Shakespeare's Originality
John Kerrigan
Reviews and Awards
"an elegant, far-reaching study" --Times Literary Supplement
"Lightly edited from the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures he delivered in 2016, this little collection of Professor Kerrigan's thought-provoking essays is as entertaining as it is erudite" -- Gayle Gaskill, St. Catherine University, Renaissance Quarterly
"John Kerrigan, with Shakespeare's Originality, has demonstrated his own originality with all the brilliance to which we have become accustomed in his writing ... profound in its scholarship across a remarkable breadth of fields, full of provocative new insights into texts we might be forgiven for having considered we knew well enough, and unrelenting in opening up intriguing new vistas for future Shakespeare work by himself and others." -- Peter Holland, Modern Philology
"Kerrigan shows, through adroit readings ... that Shakespeare's genius lies in precisely how he adapts and plays with well-known texts and audience expectations, ... his analysis of King Lear ... is a masterclass in intertextual hermeneutics. [This] book is important because it undermines facile notions of Shakespeare's genius, as well as our modern concept of creativity. It shows how subtly nuanced Shakespeare's use of source material always is, and how, by its transmission through his quill, the commonplace and hackneyed could burst forth with shining originality." -- Stav Sherev, Catholic Herald
"Kerrigan writes stylishly yet cites sources scrupulously. His fine-grained, punctilious reading conjures a new model of how academic writing can be pleasing." --Nicholas Birns, Choice
"based on learning both wide and deep .... It's bracing to watch Kerrigan perform these intellectual gymnastics ... one emerges with a real sense of new understanding. ... He is a highly respected scholar with a welcome ability to uncover fresh approaches to standard texts rather than indulging in the graceful rearrangement of commonplaces that often constitutes Shakespeare studies. Nobody should deny him his own originality.'" --Paul Dean, The New Criterion
"Read John Kerrigan's intense, condensed account of the playwright's creative borrowing ... Kerrigan, one of the world's leading Shakespeare scholars, ... takes us beyond Shakespeare's primary sources into the deeper texture of his allusions and passages of imitation. ... The reward is a vivid sense of how original it was to borrow. ... The book is unrepentantly erudite, but the erudition is as diverting as it can be daunting. ... the trust in our literary curiosity is intoxicating. Who wants Shakespeare to be made easy when he was so beautifully and originally complex?" -- John Mullan, The Guardian
"John Kerrigan is, to my mind, one of the most incisive and subtle contemporary writers on Shakespeare. [...] Kerrigan is exceptionally good at unpicking how ideas of originality change. [...] In his conclusion, Kerrigan says... "I hope that this book has shown [...] how much light and shade and depth and nuance are needed to comprehend Shakespeare's use of sources [...]". Hurrah to that, and would that each and every university took it as policy." -- Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
"Kerrigan delves deep into the the question of originality and its historical importance ... A consummate study, in-depth and full of insight." --Patrick J. Murray, History Today
