ‘definitive’.