#KUFieldWorks: Understanding the past through Shakespeare

Editor’s note: Fieldwork provides invaluable insights about real-world environments and processes, expanding and reinforcing what researchers learn in classrooms, labs and collections. KU faculty, staff and students across a spectrum of disciplines take their inquiry directly to rivers, prairies, dig sites, glaciers, islands, archives and more. Through the #KUFieldWorks series, we'll join them on their adventures.

Q&A with Jonathan Lamb, associate professor of English

William Shakespeare's England, sometimes called the early modern era, was a time of great change. Studying how people in the past dealt with transition can help us understand reactions to change in the present. Jonathan Lamb recently traveled to London to view early print publications of "Love's Labour's Lost" as part of his work to create a scholarly edition of the play.    

What methods, approaches, experiments, etc. are you using?

For my current project creating a scholarly edition of William Shakespeare’s comedy "Love’s Labour’s Lost," I use a mixture of methods. Editing a play involves working from the earliest printed editions, which often contain errors, confusing language and various peculiarities. Working with the British Library’s massive collection of early printed books, including pretty much every edition of "Love’s Labour’s Lost" in the last four centuries, I am studying the history of the play’s publication. Perhaps ironically, this close archival work often prompts me to use massive full-text digital databases — which I access thanks to KU Libraries — to study Shakespeare’s language in new ways. To pick one recent example, at one point in the play, the character Don Armado uses the word “annothanize,” which seems to be a quirky portmanteau of “annotate” and “anatomize.” Combining close archival work with scaled digital work allows me 1) to look for close analogues to this word in Shakespeare’s time, 2) to assert with relative confidence that the word is Shakespeare’s invention, and 3) to consider the way the word is Don Armado’s attempt to sound fancy.

Why does your study matter to your field or for society?

This work matters because my edition of "Love’s Labour’s Lost" will be the first new scholarly edition of the play in the last 20-odd years. In that time, not only have digital repositories opened whole new avenues of inquiry and knowledge-making, but the field of Shakespeare studies has gotten really good at studying questions of race, gender and embodiment — and all these questions pertain directly to "Love’s Labour’s Lost." Thirty years ago, readers may not even have recognized that Shakespeare’s play is obsessed with the meaning of skin color, or that the play inverts the patriarchal superiority of men over women. But my edition will put these questions front and center, while also highlighting the longstanding critical interest in the play’s astonishing use of language and its playful metatheatricality.

What do you enjoy most about being in the field?

I love thinking about how Shakespeare’s England — sometimes called “Renaissance” or “early modern,” though I prefer “premodern” — is shockingly like our own. Shakespeare’s culture, like our own, was coming to terms with what it means to be modern. Although Shakespeare and his contemporaries were contending with this question on “the front end” (at the onset of modernity), we are contending with them on “the back end” — as we see modernity losing its salience in our society. If we want to understand how anti-vaxxers and anti-racists are responding to the same facets of the modern world, we could do worse than look to premodern England.

What are some memorable (funny, scary, surprising, etc.) moments from the field?

Archival serendipity is one of my favorite parts of on-site research. I came to England, Belgium, France and Italy with a list of items to consult; but over the course of my time in the archive, I found surprising and fruitful avenues of research. One day, sitting in the British Library, I realized someone sitting next to me is working on questions adjacent to mine, and we ended up talking for an hour about a book they’d called up. Also, on another day, I accidentally broke the cover of a book printed in the 16th century! (The library assured me I was not to blame…)

When is fieldwork frustrating, challenging or overwhelming?

In October 2023, the British Library experienced a major cyber-attack that crippled its whole system. The effects of this change linger even now, as the library’s systems are still being repaired. These changes pose the challenge of figuring out how to find and access what I need in an archive of hundreds of millions of items.

How does fieldwork complement the work you do elsewhere?

The fieldwork makes my other work possible. The library is a literary scholar’s laboratory, where collaboration, knowledge-making and scholarly rigor happen. A lot of people think humanities scholarship happens with a solitary figure in an office writing — and a lot of it does! But it also involves working on a set of materials and working with other scholars to generate new and crucial knowledge.

First photo: A collage of KU researchers in the field, intermixed with graphic elements.

Second photo: This "Love’s Labour’s Lost" title page comes from an important 1709 edition of the play, one of the first to feature illustrations of the play’s events.

Third photo: The title page to the second edition of "Love’s Labour’s Lost," which advertises the play as both “witty” and “pleasant” in bigger typeface than it does the play’s title.

Fourth photo: A wooden hand press on display in the British Library. Books were printed on devices like this for hundreds of years.