Jeremy Lopez: Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama.

• George Opptitz-Trotman

The format of the Anglophone academic monograph has rarely been as uniform as currently: we are living through a virtual epidemic of five-chaptered books. Their ubiquity likely has origins in the positivism of the doctoral thesis, entrenched by publishers’ love of the previously successful. Many of the best examples wage inner struggles against or for the form. In Constructing the Canon, Jeremy Lopez takes the opportunity afforded by his subject – anthologies of Early Modern non-Shakespearean drama – to explore the possibilities of a more unusual format. His book consists of sixty-one short chapters, organized into two main categories (‘Early Modern Dramatic Forms’; ‘Early Modern Dramatic Canons’). These halves are bridged by an ‘Interlude’ called ‘Reading a bad play’, and divided into six loosely thematic sub-categories (‘Origins’; ‘Attachments’; ‘Paradoxes’; and ‘Bifurcation’; ‘Opposition’; ‘Inheritance’).