Shakespeare and Narrative Theory

Shakespeare and Narrative Theory is the first book-length collection to explore the intersection of two established scholarly fields, posing two main questions: what can narrative theory tell us about Shakespeare’s works, especially his plays, and what can Shakespeare’s dramatic storytelling tell us about narrative and narrativity?Shakespeare was a great storyteller; his plays dramatize narrative sequences of events and possess many features commonly analyzed by narrative theorists including the composition of plots from narrative functions; the interplay of fabula and sjužet with respect to time, ordering, point of view, focalization, and the relation of fictions to possible worlds. Yet to date, little scholarly attention has been paid to his works as models of narrative fiction. This collection addresses questions such as: What storytelling techniques does Shakespeare use to generate suspense, curiosity, and surprise? How are his narrative forms like, and unlike, those employed by narrators in nondramatic fiction? When characters in his plays themselves tell stories, what is the relation between what they are doing and the narrativity of the dramatic and theatrical fictions that give the tellers being? How do Shakespeare’s dramatic narrative strategies differ from those of his theatrical predecessors and contemporaries?The essays contained here equip readers of Shakespeare's drama to greatly expand their analytic vocabularies and their heuristic frameworks for asking what plays do and why. At the same time, the book will afford many narratologists their first sustained view of Shakespearean scholarship’s theatrical and discursive practices that shape early modern dramatic narrative and that enable the intricacies and ambiguities of Shakespeare’s storytelling.