by Emma Smith
CHAPTER 3: THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
The New Oxford Shakespeare The Complete Works, edited by Gary Taylor, Terri Bourus, John Jowett and Gabriel Egan (Oxford University Press, 2016), has a bricolage of critical quotations instead of introductions to the plays and these directed me to George Steevens’s observation on The Comedy of Errors. T. S. Eliot’s famous observation about poets borrowing or stealing comes from an essay on another early modern playwright, Philip Massinger, in his collection The Sacred Wood, first published in 1920. You can access a digital facsimile of the First Folio to look at the confusions of the play before editors get hold of it, via the Bodleian Library:
CHAPTER 4: RICHARD II
The official Elizabethan homilies are available online via the Internet Shakespeare project:
CHAPTER 5: ROMEO AND JULIET
I’ve quoted Jean Anouilh’s Antigone from the English translation by Barbara Bray, published in Anouilh: Five Plays (Methuen, 1987). Susan Snyder’s term ‘evitability’ comes from her book The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton University Press, 1979). Arthur Brooke’s poem is printed in Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957) (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). George Puttenham’s work is reprinted by Gavin Alexander in his Penguin Classics edition of Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (2004). Narrative theories, including those likening reading to sexual pleasure, are discussed in Paul Cobley’s Narrative (Routledge, 2001). The comic Restoration version of Romeo and Juliet was by James Howard, and performed in tandem with its tragic sibling at Lj33.incoln’s Inn in 1663–4. You can read the play as printed without its Prologue in the First Folio via the Bodleian Library:
CHAPTER 6: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
The unfortunate school party shocked by the Royal Shakespeare Company performance was reported by the BBC in 1999:
CHAPTER 7: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
Documentary information about Shakespeare, including digital facsimiles of the fascinating and often informative title pages of his work, is collected at
CHAPTER 8: 1 HENRY IV
Title-page information on early printed texts of Shakespeare can be found at
CHAPTER 9: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare is the go-to on Shakespeare’s influences and source material. George Bernard Shaw’s comment on Don John is included in Edwin Wilson’s Shaw on Shakespeare (Penguin, 1961). The 1600 Quarto of Much Ado is available from the British Library:
CHAPTER 10: JULIUS CAESAR
Critics worrying about whether ‘The Tragedy of Brutus’ would be more appropriate include Ernest Schanzer in the journal English Literary History 22 (1955) and Horst Zander in Julius Caesar: New Critical Essays (Routledge, 2005). Jean Baudrillard’s provocative ideas about the Gulf War were published as three short essays in Liberation (in French) and The Guardian (in English) in January–March 1991, and then as a book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Indiana University Press, 1995). Marx’s insight about tragedy and farce comes from his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, first published in German in 1852. Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans is included in Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. There’s a good Penguin Classics edition of Arthur Golding’s version of Ovid, Metamorphoses, edited by Madeleine Forey (2002). The first plays to be published with Shakespeare’s name on the title page date from 1598: see
CHAPTER 11: HAMLET
I’ve quoted Joyce’s Ulysses from the Oxford World’s Classics text edited by Jeri Johnson (1993). Freud writes on Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900; first English translation, 1913), volume 4 in the Penguin Freud Library (1991); Marx uses Hamlet in his discussion of revolution in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852); twentieth-century philosophers’ responses to the play are explored in The Hamlet Doctrine (Verso, 2013) by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster. T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was first published in 1915 in Poetry magazine. Jan Kott’s book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Methuen, 1964) is always suggestive. On the stage history of the play, see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (Oxford University Press, 2011). The description of Jonathan Pryce’s performance is taken from a review in the Listener (4 April 1980). On Protestantism and the wider historical context, Peter Ma
rshall’s Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (Yale University Press, 2017) is highly recommended, as is Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (expanded edition, Princeton University Press, 2013). Thomas Kyd’s brilliant The Spanish Tragedy is available in lots of print editions, including my Five Revenge Tragedies (Penguin Classics, 2012), and online at
CHAPTER 12: TWELFTH NIGHT
Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Will Tosh’s Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) flesh out some of the issues around sexuality in the period. Montaigne’s essays are available in a modern English translation by M. A. Screech (Penguin Classics, 2003): for the early modern translation by John Florio with which Shakespeare was familiar, see Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt (eds), Shakespeare’s Montaigne (NYRB Classics, 2014). Thomas Heywood’s description of genres comes from his An Apology for Actors (1612), reprinted in Tanya Pollard’s Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Blackwell Publishing, 2004). I’ve quoted the definition of ‘great’ from the Oxford English Dictionary at
CHAPTER 13: MEASURE FOR MEASURE
Charlotte Lennox’s pioneering scholarship on Shakespeare’s sources is available online at
CHAPTER 14: OTHELLO
John Kani recalled the Suzman production of Othello in an essay published by the British Council, ‘Apartheid and Othello’ (2016):
CHAPTER 15: KING LEAR
Because of the issues around the texts of King Lear with which this chapter concludes, the Oxford Shakespeare, which prints the Quarto and Folio as separate plays, is awkward to cite here: I’ve shifted for this chapter only to The Norton Shakespeare (W. W. Norton, 2016), edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus and Gordon McMullan. The two texts of King Lear are available as digital facsimiles: the 1608 Quarto from the British Library:
CHAPTER 16: MACBETH
Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is widely available, including in a Penguin edition edited by Angus Gowland (forthcoming, 2019). Burton’s library of over 1,700 books is catalogued by Nicolas K. Kiessling in The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988). The mock trial was reported in the Evening Standard (17 May 2010). James Thurber’s ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’ was first published in The New Yorker in 1937, and is printed in The Thurber Carnival (Penguin Classics, 2014). Diane Purkiss’s book The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (Routledge, 1996) is highly recommended. Forman’s account of Macbeth is recorded on the Shakespeare Documented site:
CHAPTER 17: ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
Van Es’s book Shakespeare in Company (Oxford University Press, 2013) is recommended for the impact Shakespeare’s actors had on his writing. Linda Bamber’s book Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare was published in 1982 (Stanford University Press). The unconvinced review of the Globe performance is by Benedict Nightingale from the New York Times of 29 August 1999.
CHAPTER 18: CORIOLANUS
I’ve quoted Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 3rd edn (W. W. Norton, 2018). Shakespeare’s sources are reprinted in Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare; the historian Steve Hindle has written brilliantly on food riots and the play in his article in History Workshop Journal, Vol. 66, Issue 1 (October 2008), ‘Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England: Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607’. Amid admirable Shakespeare biographies by Katherine Duncan-Jones, Lois Potter, Stephen Greenblatt and Park Honan, Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford University Press, 1975) presents a balanced account based on evidence rather than creative speculation. Creative speculation is very much the territory of Edward Bond’s unsympathetic play Bingo (1973): I’ve quoted here from Bond’s introduction to the play as published by Methuen in Bond Plays: 3 (2007). Hazlitt’s insight about Shakespeare’s characteristic excessiveness or supererogation comes from his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, first published in 1817 and excerpted in Jonathan Bate (ed.), The Romantics on Shakespeare (Penguin, 1992). I’ve quoted Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, first published in 1901, from the edition translated by Anthea Bell with an introduction by Paul Keegan (Penguin Classics, 2002). G. Wilson Knight writes about Coriolanus in The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, 3rd edn (Methuen, 1954). I’ve used the terms associated with PTSD from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013). My argument about speech prefixes and stage directions will probably be easier to follow if you look at the pages of the First Folio (digitized by the Bodleian Library at