Jeremy Lopez

This page reflects a scholar's association with the Folger Institute.

Long-term fellowship

Anticanons for Early Modern Drama (NEH, 2010-2011)

This book undertakes to describe, historicize, and effect a large-scale reconsideration of the canon of “non-Shakespearean” early modern drama. During the term of my fellowship I will write two chapters for the this book.

In “Canon by Exclusion: Collecting Early Modern Drama from Dodsley to Norton,” I will write the history of the non-Shakespearean canon as it currently exists in modern anthologies, and as it has evolved since Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old Plays (1744). Analyzing these anthologies within a theoretical framework informed by contemporary scholarship and debate on canon-formation, this chapter will anatomize the editorial, aesthetic, and institutional stakes of that canon in such a way as to demonstrate that its wholesale reconsideration is timely and necessary.

In “The Heywood Problem: Texts vs. Canon” I will write a history of Heywood’s textual and (non-) canonical identity in order to examine two questions near the heart of modern scholarship’s attempt to comprehend early modern dramatic literature within the form of the canonical anthology: first, what is it about Heywood’s play-texts which has made them resistant not only to reproductions as an authorial canon, but also to inclusion within the early modern dramatic canon? And second, how is it possible to use the resistant quality in these texts as a means of revising the Shakespearean aesthetic upon which re-presentations of early modern dramatic literature are based?

Podcast

"Speak to Me as to Thy Thinkings: Why Shakespeare's Stories Still Resonate"

Rebecca Sheir, host of our Shakespeare Unlimited series, talks with scholars Gail Kern Paster and Jeremy Lopez about why we continue to learn something new from Shakespeare's plays more than four hundred years after their first performance.