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The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies offers a comprehensive introduction to the study of Shakespeare in a series of essays specially written by an international team of eminent scholars. Studies of Shakespeare's life, and of his relationship to the thought of his time, are followed by essays connecting his writings to the literary, dramatic, and theatrical conventions of his age. There are accounts of the transmission of his text, and of the theatrical and critical fortunes of his plays from his own time to ours. Particular attention is given to the twentieth century in studies of criticism, theatre history, the plays on film and television, new critical approaches, and reference books. Each essay is followed by a reading list. A successor to Cambridge's original Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1934) and the New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1971) this attractively written and helpfully organized volume will be an indispensable companion to anyone with a serious interest in Shakespeare.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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About the author
Stanley Wells
188 books47 followersStanley William Wells, CBE, is a Shakespeare scholar and Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 26, 2023
This first edition of The Cambridge Companion To Shakespeare Studies edited by Stanley Wells (1986) belongs to the old school of late-Twentieth Century literary criticism and referencing. It may only be less than 40 years old, but it feels like it belongs to another era. Just the little things, like the reading list and note references, which smack of untidiness, or at least incompleteness, are now almost an affront to recent graduates who are used to a scrupulously referenced library of incisive modern academic works. But the overall quality of the criticism is not lessened by this laxness. It does, of course, omit later data, such as the huge resurgence of performance and film since its publication, especially in the latter particularly with the Shakespeare film from the '90s after Branagh, but it does include the new literary theoretical approaches of New Historicism and Material Criticism that had emerged about this time in the field of literary criticism.
01. The Life of Shakespeare - S. Schoenbaum - 7.53
Schoenbaums' life of Shakespeare, based on 3 of his own works, claims from the start that much of the scant evidence of his life was based on legal documentation, and the latter half of his essay is largely a list of such transactions. But the front half is interesting, and those 'lost' 7 years between 1585 and 1592 leave us only with the tenuous link with a Lancashire teacher's assistant post, before Shakespeare is referenced (via 3HVI, 1591) in Robert Greene's 'Groatsworth of Wit' as an actor and playwright in the London theatres.
02. Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age - W.R. Elton - 8.07
Elton's 'Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age' forces you to think hard and see correspondences all over Shakespeare's work, and to draw some useful conclusions from what is a very complex and dynamic issue. Those being that the 'analogical' world was in a state of flux, regarding religious and political thought, as well as the mobility of the upper classes, and that this world of 'transition' was reflected in the linguistic changes occurring, so well discussed later in essays on Shakespeare's use of trope and rhetoric. The last category of discussion, the 'dialectic', or logical development of argument, was less developed and useful, and more difficult to see in Shakespeare's work, but the point here is that Shakespeare exploited the contradictions of his world to discuss if not solve issues. It particularly made me think about Troilus and Cressida [1601-1602], which has preoccupied me for the past month. Who'd have known?
03. Shakespeare the Non-dramatic Poet - Robert Ellrodt - 8.3
Ellrodt assumes our knowledge both of Early Modern narrative poems and sonnets (Sidney's 'Astrophil and Stella' [1591], Spenser's 'Amoretti' [1595], and so on), and without this, you have to concentrate hard on his exhibition of detailed knowledge. But it is worth it. Frankly, I found Shakespeare's two narrative poems a bit tedious (because of their prolixity), but few of his sonnets. That said, 154 is a lot, and without Ellrodt's detailed knowledge of them, his lists (while doffing a cap to that lax referencing mentioned), mean little but evidential qualification of his point. But it certainly helps if you know the gist of 18 ('Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?'), 116 ('Let me not to the marriage of true minds') and 144 ('Two loves I have of comfort and despair'), for example, as anchors in his argument (or choose any others).
Nonetheless, lack of detailed knowledge does not prevent both an appreciation of Shakespeare's art nor Ellrodt's insights. This, although a 'traditional' essay bedded in a deep knowledge of poetry and poesy, would have been missed by me had I taken my degree at the usual time of life. And proves the worth even of an 'outdated' collection of essays. I really enjoyed it.
04. Shakespeare and the Arts of Language - Inga-Stina Ewbank - 8.27
Ewbank's 'Shakespeare and the Arts of Language' discusses Shakespeare's use of tropes (metaphor, allegory, hyperbole) and rhetoric (figures of speech that include tropes and imagery, symbolism etc.) is written to entertain as well as instruct, her use of examples from several plays highly illustrative of anaphora (repetition at the beginning of lines), epistrophe (at the end), and a handful more grammatical definitions. If you really want to understand how Shakespeare uses rhetoric, figures and tropes to create his imagery, read, she suggests, The Tempest. This is a huge subject which usually requires a handbook of grammatical terms to hand, but Ewbank's larger picture is how Shakespeare both uses and moulds language to reflect character and structure and dramatic mood, and develops his style over his career, which illustrates the levels of the subject itself. Ewbank's reading list offers 30 titles, to which we can add at least 3 major modern works (Kermode's Shakespeare's Language, 2000, McDonald's Shakespeare And The Arts Of Language, 2001, and his Shakespeare's Late Style, 2006).
(NB. a 'figure' is either a 'trope' or a 'schemata' of grammatical and rhetorical devices - see the illustration of Henry Peacham's The Garden of Eloquence in Russ McDonald's Arts of Language, 2001).
05. Playhouses and Players in the Time of Shakespeare - Peter Thomson - 7.3
Thomson's essay commences with a series of dates when the theatre business in London was interrupted by major and subsidiary outbreaks of the plague. He then goes on to discuss the main troupes of players and gives a brief summary of each theatre within and without the City up to 1642. His piece (1986 latest) about the Globe (first, 1599-1613, destroyed by fire in 1613, rebuilt second, 1613-44) is speculative, and based on a contemporary drawing of the Swan, considering the essay predates the discovery of the remains of the second Globe in 1989-90, but arrives at approximate measurements (100') and maximum capacity (3,350) close to the figure modern estimate (3,000) suggested by the replica built near the original site in 1997, based on the remnants found.
His section on actors and acting is largely speculative too, and replete with platitudinous assumptions, surmises and 'fair guessing', but overall the piece creates a picture of the early modern theatrical world. For a detailed look at performances within genres, a more modern work such as Julie Sanders' The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama, 1576-1642 (CUP, 2014) is worth considering, looking at its subject through repertoires and company practices, rather than through playwrights and their works, if Thomson's piece has inspired an interest in this subject, which is now an optional module in masters study at the Shakespeare Institute.
06. Shakespeare and the Theatrical Conventions of His Time - Alan C. Dessen - 6.4
Dessen's essay is a summary of his fuller work Elizabethan Stage Conventions And Modern Interpreters (CUP, 1984), and offers but a little insight into the narrow focus of conventions he concentrates on, namely the limited but often detailed signs and signals indicating time, place and setting in Elizabethan (usually) daytime drama.
07. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy - David Daniell - 7.8
Daniell's 'Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy' is an entertaining survey of Shakespeare's comedies and the development of them up to and including the four romances, with their 'comic' endings. He registers the merits and demerits of Two Gentlemen and The Taming Of The Shrew, and moves with interesting precision onto the mature comedies (touching en route the comic aspects of the first history tetralogy, mostly Falstaff, but more), and discusses the Problem Plays not so much as problems but as a development towards an indeterminacy foreshadowed by its unusually dark subtexts and unsatisfying final tidying-up. His section on Much Ado is as close to perfect as an essay comes, given the brevity of requirement, and while his visit of the romances is far too brief, the overall essay is very satisfying, touching on language, style and origins that alone require several essays, if not books, themselves, and though he is short on references, I'm sure all these things could be addressed if given over to an entire book.
08. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy - G.K. Hunter - 8.3
G.K. Hunter's 'Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy' disputes Bradley's view of holding only 4 of the tragedies as 'pure' enough for study (Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear) by asserting that a quality (and a developing, maturing one) of Shakespeare's playwriting was that he introduced an indeterminacy or ambiguity into his plays which meant that we were always adjusting our judgements during them, questioning our perceptions and interpretations; that this was a feature of (especially) his later plays which mark them as endlessly captivating and thus necessarily not 'pure'. He places this within a survey of tragedy in early modern drama, but can point to no sufficient earlier model than Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (1586) and Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1587-8) (thus, ignoring Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for example). His argument covers the range of tragedies, from Titus Andronicus (1591-2) to Coriolanus (1608), including - as the Folio placed it - Troilus And Cressida (1601-2), and while little time is spent on most of them, it is a thought-provoking read.
09. Shakespeare's Use of History - R.L. Smallwood - 8.8
Smallwood commences his survey of Shakespeare's history plays with the final Chorus of Henry V (1599) as a bridge between his two tetralogies and as the end of an arch of history plays (John [1595-7]) excluded) written between 1591 and 1599 and covering the English monarchs between 1377 and 1485 (Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III, Henry VII; where Edward IV and V are subsumed within the play Richard III) - even if we ignore King Edward III [1592], whose authorship is still cast variably by modern scholars, but recently toward a consensus as being 60% written by Thomas Kyd, 40% by Shakespeare (Vickers, 2009), and extends his purview back to 1327 before Richard II. (This is taken up in Jackson's following essay). This also does not include Henry VIII (1613), co-written with John Fletcher, which further extends the historical line, and on which he ends.
Despite the odd anachronism in an essay concerned with histories and their sources (Smallwood claims Henry V as the only place in the canon where a Chorus introduces each act [p.157], thus ignoring Gower's role in Pericles [1608], and thus implicitly that play from the canon), this is a highly entertaining and perceptive essay about a subject which I had long held as third rate in the canon - until I recently read (and watched) all the history plays. I really enjoyed this essay. Good stuff.
10. The Transmission of Shakespeare's Text - MacD.P. Jackson - 6.8
Jackson's detailed analysis of mismatches between Quarto and Folio editions of the plays, while commencing lucidly, gets so immersed in detail that, with few printed examples, not only becomes a slog, but at times difficult to discern the point. Without such close textual analysis and comparison, and the knowledge developed in the twentieth century of different scribal copyists and typesetters and their styles, we would not have the readable texts we have today; but the process described is, while painstaking, rarely fruitful.
11. Shakespeare on the Stage from 1660-1900 - Russell Jackson - 7.25
Jackson embarks where late-16th century adapters of Shakespeare's plays, like Davenant, Dryden and Nahum Tate, made new nonsense out of what we having grown up with legitimate Shakespeare see as classics (Macbeth, The Tempest). It hardly seems worth the coverage. Even eighteenth century reversions to the originals were tweaked, like Garrick's Macbeth, to accentuate the actor's style, and dropping parts like the Porter - which is astonishing, in that they missed one of the best roles in Shakespeare, if acted right (see Michael Hodgson in Polly Findlay's 2018 RSC production: the creepiest Satan this side of human).
12. Critical Approaches to Shakespeare from 1660-1904 - Harry Levin - 7.63
Levin's essay really needs a little background reading to fully appreciate, written as it is in a style that enters the discussion as it were in media res, for those in the know. His purview of eighteenth to nineteenth century criticism takes in French and German personalities as well as major and lesser known English critics, from Johnson to Coleridge and Marx. The argument is framed by art versus nature, and concentrates heavily on character, rather than language - and thus ends with Bradley. Shunning notes, he references titles (dates only) in situ, which can be a little irksome, since his reading list needs cross-referencing with his text to discover the original publication dates, and only scantly includes some his many references. All that said, it was nonetheless interesting, from a mind that can hold a wide historical and literary purview of works from many names, from Langbaine (1691) to Bradley (1904). That's impressive.
13. Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism
13.a. The Comedies - Lawrence Danson - 8.13
Lawrence Danson's survey of 'Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism: the comedies' is a very enjoyable and thought-provoking précis of the prevalent developments of critical approaches to the formal archetype of comedy, reflecting on the romances, and commencing, naturally, with Northrop Frye's structuralist approach through myth. Many references included beg you to go off and complete this introduction by detailed analysis, but that would be only part of the work. Shakespearean criticism has moved on since this first edition of 1986, and there is a host of more recent criticism which discusses analysis of temporality, for example, or psychoanalytical feminism merely alluded to in his summing up. This would, however, have been a good place to start any research into Shakespeare Studies, and is well worth the read as a foundation. It could have been significantly longer, and would have been well served by a concluding reading list.
13. b. The Tragedies - Kenneth Muir - 6.9
Kenneth Muir's similar look at twentieth century criticism of the tragedies is primarily a list with a few pointers, commencing with Bradley's seminal work - where we should all start - which sums up 19th-century critical views (but does much more than this: his definitions of tragedy alone are superlative). Muir does go into journal publications as well as books. However, it needs to be read with a fine-tooth comb and an eye to what you are looking for, for it to be really useful. I would have preferred more of a discussion of critical approaches/themes represented, with a reading list at the end, than this brief series of pointers.
13.c. The Histories - Edward Berry - 7.7
The first half of Berry's survey of the critical history of the histories in the twentieth century revolves around E.M.W. Tillyard's 1942 work Shakespeare's History Plays, discussing the supportive and opposition views of the two tetralogies as an arch of English patriotism that develops the 'Tudor myth' and reflects the Elizabethan 'world picture' of order and degree (that issue exhorted at length by Ulysses in Troilus And Cressida [1601-2], and thus satirised by Shakespeare through its hyperbole). Notably, Berry hardly mentions the Wars of the Roses. Berry then moves on to more recent criticism, and notes that while theatrical interest in the histories has been high throughout the century, that the major critical issues had become exhausted. Not so their presentation on stage screen (picked up in Warren's and Hapgood's following essays).
14. Shakespeare on the Twentieth-Century Stage - Roger Warren - 6.7
Any essay on theatrical productions relies on extremes of contrast and a few pictures, but can never really tell of the thousand impressions which actually watching a play at the theatre engenders. You may not remember all the responses, but you remember the overwhelming (or underwhelming) impression of seeing a play live. Thus, Warren's piece is necessarily not evocative, but he does effuse on a couple of performances that highlight just how impressionable a good directorial interpretation can be.
15. Shakespeare on Film and Television - Robert Hapgood - 7.33
Any essay of Shakespeare on film and TV is bound to be dated within even 10 years, so it's platitudinous to note that this survey up to 1986 excludes the resurgence of Shakespeare on film in the '90s clarioned by Branagh's Henry V (1989), and his bright Much Ado (1996) and extravagant 4-hour Hamlet (1996). Not to mention the speight of RSC, NT and Globe filmed productions, nor the Hollow Crown series in 2012/2016 that really brought most of the histories alive for me - and more. That said, Hapgood pays lip-service to the tragedies and offers little interpretation of the comedies on film, only touching on Zeffirelli's 1967 Taming of the Shrew with Taylor and Burton on fire, which deserved more attention.
16. Shakespeare and New Critical Approaches - Terence Hawkes - 8.1
Terence Hawkes' survey of 'Shakespeare and New Critical Approaches' is instructive, interesting and - most important - clear (especially when considering deconstruction based on Derrida's 'différance'). It encompasses - from its starting point of Bradley's 1904 work and its subsequent challenges in several fields of literary criticism - Structuralism, Post-Structuralism or Deconstruction, Semiotics ('the study of how meaning is produced in society'), Feminism, Marxism and 'discourse', and 'reader-response' or 'reception' theory. If you thought these subjects were dryish, read again: Hawkes lights them up, applies them, and makes them comprehensible - no mean feat. A sure and comprehensive introduction to these approaches.
17. Shakespeare Reference Books - Dieter Mehl - 7.1
Mehl's bibliography strangely incorporates some German references, which might be of interest to the scholar of research, but not to the general student. Further, this listing is now almost hopelessly out of date, being nearly 40 years old, talking of the then recent Arden second series of the '50s to the early '80s, since superseded by the excellent Third series from 1995 to 2020. Mehl also notes the wider appeal of the New Penguin series from 1967, which have been updated in new editions in 2015, but their single biggest fault is in placing notes and commentary at the end of each volume instead of in easily accessible footnotes in situ. The best series for non-study is the RSC individual works or Complete Works (2008).
01. The Life of Shakespeare - S. Schoenbaum - 7.53
Schoenbaums' life of Shakespeare, based on 3 of his own works, claims from the start that much of the scant evidence of his life was based on legal documentation, and the latter half of his essay is largely a list of such transactions. But the front half is interesting, and those 'lost' 7 years between 1585 and 1592 leave us only with the tenuous link with a Lancashire teacher's assistant post, before Shakespeare is referenced (via 3HVI, 1591) in Robert Greene's 'Groatsworth of Wit' as an actor and playwright in the London theatres.
02. Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age - W.R. Elton - 8.07
Elton's 'Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age' forces you to think hard and see correspondences all over Shakespeare's work, and to draw some useful conclusions from what is a very complex and dynamic issue. Those being that the 'analogical' world was in a state of flux, regarding religious and political thought, as well as the mobility of the upper classes, and that this world of 'transition' was reflected in the linguistic changes occurring, so well discussed later in essays on Shakespeare's use of trope and rhetoric. The last category of discussion, the 'dialectic', or logical development of argument, was less developed and useful, and more difficult to see in Shakespeare's work, but the point here is that Shakespeare exploited the contradictions of his world to discuss if not solve issues. It particularly made me think about Troilus and Cressida [1601-1602], which has preoccupied me for the past month. Who'd have known?
03. Shakespeare the Non-dramatic Poet - Robert Ellrodt - 8.3
Ellrodt assumes our knowledge both of Early Modern narrative poems and sonnets (Sidney's 'Astrophil and Stella' [1591], Spenser's 'Amoretti' [1595], and so on), and without this, you have to concentrate hard on his exhibition of detailed knowledge. But it is worth it. Frankly, I found Shakespeare's two narrative poems a bit tedious (because of their prolixity), but few of his sonnets. That said, 154 is a lot, and without Ellrodt's detailed knowledge of them, his lists (while doffing a cap to that lax referencing mentioned), mean little but evidential qualification of his point. But it certainly helps if you know the gist of 18 ('Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?'), 116 ('Let me not to the marriage of true minds') and 144 ('Two loves I have of comfort and despair'), for example, as anchors in his argument (or choose any others).
Nonetheless, lack of detailed knowledge does not prevent both an appreciation of Shakespeare's art nor Ellrodt's insights. This, although a 'traditional' essay bedded in a deep knowledge of poetry and poesy, would have been missed by me had I taken my degree at the usual time of life. And proves the worth even of an 'outdated' collection of essays. I really enjoyed it.
04. Shakespeare and the Arts of Language - Inga-Stina Ewbank - 8.27
Ewbank's 'Shakespeare and the Arts of Language' discusses Shakespeare's use of tropes (metaphor, allegory, hyperbole) and rhetoric (figures of speech that include tropes and imagery, symbolism etc.) is written to entertain as well as instruct, her use of examples from several plays highly illustrative of anaphora (repetition at the beginning of lines), epistrophe (at the end), and a handful more grammatical definitions. If you really want to understand how Shakespeare uses rhetoric, figures and tropes to create his imagery, read, she suggests, The Tempest. This is a huge subject which usually requires a handbook of grammatical terms to hand, but Ewbank's larger picture is how Shakespeare both uses and moulds language to reflect character and structure and dramatic mood, and develops his style over his career, which illustrates the levels of the subject itself. Ewbank's reading list offers 30 titles, to which we can add at least 3 major modern works (Kermode's Shakespeare's Language, 2000, McDonald's Shakespeare And The Arts Of Language, 2001, and his Shakespeare's Late Style, 2006).
(NB. a 'figure' is either a 'trope' or a 'schemata' of grammatical and rhetorical devices - see the illustration of Henry Peacham's The Garden of Eloquence in Russ McDonald's Arts of Language, 2001).
05. Playhouses and Players in the Time of Shakespeare - Peter Thomson - 7.3
Thomson's essay commences with a series of dates when the theatre business in London was interrupted by major and subsidiary outbreaks of the plague. He then goes on to discuss the main troupes of players and gives a brief summary of each theatre within and without the City up to 1642. His piece (1986 latest) about the Globe (first, 1599-1613, destroyed by fire in 1613, rebuilt second, 1613-44) is speculative, and based on a contemporary drawing of the Swan, considering the essay predates the discovery of the remains of the second Globe in 1989-90, but arrives at approximate measurements (100') and maximum capacity (3,350) close to the figure modern estimate (3,000) suggested by the replica built near the original site in 1997, based on the remnants found.
His section on actors and acting is largely speculative too, and replete with platitudinous assumptions, surmises and 'fair guessing', but overall the piece creates a picture of the early modern theatrical world. For a detailed look at performances within genres, a more modern work such as Julie Sanders' The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama, 1576-1642 (CUP, 2014) is worth considering, looking at its subject through repertoires and company practices, rather than through playwrights and their works, if Thomson's piece has inspired an interest in this subject, which is now an optional module in masters study at the Shakespeare Institute.
06. Shakespeare and the Theatrical Conventions of His Time - Alan C. Dessen - 6.4
Dessen's essay is a summary of his fuller work Elizabethan Stage Conventions And Modern Interpreters (CUP, 1984), and offers but a little insight into the narrow focus of conventions he concentrates on, namely the limited but often detailed signs and signals indicating time, place and setting in Elizabethan (usually) daytime drama.
07. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy - David Daniell - 7.8
Daniell's 'Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy' is an entertaining survey of Shakespeare's comedies and the development of them up to and including the four romances, with their 'comic' endings. He registers the merits and demerits of Two Gentlemen and The Taming Of The Shrew, and moves with interesting precision onto the mature comedies (touching en route the comic aspects of the first history tetralogy, mostly Falstaff, but more), and discusses the Problem Plays not so much as problems but as a development towards an indeterminacy foreshadowed by its unusually dark subtexts and unsatisfying final tidying-up. His section on Much Ado is as close to perfect as an essay comes, given the brevity of requirement, and while his visit of the romances is far too brief, the overall essay is very satisfying, touching on language, style and origins that alone require several essays, if not books, themselves, and though he is short on references, I'm sure all these things could be addressed if given over to an entire book.
08. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy - G.K. Hunter - 8.3
G.K. Hunter's 'Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy' disputes Bradley's view of holding only 4 of the tragedies as 'pure' enough for study (Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Lear) by asserting that a quality (and a developing, maturing one) of Shakespeare's playwriting was that he introduced an indeterminacy or ambiguity into his plays which meant that we were always adjusting our judgements during them, questioning our perceptions and interpretations; that this was a feature of (especially) his later plays which mark them as endlessly captivating and thus necessarily not 'pure'. He places this within a survey of tragedy in early modern drama, but can point to no sufficient earlier model than Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (1586) and Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1587-8) (thus, ignoring Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for example). His argument covers the range of tragedies, from Titus Andronicus (1591-2) to Coriolanus (1608), including - as the Folio placed it - Troilus And Cressida (1601-2), and while little time is spent on most of them, it is a thought-provoking read.
09. Shakespeare's Use of History - R.L. Smallwood - 8.8
Smallwood commences his survey of Shakespeare's history plays with the final Chorus of Henry V (1599) as a bridge between his two tetralogies and as the end of an arch of history plays (John [1595-7]) excluded) written between 1591 and 1599 and covering the English monarchs between 1377 and 1485 (Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III, Henry VII; where Edward IV and V are subsumed within the play Richard III) - even if we ignore King Edward III [1592], whose authorship is still cast variably by modern scholars, but recently toward a consensus as being 60% written by Thomas Kyd, 40% by Shakespeare (Vickers, 2009), and extends his purview back to 1327 before Richard II. (This is taken up in Jackson's following essay). This also does not include Henry VIII (1613), co-written with John Fletcher, which further extends the historical line, and on which he ends.
Despite the odd anachronism in an essay concerned with histories and their sources (Smallwood claims Henry V as the only place in the canon where a Chorus introduces each act [p.157], thus ignoring Gower's role in Pericles [1608], and thus implicitly that play from the canon), this is a highly entertaining and perceptive essay about a subject which I had long held as third rate in the canon - until I recently read (and watched) all the history plays. I really enjoyed this essay. Good stuff.
10. The Transmission of Shakespeare's Text - MacD.P. Jackson - 6.8
Jackson's detailed analysis of mismatches between Quarto and Folio editions of the plays, while commencing lucidly, gets so immersed in detail that, with few printed examples, not only becomes a slog, but at times difficult to discern the point. Without such close textual analysis and comparison, and the knowledge developed in the twentieth century of different scribal copyists and typesetters and their styles, we would not have the readable texts we have today; but the process described is, while painstaking, rarely fruitful.
11. Shakespeare on the Stage from 1660-1900 - Russell Jackson - 7.25
Jackson embarks where late-16th century adapters of Shakespeare's plays, like Davenant, Dryden and Nahum Tate, made new nonsense out of what we having grown up with legitimate Shakespeare see as classics (Macbeth, The Tempest). It hardly seems worth the coverage. Even eighteenth century reversions to the originals were tweaked, like Garrick's Macbeth, to accentuate the actor's style, and dropping parts like the Porter - which is astonishing, in that they missed one of the best roles in Shakespeare, if acted right (see Michael Hodgson in Polly Findlay's 2018 RSC production: the creepiest Satan this side of human).
12. Critical Approaches to Shakespeare from 1660-1904 - Harry Levin - 7.63
Levin's essay really needs a little background reading to fully appreciate, written as it is in a style that enters the discussion as it were in media res, for those in the know. His purview of eighteenth to nineteenth century criticism takes in French and German personalities as well as major and lesser known English critics, from Johnson to Coleridge and Marx. The argument is framed by art versus nature, and concentrates heavily on character, rather than language - and thus ends with Bradley. Shunning notes, he references titles (dates only) in situ, which can be a little irksome, since his reading list needs cross-referencing with his text to discover the original publication dates, and only scantly includes some his many references. All that said, it was nonetheless interesting, from a mind that can hold a wide historical and literary purview of works from many names, from Langbaine (1691) to Bradley (1904). That's impressive.
13. Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism
13.a. The Comedies - Lawrence Danson - 8.13
Lawrence Danson's survey of 'Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism: the comedies' is a very enjoyable and thought-provoking précis of the prevalent developments of critical approaches to the formal archetype of comedy, reflecting on the romances, and commencing, naturally, with Northrop Frye's structuralist approach through myth. Many references included beg you to go off and complete this introduction by detailed analysis, but that would be only part of the work. Shakespearean criticism has moved on since this first edition of 1986, and there is a host of more recent criticism which discusses analysis of temporality, for example, or psychoanalytical feminism merely alluded to in his summing up. This would, however, have been a good place to start any research into Shakespeare Studies, and is well worth the read as a foundation. It could have been significantly longer, and would have been well served by a concluding reading list.
13. b. The Tragedies - Kenneth Muir - 6.9
Kenneth Muir's similar look at twentieth century criticism of the tragedies is primarily a list with a few pointers, commencing with Bradley's seminal work - where we should all start - which sums up 19th-century critical views (but does much more than this: his definitions of tragedy alone are superlative). Muir does go into journal publications as well as books. However, it needs to be read with a fine-tooth comb and an eye to what you are looking for, for it to be really useful. I would have preferred more of a discussion of critical approaches/themes represented, with a reading list at the end, than this brief series of pointers.
13.c. The Histories - Edward Berry - 7.7
The first half of Berry's survey of the critical history of the histories in the twentieth century revolves around E.M.W. Tillyard's 1942 work Shakespeare's History Plays, discussing the supportive and opposition views of the two tetralogies as an arch of English patriotism that develops the 'Tudor myth' and reflects the Elizabethan 'world picture' of order and degree (that issue exhorted at length by Ulysses in Troilus And Cressida [1601-2], and thus satirised by Shakespeare through its hyperbole). Notably, Berry hardly mentions the Wars of the Roses. Berry then moves on to more recent criticism, and notes that while theatrical interest in the histories has been high throughout the century, that the major critical issues had become exhausted. Not so their presentation on stage screen (picked up in Warren's and Hapgood's following essays).
14. Shakespeare on the Twentieth-Century Stage - Roger Warren - 6.7
Any essay on theatrical productions relies on extremes of contrast and a few pictures, but can never really tell of the thousand impressions which actually watching a play at the theatre engenders. You may not remember all the responses, but you remember the overwhelming (or underwhelming) impression of seeing a play live. Thus, Warren's piece is necessarily not evocative, but he does effuse on a couple of performances that highlight just how impressionable a good directorial interpretation can be.
15. Shakespeare on Film and Television - Robert Hapgood - 7.33
Any essay of Shakespeare on film and TV is bound to be dated within even 10 years, so it's platitudinous to note that this survey up to 1986 excludes the resurgence of Shakespeare on film in the '90s clarioned by Branagh's Henry V (1989), and his bright Much Ado (1996) and extravagant 4-hour Hamlet (1996). Not to mention the speight of RSC, NT and Globe filmed productions, nor the Hollow Crown series in 2012/2016 that really brought most of the histories alive for me - and more. That said, Hapgood pays lip-service to the tragedies and offers little interpretation of the comedies on film, only touching on Zeffirelli's 1967 Taming of the Shrew with Taylor and Burton on fire, which deserved more attention.
16. Shakespeare and New Critical Approaches - Terence Hawkes - 8.1
Terence Hawkes' survey of 'Shakespeare and New Critical Approaches' is instructive, interesting and - most important - clear (especially when considering deconstruction based on Derrida's 'différance'). It encompasses - from its starting point of Bradley's 1904 work and its subsequent challenges in several fields of literary criticism - Structuralism, Post-Structuralism or Deconstruction, Semiotics ('the study of how meaning is produced in society'), Feminism, Marxism and 'discourse', and 'reader-response' or 'reception' theory. If you thought these subjects were dryish, read again: Hawkes lights them up, applies them, and makes them comprehensible - no mean feat. A sure and comprehensive introduction to these approaches.
17. Shakespeare Reference Books - Dieter Mehl - 7.1
Mehl's bibliography strangely incorporates some German references, which might be of interest to the scholar of research, but not to the general student. Further, this listing is now almost hopelessly out of date, being nearly 40 years old, talking of the then recent Arden second series of the '50s to the early '80s, since superseded by the excellent Third series from 1995 to 2020. Mehl also notes the wider appeal of the New Penguin series from 1967, which have been updated in new editions in 2015, but their single biggest fault is in placing notes and commentary at the end of each volume instead of in easily accessible footnotes in situ. The best series for non-study is the RSC individual works or Complete Works (2008).
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October 31, 2018DNF at p59.
This could probably be useful for others, but not so much for my topic area. Not going to include it in my reading challenge, or give it an unfair rating.
This could probably be useful for others, but not so much for my topic area. Not going to include it in my reading challenge, or give it an unfair rating.
October 23, 2015
This volume was somewhat helpful in understanding Shakespeare. Some of the more helpful articles in this collection were "The Life of Shakespeare," "Playhouses and Players in the Time of Shakespeare," and "The Transmission of Shakespeare's Text." I enjoyed these articles and a few others. Overall, I was happy to have read the book.
January 6, 2011
If you haven't read Shakespeare extensively, this is not for you. For interested parties, a good book, well researched, good prose style.
July 4, 2012
An essential collection of essays on Shakespeare.
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