About
Adam G. Hooks
Early Modern Drama and Literature; Shakespeare; History of the Book
Adam Hooks joined the English department at Iowa in 2009. His work focuses on the developing literary industries of early modern England, with an emphasis on the relationship between drama and the marketplace of print. In other words: how (and why) did early modern people read plays? What did “drama” mean in print? And what did it mean to be a writer of published plays?
His current book project, “Vendible Shakespeare,” tells the story of Shakespeare’s career in print from the late-sixteenth to the late-seventeenth century. The members of the book trade (and their customers, of course) bought and sold Shakespeare for a variety of reasons, few of which resemble those of their twenty-first century counterparts. This project recovers a Shakespeare—indeed, several versions of Shakespeare—firmly embedded in the cultural, institutional and textual networks of his own time.
Other works in progress study the forms and practices of textual circulation in the early modern period, particularly commonplacing in manuscript and in print.