Shakespeare After Werstine

Shakespeare After Werstine

This conference will be a free event, beginning with a catered opening reception on May 1st to welcome scholars and to celebrate the teaching and research legacy of Distinguished University Professor Paul Werstine.

May 2nd and 3rd will feature panel discussions by leading and emerging scholars on the most urgent questions of editorial practice facing Shakespeare scholars today. Over the past three decades, in part driven by the work of Paul Werstine, assumptions and practices that dominated editing in the twentieth century have been overturned. Editors and textual theorists now work at a moment of uncertainty that demands new theories and practices for establishing and presenting Shakespeare's text. As edited texts are the starting point for nearly all Shakespeare research and teaching, this rethinking of editing is a fundamental issue for Shakespeare scholarship at all levels.

Paper sessions will address three challenges. First, now that assumptions that purported to identify the copy beneath early printed texts have been discredited, how may textual and documentary evidence bear on editorial decision-making? Second, how may new editions best serve a diverse modern readership? Papers might explore, for example, how obligations to equity and diversity might be better met through editorial strategies such as paratextual materials, decisions about the playtext, and innovative forms of annotation. Third, presentations will address how accessibility and possibilities for interactivity that come with digital publication have transformed the editor's work, the face of the edition, and concepts of what constitutes a work and a canon.

Host or Publisher M.J. Kidnie, J. Purkis (Western) & I. Rae (King's)