Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra—these were figures of intense signification long before Shakespeare took up the task of giving them new life on the stage. And when he did, Linda Charnes argues, he used these legendary figures to explore a new kind of fame—notorious identity—an infamy based not on the moral and ethical “use value” of legend but on a commodification of identity itself: one that must be understood in the context of early modern England’s emergent capitalism and its conditions of economic, textual, theatrical, and cultural reproduction. Ranging across cultural materialism, new historicism, feminist psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, deconstruction, and theories of postmodernity, the author practices a “theory without organs”—which she provocatively calls a constructive “New Hystericism”—retheorizing the discourses of reigning methodologies as much as those in Shakespeare’s plays.

"Although there has always been a fascination for famous people, the invention of modern celebrity culture goes back to the nineteenth century. During Romanticism the position of the author changed, but, with the phenomenon of the fan and associated fandom coming into existence, also that of the public with the phenomenon of the fan and associated fandom coming into existence. In Star Authors in the Age of Romanticism Dutch literary celebrity culture is analysed and embedded in the international discourse on this subject. Internationally, scholarly attention has over the last years been given to literary celebrity. This book supplies the Dutch dynamic to the international prevailing scholarly discourse on the development of literary celebrity by focusing on five famous Dutch authors from the nineteenth century: Willem Bilderdijk, Hendrik Tollens, Nicolaas Beets, François HaverSchmidt (alias Piet Paaltjens) and Eduard Douwes Dekker (better known as Multatuli). "