The 2025 John N. King Lecture in Medieval and Renaissance Studies will feature Dr. Mark Bayer, Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, presenting "The American Editorial Tradition and the Emergence of Shakespeare Studies."
At the end of the Civil War, there were well over one million copies of Shakespeare’s plays in circulation in the United States, at a time when the population was about 30 million—about one copy for every six households. These editions, moreover, were used in several contexts beyond casual reading. By the end of the nineteenth century, many schools and colleges featured classes exclusively on Shakespeare, and his dramatic works became the subject of deliberate humanistic inquiry and philological scholarship by an emerging cadre of specialists who would come to populate the earliest university English departments. I argue that Shakespeare’s growing place in American culture was made possible by editors. These editors, amateur enthusiasts who had little formal training in English literature, nevertheless influenced how generations read and understood Shakespeare and were pivotal in the development of this incipient academic field. The mechanism of the edition was crucial in mediating Shakespeare for new readers because it embedded a humanist critical approach within its textual apparatus—introductions and annotations subtly assisted Americans to not just read the plays, but to understand them in a specific way. Today, I concentrate on one in particular: Richard Grant White. An irascible New York City reporter by trade, White published a series of editions during the late nineteenth century, including the first Riverside Edition that would be used in college classes for over a century. In these works, White self-consciously and defiantly departed from prevailing British scholarly conventions, signaling a commitment to make Shakespeare accessible, enjoyable, and, above all, intellectually useful to a specifically American readership.
This event is free, open to the public and welcoming to everyone. Co-hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the OSU Humanities Institute.
Mark Bayer is Celia Jacobs Endowed Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research focuses on the reception of early modern drama. He's interested in both the local conditions of dramatic performance in sixteenth and seventeenth-century London, and in the afterlives of Shakespeare’s plays in contexts as diverse as the modern Middle East to nineteenth-century America. In his first book, Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London (University of Iowa Press, 2011), a finalist for the 2012 Freedley award, he claimed that playgoing enhanced social capital and contributed to community formation in early modern London—especially in the neighborhoods where specific playhouses were located.
He is the author of numerous articles on these subjects and editor (with Joseph Navitsky) of Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States (Routledge, 2022) and Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, and the Bardic Tradition (forthcoming, Cornell University Press).
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