About

Claire M. L. Bourne is an Associate Professor of English and the Helena Rubenstein University Endowed Fellow in the Humanities at Penn State University. She serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies within the Department of English. Her academic background includes a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, an MSt in English Literature (1550-1780) from the University of Oxford, and a BA in English & French from Middlebury College. Her research focuses on book history, textual studies, and early modern drama, with particular interest in Shakespeare, typography, bibliography, and theater studies. Bourne's scholarly contributions include her first monograph, 'Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England,' published by Oxford University Press in 2020, which offers a new history of early modern English drama through the lens of playbook typography. She is currently working on a book titled 'Accidental Shakespeare,' examining book design experiments, editorial failures, and counterfactual editorial histories related to Shakespeare. She has co-authored articles, edited collections such as 'Shakespeare / Text,' and is involved in editing early modern plays, including editions of 'Henry the Sixth, Part 1,' '1 & 2 Tamburlaine,' and 'The Sea Voyage.' Additionally, she is the general editor of the Digital Beaumont & Fletcher project, which aims to publish open-access editions of plays from the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio. Her work intersects with various aspects of Renaissance literature, book history, and textual editing, emphasizing the materiality of texts and their theatricality.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Art
• Library science
• History
• Classics
• Art history

Selected publications

• Typography

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-09-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter shows how typography—the ‘whole art of printing’ and its artefacts—has been routinely implicated in editorial and bibliographic projects to establish the authenticity of the Shakespearean text: from a concern among early modern playwrights about the capacity of moveable type to adequately mediate authorial vision to the use of the handpress as a means of restoring the impression of authorial presence. The persistent role of the printing press, its tangible materials, and its textual effects (both desirable and undesirable) in discussions of Shakespearean authorship has not yet been fully acknowledged or illustrated. Structured as a series of vignettes ranging from Edward Capell’s typographically audacious eighteenth-century edition of Shakespeare’s plays to A. H. Bullen’s establishment of a printing house in Stratford-upon-Avon in the early twentieth century to print the complete works, this study examines how typography (type, paper, mise-en-page, the labour of bookwork) has been seen as variously enabling and restricting access to what Shakespeare actually wrote.

  PublisherDOI

• Shakespeare/Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing, and Performance

  Shakespeare studies · 2024-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Handmaids’ Tale

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-09-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter argues that the long history of the early modern book has been enabled by a shadow history of ‘service scholarship’—collecting, cataloguing, editing, and the creation of reference works—dating back to at least the eighteenth century. The labour of gathering, organizing, and making information available in digested form has been performed disproportionately—and often uncredited—by women. When credited, the women responsible have been frequently written out of the historical record or eclipsed by male colleagues and collaborators. Charlotte Lennox was the first to produce a consolidated study of Shakespeare’s sources, but her name has been displaced by Richard Farmer, James Orchard Halliwell, and Geoffrey Bullough. Henrietta C. Bartlett’s census of Shakespeare quartos, a revision of her earlier collaboration with Pollard, was overshadowed by W. W. Greg’s subsequent Bibliography of the Early Printed Drama. And the name most associated with compositor studies, a branch of scholarship that Alice Walker helped establish, is not Walker but rather Charlton Hinman.

  PublisherDOI

• Remodeling the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Workshop

  2023-02-08

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  The Digital Beaumont and Fletcher project is a student-centered digital scholarly edition of a 1647 folio of the plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon housed in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State (PR2420 1647 Q, PSU Libraries). Project editors use the Text Encoding Initiative P5 Guidelines to encode the texts, their editorial interventions, and some object-specific features such as manuscript stage directions. The student editors involved in text encoding were initially trained via workshops that covered how XML works, what the TEI Guidelines are, and how to apply those Guidelines in the specific context of the play to be edited. While student editors successfully created valid, encoded editions, the process of encoding and editing simultaneously surfaced difficulties with using the Guidelines to effectively answer editorial questions as well as broader concerns about how encoding seemed divorced from editorial practice: it was an added challenge piled on top of the work of editing and some students questioned its purpose. Reflecting on critiques of digital humanities training such as Russell and Hensley and Goldstone, the project’s leadership team decided to rethink the workshop structure to focus more on building models. Using Flanders and Jannidis as a guide, the most recent project TEI workshop had student editors work through modeling their text and editorial apparatus and then use the model as a pathway into the TEI Guidelines. Students in this new workshop gained a deeper appreciation of both the editorial process and text encoding and were better able to see the connections between encoding and editing – both in theory and practice – than prior workshop students.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The 1623 Folio and Collection(s): Beyond Shakespeare

  Shakespeare Quarterly · 2023-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article The 1623 Folio and Collection(s): Beyond Shakespeare: Introduction Get access Claire M L Bourne Claire M L Bourne Email: claire.bourne@psu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 4, Winter 2023, Pages 381–386, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad041 Published: 19 December 2023

  PublisherDOI

• “thy unvalued Booke”: John Milton's Copy of the Shakespeare First Folio

  Milton Quarterly · 2022 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Art
  • Art history

  MILTON'S BOOKS OTHER WORKS CITED

  PublisherDOI

• 1.1 Shakespeare and ‘textual studies’: Evidence, scale, periodization and access

  2021-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2021-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  The title of this volume – Shakespeare / Text (or, said aloud, ‘Shakespeare slash Text’) – makes several implicit claims about the relationship between ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘text’: their connection, their disjunction, their proximity, their distance, their separation, their entanglement. Here, ‘text’ i

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2021-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, The Sea Voyage : First performed 1622: First printed 1647

  2020-03-10

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Sea Voyage reads—and plays—like a social experiment. We are made to witness what happens when a ship carrying French pirates, self-styled gallants, and a woman kidnapped by the captain wreck on an uninhabited island without any material possessions or the proofs of social status those possessions bring with them. Lacking food, medical supplies, and sources of pleasure and distraction beyond their own withering wit, the men struggle to sustain themselves. At first, they complain of pangs in their stomachs and yearn for something—anything—to eat. Then, they imagine rocks and mud turning into food, especially the sorts of dishes that were thought in early modern England to enhance sexual performance. Here, as throughout the play, hunger is code for sexual appetite. Nowhere is this correlation more visceral than in what is arguably the play’s most disturbing set-piece: growing ever more desperate, Lamure, Morillat, and Franville enlist the Surgeon to help them cannibalize the famished Aminta after she falls asleep. They fantasize about how she will taste and joke about whether they should wake her and kill her “in a chase” because hunting her for sport would make her flesh taste “sweeter” (III.i. 116). The shipmaster arrives just in time to preempt the violence, and the situation he sees looks a lot like attempted rape: “They would have ravished her upon my life” (III.i. 159). Aminta, who woke up of her own accord and has been trying to reason with the men for almost thirty lines, responds: “Forgive ’em; ’twas their hungers” (160).

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Emma Depledge

  British Library

  5 shared

• Jason Scott‐Warren

  University of Cambridge

  2 shared

• Maria Isabel Maza

  1 shared

• Adam Rounce

  University of Nottingham

  1 shared

• Lara Hansen

  1 shared

• Musa Gurnis

  Film Independent

  1 shared

• Jonathan H. Holmes

  1 shared

• John E. Russell

  Pennsylvania State University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Helena Rubenstein University Endowed Fellow in the Humanitie…