Impressive Shakespeare ─ Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama

Shakespeare’s supposed genius and universality is still thought to lie in his work’s capacity to ’impress’, ’imprint’ or ’stamp’ our hearts, minds and souls. But to what extent is Shakespeare’s perceived impressiveness rooted in his own language of impression? Impressive Shakespeare investigates the language and material culture of three interrelated ’impressing technologies’ in Shakespearean drama: wax sealing, coining and printing. Combining book history, material culture and rhetorical theory through historicised close readings of four plays-Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale-the book analyses Shakespeare’s imprinting metaphors in relation to a variety of early modern texts and objects, arguing that Shakespeare employs the language of impression to explore the formation and destabilisation of personhood and power. In doing so, it considers the material forms of performed and printed drama, which Shakespeare and his contemporaries recognised as shaping meaning and contributing to processes by which plays ’imprinted’ audiences and readers with ideas, morals and memories. Harry Newman contextualises Shakespeare's language of impression in relation to not only the imaginative literature of contemporary authors (especially Greene, Donne, Middleton, Dekker and Jonson), but also a wide range of ’non-literary’ early modern texts such as medical writings, religious and political treatises, philosophical works and rhetorical manuals. He reveals new sources, establishes the cultural importance of largely neglected technologies, and exposes surprising connections between seemingly disparate discourses, such as anti-theatrical polemic and the language of bardolatry. As a whole, Impressive Shakespeare connects the figurative and the material imprint in Shakespearean drama, and thus revises our understanding of the dramatist’s relationship with ’print culture’ in early modern England. It

Harry Newman is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent, UK.