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Theodore Leinwand

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Emeritus Professor, English

3240 Tawes Hall
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Research Expertise

Early Modern Studies
Poetics

Now professor emeritus, I taught courses mostly on early modern drama.  My essays and books in this field focus on Tudor and Stuart London and the productive relations between the city's changing economy and plays written for its new stages.  I also have edited one of these plays, Thomas Middleton's Michaelmas Term.  My more recent work includes afterwords to books on Renaissance ethics and on Shakespeare in American education, a Yale Review essay on the Shakespearean perverse, a Hopkins Review essay on Shakespeare and mediocrity, and another on Shakespearean harmonics, "Heartache in Elsinore" in Raritan, plus an appraisal of Thomas Adès’s opera, The Tempest, in Opera Quarterly. My series of essays about writers reading Shakespeare--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes--coalesced in 2016 as a book, The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare (University of Chicago Press).  I served for a number of years on the board of the Folger Institute and I am a Consulting Editor for Shakespeare Quarterly.

Publications

The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare

The Great William is the first book to explore how several renowned writers including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, and Allen Ginsberg—wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they were reading his work.

English

Author/Lead: Theodore Leinwand
Dates:

The Great William is the first book to explore how seven renowned writers—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes—wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they were reading his work. What emerges is a constellation of remarkable intellectual and emotional encounters.

Leinwand builds detailed accounts of these writers’ experiences through their marginalia, lectures, letters, journals, and reading notes. We learn why Woolf associated reading Shakespeare with her brother Thoby, and what Ginsberg meant when referring to the mouth feel of Shakespeare’s verse. From Hughes’s attempts to find a “skeleton key” to all of Shakespeare’s plays to Berryman’s tormented efforts to edit King Lear, Leinwand reveals the palpable energy and conviction with which these seven writers engaged with Shakespeare, their moments of utter self-confidence and profound vexation. In uncovering these intense public and private reactions, The Great William connects major writers’ hitherto unremarked scenes of reading Shakespeare with our own.

Read More about The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare

The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare

The Great William is the first book to explore how seven renowned writers—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes—wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they were readin

English

Author/Lead: Theodore Leinwand
Dates:
Leinwand builds detailed accounts of these writers’ experiences through their marginalia, lectures, letters, journals, and reading notes. We learn why Woolf associated reading Shakespeare with her brother Thoby, and what Ginsberg meant when referring to the mouth feel of Shakespeare’s verse. From Hughes’s attempts to find a “skeleton key” to all of Shakespeare’s plays to Berryman’s tormented efforts to edit King Lear, Leinwand reveals the palpable energy and conviction with which these seven writers engaged with Shakespeare, their moments of utter self-confidence and profound vexation. In uncovering these intense public and private reactions, The Great William connects major writers’ hitherto unremarked scenes of reading Shakespeare with our own.

Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works

The Collected Works brings together for the first time in a single volume all the works currently attributed to Middleton.

English

Author/Lead: Theodore Leinwand
Dates:
It is the first edition of Middleton's works since 1886. The texts are printed in modern spelling and punctuation, with critical introductions and foot-of-the-page commentaries; they are arranged in chronological order, with a special section of Juvenilia. The volume is introduced by essays on Middleton's life and reputation, on early modern London, and on the varied theatres of the English Renaissance. Extensively illustrated, it incorporates much new information on Middleton's life, canon, texts, and contexts. A self-consciously 'federal edition', The Collected Works applies contemporary theories about the nature of literature and the history of the book to editorial practice.

The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613

In this highly original and energetic study, Theodore B. Leinwand views Jacobean theater—particularly Jacobean city comedy—as a measure of the way Londoners of the time perceived each other.

English

Author/Lead: Theodore Leinwand
Dates:

In this highly original and energetic study, Theodore B. Leinwand views Jacobean theater—particularly Jacobean city comedy—as a measure of the way Londoners of the time perceived each other. In forming a sophisticated view of the relations between Jacobean comedy and life, Leinwand makes a solid contribution not only to Jacobean theater, but, more broadly, to our understanding of the cultural, social, and political contexts within which all literature is produced.

Leinwand turns to the plays of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, George Chapman, John Fletcher, and Ben Jonson to see the ways in which Jacobean theater was bound up with contemporary social relations. He measures the attitudes implicit or expressed in the plays toward various London types of the day. These same figures appeared in the commentary of the time and Leinwand raises the question of how realistic stage portrayals were meant to be, and how they were likely to have been received by their audiences. He suggests that most sophisticated playwrights, by making their audiences aware of stereotype, urged them to think beyond it to a fuller sense of their own and other people's identities.

Read More about The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613

Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England

This study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period.

English

Author/Lead: Theodore Leinwand
Dates:

This study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand's new readings of texts by and about Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, the Earl of Suffolk, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Gresham, James Burbage, and Lionel Cranfield reveal a blend of affect and cognition concerning finance that includes nostalgia, anger, contempt, embarrassment, tenacity, bravado and humility.

Read More about Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England

Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England

This study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period.

English

Author/Lead: Theodore Leinwand
Dates:
These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand's new readings of texts by and about Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, the Earl of Suffolk, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Gresham, James Burbage, and Lionel Cranfield reveal a blend of affect and cognition concerning finance that includes nostalgia, anger, contempt, embarrassment, tenacity, bravado and humility.

The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613

In this highly original and energetic study, Theodore B. Leinwand views Jacobean theater—particularly Jacobean city comedy—as a measure of the way Londoners of the time perceived each other.

English

Author/Lead: Theodore Leinwand
Dates:
In forming a sophisticated view of the relations between Jacobean comedy and life, Leinwand makes a solid contribution not only to Jacobean theater, but, more broadly, to our understanding of the cultural, social, and political contexts within which all literature is produced. Leinwand turns to the plays of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, George Chapman, John Fletcher, and Ben Jonson to see the ways in which Jacobean theater was bound up with contemporary social relations. He measures the attitudes implicit or expressed in the plays toward various London types of the day. These same figures appeared in the commentary of the time and Leinwand raises the question of how realistic stage portrayals were meant to be, and how they were likely to have been received by their audiences. He suggests that most sophisticated playwrights, by making their audiences aware of stereotype, urged them to think beyond it to a fuller sense of their own and other people's identities.