Reviewed by: The Invention of Shakespeare and Other Essays by Stephen Orgel Fran Teague THE INVENTION OF SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER ESSAYS. Stephen Orgel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022; pp. 192, 7 halftones. The Invention of Shakespeare gathers twelve of Stephen Orgelās essays. In his opening essay, he declares the collectionās theme to be āthe invention of Shakespeare, the creation of an author suited to [End Page 113] the increasing canonicity of the worksā (1). The book steadily resists canonization, however, for the pleasure of the glitches (Orgelās term). In chapter one, the glitches include the way that rumor, forgery, and misjudgment have forged our understanding of Shakespeareās life and works. If a teacher talks about what the Chandos portrait tells us about Shakespeare the man, how sailors staged Hamlet off the coast of Sierra Leone, or why Shakespeare used Don Quixote in his lost play Cardenio, the class learns things likely to be false. The history of how the myth of Shakespeareās life and works came to be, so well discussed by scholars like Schoenbaum and Taylor, is an important part of this book, but unlike his predecessors, Orgel uses the textual glitches as a heuristic, generating new ways of understanding why the glitches matter. Orgel remarks early on, after noting that the text as we have it today is a script: āThe script is not the play, it is only where the play starts. The actors turn it into a play, and every revival of the playāand indeed, every performanceāis different. There is never a āfinal versionā (2). In literary discussions, critics often want to believe in a master-text and may resist the idea that editing a play, reading a play, and watching a play differ from editing, reading, or experiencing prose fiction or poetry or other forms. Chapter two, āThe Desire and Pursuit of the Whole,ā focuses on canonicity. Specifically, it concerns editors and the way that they imagine and improve on Shakespeare in the guise of improving on previous editions. The dizzying way that certain plays are in the canon, out of the canon, ping-ponging back and forth, makes for fascinating (and sometimes comic) reading. After the first chapter, however, the essays are varied: Orgel writes some in his role as a textual editor, some as a sophisticated reader, and some as a play-goer. In his introduction, Orgel groups together five of the essays, āNo Sense of an Ending,ā āThe Poetics of Incomprehensibility,ā āTwo Household Friends,ā āGetting Things Wrong,ā and āRevising King Lear.ā These essays āfocus in various ways on the sorts of problems I have termed glitches, whether typographical, grammatical, or discursiveā (3). He also mentions that two essays, āFood for Thoughtā and āVenice at the Globe,ā were written for groups that share an interest in early modern culture. Two others, āDanny Scheieās Shakespeareā and āShakespeare allāitaliana,ā consider performance from the perspective of an audience member. One essay, āLascivious Grace,ā is perhaps the most personal, but goes unmentioned in the introduction. Chapter three, āNo Sense of an Ending,ā concerns Shakespeareās poetry (and that of others) and the way that a poem may seem incomplete rather than the product of an artistic or printerās choice. The argument also suggests that the sonnets are personal, autobiographical, in what they say about homosexual and adulterous relationships. The following chapter, āLascivious Grace,ā presents Orgel as a reader, analyzing character (especially Iago) in Othello and picking up on threads from the previous essay. This chapter is a revised version of work published in Orgelās Spectacular Performances, and it shows him as reader, as textual editor, and as a director who āstages the play in my own mindā (50). But he also writes that ātwo friends to whom I have proposed this [character analysis of Iago] havenāt liked it; both objected that making Iago gay explains too much, that malignity ought to be left motivelessā (51). As a reader, I have no problem acknowledging that productions may certainly offer homoeroticism as an important part of the play, but I think other important elements are race and Desdemonaās choices (and agency), which the essay does...