Constructing Inessential Shakespeare in the United States

Abstract

ABSTRACT ‘Inessential Shakespeare’ is largely an invented category, a consequence of a set of critical, editorial, and economic factors established when Shakespeare studies emerged as a recognisable academic discipline. Like all disciplines, Shakespeare studies required the construction of a material and conceptual apparatus consisting of the text of the plays, annotations, introductions, methods, and commentaries that would introduce students to the formal study of Shakespeare – as opposed to the more ephemeral experience of witnessing a performance. I argue that two popular and influential nineteenth-century American editors, Henry Norman Hudson and Richard Grant White, in the process of rendering Shakespeare essential to American education, also introduced a series of plays that continue to be held less essential than others. Demarcating some plays as inessential, even if unintentional, was therefore necessary due to the institutional demands of this new field of study.