The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594

One of the central assumptions of established Shakespeare scholarship has been that the playwright produced flawless work needing no revision—that if a text was inferior in style, it could be assumed that Shakespeare did not write it. Thus Shakespeare had nothing to do with the "bad" quartos; these were instead the work of "memorial reconstruction," in which actors remembered and subsequently wrote down entire texts composed by others. In this controversial book, Eric Sams suggests that the...