This Is Shakespeare

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: . Carol Ann Duffy wrote a wonderful adaptation of the medieval play Everyman, published by Faber in 2015. Coleridge’s view of The Comedy of Errors can be found in Jonathan Bate (ed.), The Romantics on Shakespeare (Penguin, 1992); John Mortimer and Michael Frayn on farce are both from interviews with the New York Times, on 26 January 1992 and 8 December 1985, respectively. Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy is available in an edition by Gavin Alexander (Penguin Classics, 2004); Henri Bergson’s work on laughter is much reprinted, or in digital form from Project Gutenberg: .

  CHAPTER 4: RICHARD II

  The official Elizabethan homilies are available online via the Internet Shakespeare project: . Shakespeare’s great historical source Raphael Holinshed has been digitized at the Holinshed Project: . Ernst Kantorowicz developed his ideas in a book called The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, first published in 1957. There’s more on the stage history of the play, including John Barton’s production, in Margaret Shewring’s Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard II (Manchester University Press, 1996). Simon Palfrey’s Doing Shakespeare (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011) has a dazzling section on rhyme in Richard II. Ireland, Essex and Elizabeth feature prominently in James Shapiro’s excellent 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Faber, 2005).

  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: . There are lots of Victorian illustrations of scenes from the play available from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s digital collection: . Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night is included in the Penguin Classics edition of The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (1978). I’ve quoted from one of my favourite works of Shakespeare criticism, Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Methuen, 1964).

  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 . Freud’s essay ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ was published in 1913 and is included in volume 14 of the Penguin Freud Library, Art and Literature (1985). Karl Marx writes on Timon of Athens in The Paris Manuscripts and in Capital.

  CHAPTER 8: 1 HENRY IV

  Title-page information on early printed texts of Shakespeare can be found at . Harold Bloom’s book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Fourth Estate, 1999) is a compelling read: some useful critiques of its approach are by Geoffrey O’Brien in The New York Review of Books (18 February 1999) and A. C. Grayling in Prospect (April 1999); the quotation ‘Falstaff is life! Falstaff is the blessing’ comes from an interview Bloom gave to John Heilpern in Vanity Fair (20 April 2011). Maurice Morgann’s essay on Falstaff is digitized at ; H. R. Woudhuysen’s Penguin Classics collection Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1990) is recommended. I’m indebted to Wikisimpsons () for information on Matt Groening’s animated sitcom. Anti-theatrical writing, including Philip Stubbes’s phrase ‘Satan’s synagogue’, along with lots of other contemporary documentation about theatre practice, audiences and the place of the stage, is excerpted in Tanya Pollard (ed.), Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Blackwell Publishing, 2004).

  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: . There’s more on the actors of the Chamberlain’s Men and their impact on Shakespeare’s plays in Bart van Es, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford University Press, 2013).

  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 . Richard McCabe’s essay is the best account of the Bishops’ Ban, ‘Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599’, in The Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981); Thomas Platter’s travelogue was translated by Clare Williams and published as Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599 (Jonathan Cape, 1937).

  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 , the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Digital Anthology of Early Modern Drama. Hamnet Shakespeare is discussed by Graham Holderness in the group biography of Shakespeare and his associates, The Shakespeare Circle, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  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 . The exhilarating Northrop Frye can be sampled in the book Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, edited by Robert Sandler (Yale University Press, 1986), but I particularly recommend his book on comedies which takes its title from Twelfth Night, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965). Thanks to the work of Phil Gyford, you can read The Diary of Samuel Pepys online: .

  CHAPTER 13: MEASURE FOR MEASURE

  Charlotte Lennox’s pioneering scholarship on Shakespeare’s sources is available online at ; the more modern version of this material is Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, which includes Cinthio and Whetstone. The catalogue page to the First Folio is viewable in the preliminaries to the digitized text from the Bodleian Library: . Liz Lochhead delivers ‘Men Talk’ in a recording available on YouTube: . Lots of online texts can generate proportions of lines spoken by different characters: I’ve used the figures from my The Cambridge Shakespeare Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2012). I discuss William Johnstoune (the probable early reader and annotator of a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio) in my Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford University Press, 2016): the annotations, from a copy now in Meisei University, Japan, are also available online: . I discuss, with great and I hope evident enjoyment, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside in the ‘Not Shakespeare’ audio lecture series available from Apple Podcasts or . Comparisons between the Duke and James I have been made by numerous scholars, including Leah S. Marcus in her Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (University of California Press, 1988).

  CHAPTER 14: OTHELLO

  John Kani recalled the Suzman production of Othello in an essay published by the British Council, ‘Apartheid and Othello’ (2016): . Other landmark productions of the play are discussed in Lois Potter, Othello: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester University Press, 2002). Burbage’s skills and the response to his death are discussed by Bart van Es in his study Shakespeare in Company (Oxford University Press, 2013), from where these quotations are taken. Othello’s critical history is surveyed in Othello: A Critical Reader, edited by Robert C. Evans (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), and in Ayanna Thompson’s introduction to the Arden edition of the play (2016). Jonathan Bate wrote about the contemporary echoes in the Times Literary Supplement of 21 October 2001. Intersectionality is a concept initially outlined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989) and developed by many social theorists and activists, as explained in Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge’s Intersectionality: Key Concepts (Polity Press, 2016). W. H. Auden’s ‘The Joker in the Pack’ was published in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (Faber, 1963); Thomas Rymer’s scornful analysis of Othello comes from his A Short View of Tragedy (1692); Thomas Heywood’s defence of the stage, An Apology for Actors (1612), is included in Tanya Pollard’s Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Blackwell Publishing, 2004).

  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: ; the 1623 First Folio from the Bodleian Library: . Terry Eagleton’s summary account of tragic theory forms the first chapter of his book Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002); the insight about changing meanings of ‘uncomfortable’ comes from A. D. Nuttall’s book Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (Oxford University Press, 1996). Nahum Tate’s Restoration rewrite of King Lear, The History of King Lear (1681), is available from the Internet Shakespeare: ; Samuel Johnson on Lear is included in H. R. Woudhuysen’s Penguin Classics collection Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1990). Jonathan Bate’s Penguin anthology The Romantics on Shakespeare (Penguin, 1992) is the source of quotations from Schlegel, Hazlitt and Coleridge. A. C. Bradley’s 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy is much reprinted (Penguin Classics, 1991); G. Wilson Knight’s account of the play is in his whirlingly brilliant The Wheel of Fire (first published in 1930 by Oxford University Press; Routledge Classics, 2001); Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Methuen, 1964) is, I hope you’re seeing, required reading. Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) reviews some of the play’s critical history, as does Kiernan Ryan in his introduction to the New Casebook of essays on King Lear (Palgrave, 1992). The argument about Shakespeare revising King Lear was first developed in the book The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford University Press, 1983). Taylor gives a great account of this critical bromide in his entertaining Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (Oxford University Press, 1991). It’s still a contentious issue: look up responses to Brian Vickers’ The One King Lear (Harvard University Press, 2016) to get a sense of the debate. Ernest Hemingway talked about the ending of A Farewell to Arms in an interview with The Paris Review in 1958, reprinted in The Paris Review Interviews, 1 (2006).

  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:
. Ralegh’s poem is printed in the edition of his Selected Writings, edited by Gerald Hammond (Penguin Classics, 1986).

  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