Early modern England owed a deep historical, lexical and cultural debt to France. Despite this debt, England was anxious to assert itself amid the new and unstable climate of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the book trade, the growth of commerce and the development of the early modern nation. In order to do so, England pursued a series of conflicting advancements: to learn French, to study Anglo-French history, and to glorify England. Shakespeare and the French Borders of English emerges from an interdisciplinary conversation about the theory of translation and the role of foreign language in fiction and society. By analyzing Shakespeare's treatment of France, Saenger interrogates the cognitive borders of England - a border that was more dependent on languages and ideas than it was on governments and shorelines.

An investigation into the ways in which early modern books were advertised, this study argues that those means of advertisement both record and help to shape social interactions between people and books. These interactions are not only fascinating in themselves, but also demonstrably linked to larger social phenomena, such as human commodification, the development of English nationalism, the increasingly unruly proliferation of literacy, and changing conceptions of literature. Within the context of recent developments of new textualism and new economic criticism, Saenger's approach makes use of formalist strategies of genre recognition as well as new historicist connections between social history and art. In this study Saenger illustrates his general account of the formal properties of front matter-titles and subtitles, prefatory epistles, and commendatory verses-with engaging readings of specific examples, including Feltham's Resolves, A Myrrovre for Magistrates, and Sidney's Arcadia. He explores the several ways in which paratextual authors sought to involve the reader in various active roles vis A vis the main text, whether those books were prose fiction or translated continental sermons. Some particular attention is devoted to printed drama, both because dramatic texts present printers with a unique set of challenges and because those texts have often been misread in recent criticism. This book offers a much-needed analysis of profound transformations-not only to the book trade as an industry, but also to the very concepts of reading and authorship-in an age which saw the relatively brief coincidence of ancient marketing strategies and systems and the burgeoning market of the mechanically reproduced text.

This study emerges from an interdisciplinary conversation about the theory of translation and the role of foreign language in fiction and society. By analyzing Shakespeare's treatment of France, Saenger interrogates the cognitive borders of England - a border that was more dependent on languages and ideas than it was on governments and shorelines.

It may certainly be said that nothing can be assumed about Shakespeare: on the one hand, the Elizabethan poet seems to be thriving, with more editions, productions, studies, and translations appearing every year; on the other hand, in a time of global crisis and decolonization, the question of why Shakespeare is relevant at all is now more pertinent than ever. Shakespeare in Succession approaches the question of relevance by positioning Shakespeare as a participant as well as an object of adaptive translation, a labour that has always mediated between the foreign and the domestic, between the past and the present, between the arcane and the urgent. The volume situates Shakespeare on a continuum of transfers that can be understood from cultural, spatial, temporal, or linguistic points of view by studying how the text of Shakespeare is transformed into other languages and examining Shakespeare himself as a kind of translator of previous times, older stories, and prior theatrical and linguistic systems. Contending with the poet’s contemporary fate, Shakespeare in Succession asks how Shakespeare’s work can be offered to the multicultural present in which we live, and how we might relate our position to that of the iconic writer.