Shakespeare's Reading

by Robert S. Miola

Oxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, including some general anthologies relating to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's Reading explores Shakespeare's marvelous reshaping of sources into new creations. Beginning with a discussion of how and what Elizabethans read--manuscripts, popular pamphlets, and books--Robert S. Miola examines Shakespeare's use of specific texts such as Holinshed's Chronicles , Plutarch's Lives , and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales . As well as reshaping other writers' work, Shakespeare transformed traditions--the inherited expectations, tropes, and strategies about character, action and genre. For example, the tradition of Italian love poetry, especially Petrarch, shapes Romeo and Juliet as well as the sonnets; the Vice figure finds new life in Richard III and Falstaff. Employing a traditional understanding of sources as well as more recent developments in intertextuality, this book traces Shakespeare's reading throughout his career, as it inspires his poetry, histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. Repeated references to the plays in performance enliven and enrich
the account.

Genres: Shakespeare, Literary Criticism

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Robert S. Miola is Gerard Manley Hopkins Chair of English at Loyola University Maryland. He is the author of numerous books on Shakespeare, as well as dozens of articles on sixteenth-century English literature.

Reviews

[landon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shakespeare’s Reading (2000) is a practical, orderly, academic book. It never wavers from its defined task: to describe the influence of certain literatures on Shakespeare’s work. Such a disciplined approach to the topic is useful because, as we have no explicit historical evidence of Shakespeare having ever owned or read a single book, the subject must be broached with rigorous hypotheses. The paucity of records is typical: thus Shakespeare scholarship almost always involves some imagination – informed guesses. Miola draws his conclusions based on very close reading and an impressive familiarity with Shakespearean performance history, from the early-modern stage to the postmodern screen. His well considered interpretations of the plays help make this rather programmatic book entertaining. Its programmed nature, though, does save it from gratuitous digression.

Shakespeare’s Reading opens with a concise survey of Elizabethan reading practices which quietly underpins the whole book. Here Miola emphasizes the Renaissance ideal of imitatio (manipulating classical sources without fear of “plagiarism”), aural sensitivity to verse, and the messy infancy of printing. Early modern literates read analogically, he says – that is, they did not read a text in isolation, but constantly sought parallels in a nexus of canonical texts (i.e. the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Latin classics). There was also a widespread didactic tendency: writers and publishers tried to mediate readers’ ethical interpretations of works through prefaces and commentary. Shakespeare could not escape this moralizing idiom, but he played with it, always introducing ambiguities.

Sketching out Shakespeare’s reading practices turns out to be a very pragmatic approach to defining him (a task which centuries of idolatry has made daunting to many). He was not divinely inspired; he was a man, who lived for a defined period, who read a limited number of books based on their limited accessibility. Like most every writer, he wrote because he read. In fact, his writing, though informed by live events, can be seen as a consequence of his reading, as an extension of it. Proceeding thus, it is easy to say what Shakespeare’s literary imagination was not: it was not Scandinavian, African, American, or Eastern European. It was Greek, Roman, Italian, French, British, and somewhat Spanish. We can safely guess that he read, for instance, Plutarch, Ovid, Ariosto, and Montaigne, most of them in translation. It is a strange relief to narrow down the scope of this creative behemoth.

Miola goes on to survey Shakespeare’s poems, histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances in light of their source texts. While some works draw heavily on their sources (e.g. The Merchant of Venice), others seem to have been born without direct sources (e.g. The Tempest). Although many of the play-specific revelations are intriguing, the real meat of the book lies in the general conclusions drawn from the analyses. Miola numbers ten fascinating takeaways in his conclusion (Here I quote and comment in brackets):

1. Shakespeare reads competitively [a factor of imitatio].
2. Shakespeare reads eclectically [freely combining diverse sources].
3. Shakespeare focuses on dramatic character in his reading.
4. Shakespeare expands the roles of women from his sources.
5. Shakespeare romanticizes eros and focuses on love [softening the brute eroticism of some sources].
6. Shakespeare increases the ethical and intellectual complexity of his sources [which is why we read him more than, say, Plautus].
7. Shakespeare adds to sources comic characters and subplots [ironizing, satirizing revered source material].
8. Shakespeare emphasizes contrasts in locality [often improving upon sources by multiplication].
9. Shakespeare reads retentively and reminiscently [certain allusions reappear often].
10. Shakespeare reads experimentally and defiantly [devoid of the idolatrous devotion with which many modern critics have handled him].

In short, Shakespeare’s reading practice seems to support or supply the strengths of his creative practice: transcendent plurality, clever irreverence, and profound emotional drama. This study is productive because it is practical. However, it also raises some murky theoretical questions. Mainly: how to define “reading” in this context? And how to define “sourcing”? Shakespeare worked within a mostly oral medium in a mostly oral culture. How could we possibly account for all the influence of auditory material (“orature”) on his work? And at what point does material stop qualifying as a “source” (if we were to make a spectrum of “sourced-ness” beginning with direct quotation, followed by reproduction of content, then summary, then reworking, then verbal echo, then a reproduced general sense, a je-ne-sais-quoi…)? Miola’s devoted pragmatism is a pose which assumes the primacy of a certain kind of reading and sourcing – but it is a useful pose. In the end, we often must resign ourselves to safe, responsible hypotheses about the bard’s life and mind. But thankfully, such practical work can help us dream of wilder possibilities with more conviction.

[Elvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting way of delving into Shakespeare and one that made me more interested in some of the plays I haven’t read yet and am less familiar with.

I think it could have gone slightly deeper and done a better job of connecting its theses together, but more from the standpoint of - I think it could’ve been better to go through each work and talk about possible source texts rather than starting with source texts and traditions and then partly but not wholly going into the works.

I was more interested in how the sources showed up in specific plays and felt like there were times where this didn’t fully go as far as I wanted it to in that direction.

[John-Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know more about Shakespeare but you don't want to read a long book, this is probably more worthwhile than most of those "little introduction to Shakespeare" books. You learn way more about Shakespeare as an artist and jobbing-playwright here than you would from a biography or overview of his "times." Miola really knows Shakespeare AND his sources, so you see what choices Shakespeare made, what he invented, what he cribbed, and how he worked. Almost every play is discussed in about 2-3 pages each, with the proper respect for genre and audience. Highly recommended.

[Helen Mears · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting book that traces the influence of Shakespeare's reading on his writing.