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Authorship and Alteration: Shakespeare on the Exclusion Crisis Stage and Page, 1678-1682
Ten radically altered versions of Shakespeare’s plays appeared on stage between 1678 and 1682, partly in response to what is known as the Exclusion Crisis. The plays differ from earlier Shakespeare alterations in a number of important ways and mark the most intense period of Shake- speare rewriting since the playwright’s death. By separately considering the two media for which the plays were designed, the stage and the page, and by exploring the way Shakespeare as author-source was presented in the paratextual material accompanying the plays onto the stage and the page respectively, this essay suggests that reverence for Shakespeare and claims of textual ownership varied according to medium, thus offering conflicting views of Shakespeare to late seventeenth- century audiences and readers of playbooks. These conflicting views, I contend, are intimately linked to unequal levels of stage and page censorship during, and as a direct result of, the Exclusion Crisis. The essay offers a case for seeing the Exclusion Crisis as one of the most significant points in Shakespeare’s authorial afterlife.