Brunel University London, MA, Shakespeare Authorship Studies

The programme tackles the subject of Shakespeare and authorship in all its diversity; students interrogate the mythologisation of Shakespeare, and examine the effects of collaboration on notions of authorship, value, genius, and authority; the programme also considers the enormously controversial phenomenon of the Shakespeare authorship question; the Master's considers how the desire for a national and global icon produced the Shakespeare industry; through close textual analysis of Shakespeare’s writings, it reveals the impact on the ‘Shakespeare’ corpus of collaboration with other writers; it also raises the spectre of the Shakespeare authorship question; rather than promoting an alternative to the ‘man from Stratford’, the course analyses the actual social and cultural phenomenon that is the authorship question itself.