Micro-Seminar: Forging Shakespeare PART ONE

Micro-Seminars have two parts. Attendance to both parts is required. Registering for the PART ONE session will automatically enroll you in the PART TWO session on Friday.

Part 1: Thursday, August 22, 2024 from 3:00 – 4:30 pm (PST)
Part 2: Friday, August 23, 2024 from 10:00 – 11:30 am (PST)

This micro-seminar encourages students to think broadly about three humanistic issues: what constitutes authenticity in relation to an author’s work (Shakespeare’s in this case, but the conclusions can be broadened), how the relationship between an author and his / her / their text has been historically understood, and why it matters to us, culturally, to establish that an author has in fact written the words ascribed to that author's name.

Our first day’s lecture addresses these questions by getting students to think about “forging” Shakespeare in the sense of “making” Shakespeare: we discuss how the Shakespeare we know today is a product of many editorial and cultural collaborations. To this end, we examine textual variants of famous Shakespearean speeches, early biographical descriptions of Shakespeare’s life, and multiple artistic interpretations of how Shakespeare looked.

The second class addresses issues of “forging” Shakespeare in the sense of “faking” Shakespeare: we discuss some of the famous Shakespeare forgery cases and do close readings of Shakespeare-imitations. In both classes we connect these discussions to contemporary, high-profile accounts of plagiarism and forgery.

The goal for the class is that a better historical understanding of attitudes toward authorship and authenticity will give us a better position from which to analyze, debate, and understand the media presentation, professional ramifications, contemporary definitions, and even potential intellectual benefit of plagiarism and forgery today. No pre-circulated reading is required.

Lead By: Professor Emily Anderson

I am Professor in the English Department at USC, where I have been very happily employed since earning my Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2004. My area of specialty is eighteenth-century British literature and culture, and within this rubric I work on a range of topics: the eighteenth-century novel, drama, and the connections between performance and print; actors, actresses, playwrights, and emergent celebrity culture; and links between literary criticism and memoir. My first book, on the mutually constitutive relationship of eighteenth-century novels and plays, established my interest in the interactions between performance and print. In my second book, Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss, I delved deeper into these interactions by questioning what artistic medium is best suited to commemoration, and how in practice the artistic struggle with ephemerality plays out. My forthcoming book, Shadow Work: Loneliness and the Writing Life (Columbia University Press), takes my interest in loss and effacement in a more personal direction. Framed as a series of essays, “Shadow Work” is a book that asks how the often-isolating work of reading and writing co-exists with the ability to have a communal, not-solitary life.

My new book, _Ghostwriting, A History: Authorship and Authenticity Over Time_, blends my expertise in practices of authorship with the ideas of invisible labor prominent in my third book. Ghostwriting, defined as the act of one person writing in the name of another, is not a new phenomenon. According to contemporary ghostwriters, the practice has been around since written language itself. But what would impel one person to claim ownership of words he or she didn’t write? What would impel this other person to abdicate the role of author and give creative credit to someone else? And what has the implementation of this practice looked like over time? Ghostwriting, A History excavates this hidden process, and readers intrigued by the topic of invisible authorship will be compelled by the revelatory interviews with practicing ghostwriters that I have been to include. Among its conclusions, this book demonstrates how a writing practice that hides its writer has shaped our fundamental attitudes toward collaborative authorship, even as ghostwriting has made an increasingly illiterate society—the average American now reads fewer than twelve books a year—newly impassioned about who gets to say they have written a book.

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