Shakespeare scholar Meghan C Andrews passed away in 2023, after a valiant battle with cancer. Along with her many friends and beloved family, Meghan left behind her almost-finished monograph, Shakespeare and Authorial Networks in Early Modern Drama, the culmination of her life’s work. The book has since been completed by Meghan's colleagues and is set for publication by Manchester University Press in 2026.

Please donate to help make Meghan’s book open access, and ensure that her scholarship, like her memory, benefits as many others as possible. We hope that if the many people who knew and loved Meghan, and who benefited from her work, each donated, we can ensure her widespread legacy.

The full costs of publishing the monograph Open Access are $13,000USD. We have turned on automatic goal setting with Go Fund Me, which will shift the daily goal over time.

Shakespeare and Authorial Networks in Early Modern Drama demonstrates that Shakespeare engaged in sustained intertextual dialogues with Michael Drayton, John Marston, and George Chapman.

The monograph shows that these three writers were part of Shakespeare’s extended social network, and in conversation with Shakespeare, they explored ideas circulating in three important communities: the Inns of Court, the Sidney-Pembroke family, and the Jacobean royal court. These spaces possessed distinctive literary discourses in which their intellectual and textual investments combined to provide a crucible in which Shakespeare’s creative processes developed in new ways in the 1590s and the early seventeenth century.

Drawing on social network theory and recent research in early modern sociability, this book contends that Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights engaged with one another through the literary discourses of their shared institutions. It offers new readings of some of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic plays (including the Henry VI sequence, Henry VIII, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus) and situates them within their institutions’ socio-literary discourses to provide new understandings of both his works and his ongoing textual relationships with other playwrights.

The book is scheduled to be published with Manchester University Press’ prestigious Revels Plays Companion Library series and has been edited by Alan B. Farmer, Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, and Sarah Neville.