30 Great Myths about Shakespeare
Page 27
Shakespeare at Work
The conditions of writing and printing drama are well covered by the contributors to David Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), and Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book (2001) is a readable account of changes in editing and bibliography and why they matter. The British Library's digital quartos website (http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html) allows access to all the early printed editions of Shakespeare: you can view a number of digital facsimiles of the First Folio online via the Folger Shakespeare Library (www.folger.edu). Lukas Erne's controversial Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2007) has turned old notions of the relation between long and short versions of Shakespeare's plays on their head; he posits a Shakespeare who was interested in the publication of his plays.
John Jowett's Shakespeare and Text (2007) is accessible and learned; his editions of Timon of Athens (2004) and Thomas More (2011) extend the discussion of collaborative working practices. Andrew Gurr's The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (2004) studies Shakespeare's works from the point of view of the structure and methods of the Chamberlain's, later King's, Men. Tiffany Stern's Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (2009) is one of those books that changes totally how you think about the early modern play—she shows it not to be a unified text as published by Arden or World's Classics, but rather an assemblage of fragments: songs, letters as props, parts, epilogues, prologues. David Crystal is the expert on Shakespeare and language, in a vast array of works including Shakespeare's Words (with Ben Crystal, 2002) and “Think on My Words”: Exploring Shakespeare's Language (2008); Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language (2001) is a more evocative and associative take on Shakespeare's poetic use of rhetoric and vocabulary.
Shakespeare in the Theater
Classic books on the Elizabethan theater are by Andrew Gurr again: The Shakespearean Stage, (4th edn., 2009) and Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (3rd edn., 2004). Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper's Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (2008) is full of insights from a decade of productions in the rebuilt Globe on London's Bankside. Tiffany Stern's Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (2004) understands the literary and theatrical contexts for Shakespeare's work, and her Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey, 2007) is a groundbreaking study of the way Shakespeare's actors understood their roles. Martin Wiggins's Shakespeare and the Drama of his Time (2000) is recommended as a way to counter the myopia with which we often consider Shakespeare, and Arthur Kinney's Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments (2nd edn., 2005), is the best place to sample contemporary writers.
Cambridge University Press's series Players of Shakespeare (6 vols., 1985–2004), supplemented by Michael Dobson's Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today (2006), provide a series of unique perspectives. Written by actors reflecting on their roles, these essays combine sophisticated analysis of individual actors' roles with a deep understanding of the play in which they perform. Carol Rutter's Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (1988) gives Shakespeare's female characters the same treatment: conversations between actors about their interpretation of, for example, Measure for Measure's Isabella or As You Like It's Rosalind, are revelatory about the sexual politics of specific productions at specific historical moments. Barbara Hodgdon, W.B. Worthen, Carol Rutter, and Bridget Escolme are all writers on Shakespeare in the theater who are methodologically sophisticated and genuinely revealing about performance: any of their works is well worth reading.
Interpreting Shakespeare
There is no single way of interpreting Shakespeare: here we propose some recent survey volumes, all of which introduce a range of interpretative methods and frameworks and offer extensive suggestions in turn for further reading. Finally, we highlight some specific critical works to which we find ourselves returning for their acumen and provocation.
There are any number of guides to Shakespeare: particularly useful are Robert Shaughnessy's The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare (2011), which works through the plays and their historical, theatrical, and critical contexts; Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin's Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (2003), which tries to set out, with detailed examples, different interpretative approaches; and The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2011), edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, which covers different historical and critical aspects and has good suggestions for further reading. Russ McDonald collects significant twentieth-century criticism in his Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000 (2003). There are two excellent series, the Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford University Press) and Arden Critical Companions (Arden, Bloomsbury), giving up-to-date interventions in a range of topics, from biography to religion to literary theory. Works such as Dympna Callaghan (ed.), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (2000), Sonia Massai (ed.), World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (2005), and Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds.), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (1998), give a sense of how the field has changed. We, and our students, love Doing Shakespeare, Simon Palfrey's brilliant book of close reading (2nd edn., 2011); Marjorie Garber's collection of provocative essays, Profiling Shakespeare (2008), is similarly lively. Michael Neill's Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama (2000) offers lucid, humanely historicist arguments.
Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (1990; paperback 1991) reads like a critical version of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, in which our hero morphs through centuries. Anything by Taylor is well worth reading: here he combines performance history, publication history, and political history; as an added bonus, each chapter is written in the style of the period it chronicles. Alexander Leggatt has published on every Shakespeare genre over thirty years: Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (1974, reprinted 2005), Shakespeare's Political Drama (1988), and Shakespeare's Tragedies (2005). His critical interpretations are based on the words in the play and the play's theatrical effects: no other critic could get away with this limited focus, but Leggatt's critical insights show you why he can. A.D. Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker (2007) and Tony Tanner's Prefaces to Shakespeare (2010) each offer a play-by-play approach, highly recommended if you require a refresher before going to the theater. Nuttall focuses on Shakespeare's ideas; Tanner on the language in which those ideas are expressed.
Our final injunction was to read Shakespeare himself: there is a plethora of available editions, each aimed at a particular readership. Although publishers offer Shakespeare series in individual volumes, it's hard to recommend any one series uniformly: you will have your own criteria—portability, price, font size, electronic or paper, amount of intrusive explanation, page design—for choosing. We are drawn to different editions for different reasons: New Penguin for carrying to lectures, with their up-to-date and crisp introductions; Bedford St Martin's “Texts and Contexts” series for its inclusion of historical material to contextualize each play; Arden series 3 for extensive scholarship and annotation. The “Shakespeare in Production” series from Cambridge University Press does not cover every play in the canon, but for those currently available in this series it gives a reading experience referenced to the myriad interpretations on stage: each line is keyed to how it has been interpreted by actors and directors, thus offering a quickly accessible range of interpretative possibilities. Elizabeth Schafer's The Taming of the Shrew (2002), for instance, is a particularly good volume to start with. You may wonder whether or why you would need to buy a new edition: is not a text from school or college days adequate? But interpretation of Shakespeare has developed, and new things are being discovered, as this book has shown: these changes and developments also affect the text we read. Publishers therefore are constantly updating and recommissioning editions to reflect this evolution.
Three academic journals dominate the market for new work: Shakespeare Quarterly, published by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare Studies (Farleigh Dickinson University
Press), and Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge University Press); Shakespeare (Routledge) is a relatively new entrant. The professional association in the USA is the Shakespeare Association of America: there are Shakespeare associations in India, Japan, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, Norway, Korea, Southern Africa, and many other countries. The British Shakespeare Association (http://www.britishshakespeare.ws/) has a wide base of teachers, theater practitioners, academics, and enthusiasts: the website highlights new work, Shakespeare in the news, and events and recordings.
Index
Admiral's Men
Alleyn, Edward
Allot, Robert
Aristotle
Asquith, Clare
Attridge, Derek
Aubrey, John
Bacon, Delia
Bacon, Francis
Barnfield, Richard
Barry, Lording
Barthes, Roland
Bate, Jonathan
Bearman, Robert
Beaumont, Francis
Beerbohm, Max
Beerbohm Tree, Herbert
Bergson, Henri
Berry, Cicely
Betterton, Thomas
Bierce, Ambrose
Blackfriars Theatre
Bodleian Library
Bodley, Thomas
Bogdanov, Michael
Boyd, Michael
Branagh, Kenneth
Bridges, Robert
Brook, Peter
Brooke, Arthur
Browne, Sir Thomas
Bryson, Bill
Bullough, Edward
Burbage, James
Burbage, Richard
Burgess, Anthony
Burrow, Colin
Callaghan, Dympna
Campion, Edmund
Cavendish, Margaret
Cawdray, Robert
Césaire, Aimé
Chapman, George
Charnes, Linda
Cheke, John
Chettle, Henry
Coldiron, Anne
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Cook, Ann Jennalie
Coryate, Thomas
Cressy, David
Crowl, Samuel
Crystal, David
Curtain Theatre
Daborne, Robert
Daniel, Samuel
Davenant, William
Day, John
de Quincey, Thomas
de Vere, Edward, Earl of Oxford
Dekker, Thomas
Dench, Judi
Desan, Philippe
Doran, Greg
Dowden, Edward
Dryden, John
Dubrow, Heather
Duffy, Carol Ann
Duncan-Jones, Katherine
Dutton, Elisabeth
Eagleton, Terry
Eco, Umberto
Eliot, T.S.
Elizabeth I
Erasmus, Desiderius
Erne, Lukas
Essex, Earl of
Field, Richard
Fletcher, John
Florio, John
Ford, John
Forman, Simon
Frayn, Michael
Freud, Sigmund
Gammer Gurton's Needle
Gascoigne, George
genre
Globe Theatre
Gosson, Stephen
Greenblatt, Stephen
Greene, Robert
Greer, Germaine
Gunn, Steven
Gurr, Andrew
Hackett, Helen
Hall, Edward
Hall, John
Hanmer, Thomas
Harbage, Alfred
Harington, Sir John
Hathaway, Anne (Anne Shakespeare)
Haughton, William
Hayward, John
Hazlitt, William
Hemingway, Ernest
Henslowe, Philip
Heywood, Thomas
Hobbes, Thomas
Holbein, Hans
Holbrook, Peter
Holinshed, Raphael
Honigmann, Ernst
Housman, A.E.
Howard, Jean
humanism
Hytner, Nicholas
Ireland, William Henry
Ioppolo, Grace
Jackson, MacDonald P.
James I
James, Henry
Johnson, Samuel
Jonson, Ben
Jowett, John
Joyce, James
Kahn, Coppélia
Kathman, David
Keats, John
Kemp, Will
Kermode, Frank
King Leir
King's Men
Kinnear, Rory
Kott, Jan
Kozintsev, Grigori
Kurosawa, Akira
Kyd, Thomas
Kyle, Barry
Lee, Sidney
literacy
Lodge, Thomas
Lord Chamberlain's Men
Luhrmann, Baz
Lyly, John
Malone, Edmund
Manningham, John
Marlowe, Christopher
Marston, John
Maslen, Elizabeth
Massinger, Philip
Mathiessen, F.O.
McGough, Roger
McKellen, Ian
Medwall, Henry
Melchiori, Giorgio
Meres, Francis
Middleton, Thomas
Miller, Jonathan
Milton, John
Minghella, Anthony
Montaigne, Michel de
More, Thomas
Morgann, Maurice
Mortimer, John
Moryson, Fynes
Mucedorus
Munday, Anthony
myths, definition of
Nabokov, Vladimir
Nashe, Thomas
Nicholls, Charles
Norton, Thomas
Nunn, Trevor
Olivier, Laurence
Orgel, Stephen
Orton, Joe
O'Toole, Peter
Ovid
Oxford, Earl of, see de Vere, Edmund
Platter, Thomas
Peacham, Henry
Pechter, Edward
Peele, George
Pepys, Samuel
Petrarch
Plutarch
Polanski, Roman
Pope, Alexander
Porter, Peter
Potter, Lois
printing
see alsoShakespeare, William: First Folio
Puttenham, George
Queen's Men
Rainolds, John
Ralph Roister Doister
Robinson, Benedict
Rose Theatre
Rourke, Josie
Rowe, Nicholas
Rowley, Samuel
Rowley, William
Rowse, A.L.
Rush, Christopher
Rylance, Mark
Santayana, George
Schäfer, Jürgen
Schoenbaum, Samuel
Scolaker, Anthony
Shakespeare, Hamnet
Shakespeare, John
Shakespeare, Judith
Shakespeare, Susanna
Shakespeare, William
anachronisms
‘authorship question’
blank verse
and Catholicism
collaboration
education
First Folio
life
‘lost years’
politics
popularity
reading
revision
sources
topicality
and travel
vocabulary
will
“W.S.”
works
All s Well that Ends Well
Antony and Cleopatra
As You Like It
Cardenio
The Comedy of Errors
Coriolanus productions of
Cymbeline
Edward III
Hamletproductions of
&n
bsp; 1 Henry IV productions of
2 Henry IV
Henry V productions of
1 Henry VI
2 Henry VI
3 Henry VI
Henry VIII (All Is True) productions of
Julius Caesar
King John productions of
King Lear
The Lover's Complaint
Love's Labour's Lost
“Love labours won”
Macbeth productions of
Measure for Measure
The Merchant of Venice productions of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night's Dream productions of
Much Ado About Nothing productions of
Othello productions of
Pericles
The Phoenix and the Turtle
The Rape of Lucrece
Richard II
Richard III productions of
Romeo and Juliet productions of
sonnets
The Taming of the Shrew productions of
The Tempest productions of
Thomas More
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus productions of
Troilus and Cressida
Twelfth Night productions of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona productions of
The Two Noble Kinsmen productions of
Venus and Adonis
The Winter's Tale productions of
Shakespeare in Love(dir. John Madden)
Shapiro, James
Shaw, George Bernard
Sheridan, Richard
Sidney, Sir Philip
Sinfield, Alan
Sir John Oldcastle
Sir Thomas Stukeley
Southampton, Earl of
Spenser, Edmund
stage directions
Stanislavsky, Konstantin
Steevens, George
Stern, Tiffany
Stoppard, Tom
Strachey, Lytton