Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, the Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 66 is 'Working with Shakespeare', and Tiffany Stern's essay has been selected by the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society for its Barbara Palmer/Martin Stevens award for best new essay in early drama studies, 2014. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at http://www.cambridge.org/online/shakespearesurvey. This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic and save and bookmark their results.

‘Tiffany Stern’s essay, ‘Sermons, Plays and Note-Takers: Hamlet Q1 as a ‘Noted’ Text’, reads like an especially well-written and deftly plotted mystery novel. Taking as her subject the so-called ‘bad quarto’ of Hamlet, Stern leads the reader through a thoroughly documented and totally compelling rethinking of Q1’s origins. [She] persuasively argues that this text is the product of a note-taking scribal audience who employed contemporary notational habits to produce a ‘pirated’ text for publication … [She] brings to life a new world of early modern performance through descriptions and details that offer many small openings onto the textual culture of the period … this essay not only offers a significant reassessment of Hamlet Q1, but also makes a claim for the cultural importance of note-taking practices in the early modern period more generally.’

Source: Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society