The field of Shakespearean study is a vast one. As well as the original plays and sonnets, there is also a huge body of critical work and media. The plays have been performed over four centuries around the globe, and in multiple languages. In film, they are also prolific, from the numerous BBC productions to cinematic releases such as Kenneth Branagh's popular 1993 adaptation of Much Ado about Nothing. Most recently, director Danny Boyle used Caliban's speech from The Tempest as an overall theme for the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, titled “Isles of Wonder”. That such a cultural touchstone of Britain and the English language should come from someone contemporary Robert Greene described as an “upstart Crow” (p. 13) is testament to his powers of language and command of narrative. Nowadays, it feels as though Shakespeare is, as well as a sixteenth century playwright and poet, also a name representing a body of work, a particular dramatic style and an enduring British export.
The challenge faced by Robert Shaughnessy, then, is to harness this sprawling amount of information – biography, critical theory, performance, and the works themselves – into one navigable volume. Shaughnessy himself notes that his work is aimed at undergraduate level upwards, and this is definitely an academic text which delves deep into critical ideas about Shakespeare and Shakespearian studies.
The book is in four parts, Life and Contexts, Works, Criticism, and Stage and Screen. The first part looks at Shakespeare's early years, and then follows his career as poet, playwright and actor in Elizabethan England, including issues of patronage, the ownership of the playhouses and the theatre politics among different troupes of actors. Shaughnessy uses parish records and contemporary writings to ascertain the facts of Shakespeare's family and placing them in context, to achieve a fuller idea of where Shakespeare came from and how this might have influenced his future writing. This chapter is structured in a way that we can trace Shakespeare's early work, and also burgeoning awareness among his contemporaries of his entrance on the writing scene. As well as this treatment of Shakespeare's writing life, short bibliographies are included of the key players of the period, for example, the actor Edward Alleyn, writer Thomas Heywood and Philip Henslowe, founder of the Rose playhouse. As well as people, Shaughnessy also includes précis of non‐canon works which may have been written, or co‐written by Shakespeare. At the end of part 1, there is a chronology listing key dates between Shakespeare's birth in 1564 until 1644 when the second Globe playhouse was demolished.
Part 2 of this book covers the canon works of Shakespeare, placing the works in the context of their time as well as considering modern approaches to the plays and how these bring out underlying themes in the texts such as race and sexuality. It is divided into sections which consider either one single play, for example Julius Caesar, or looks at two or more similarly‐themed plays together, for example the entry on Twelfth Night and Much Ado about Nothing. Shakespeare's sonnets also have their own entry in tandem with the narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint. Each entry begins with an information box about the work to be discussed, including the date of publication, authorship, sources and influences, notable productions of stage and screen, and off‐shoots (for example film and TV re‐workings such as Ten Things I Hate about You, the updated Hollywood re‐telling of the Taming of the Shrew). Shaughnessy examines the works critically, discussing structure, language and narrative sources as well as the problems encountered either within the text itself, or with the response to the text. Mention is made, for example, of implausible plot resolutions in Measure for Measure, a play with an uncomfortable “happy ending”. In the section on Othello, Shaughnessy compares two editions of the play published in the 1950s and the apparent discomfort of the editors in addressing the question of Othello's race. One editor barely mentions it, and the other pays the character a telling back‐handed compliment by imagining Othello as dark‐skinned with strong European features, rendering him “noble” looking. Each section ends with a short list of further reading, both books and journal articles, to enable the reader to research more broadly into the play in question and themes discussed.
Part 3 looks at the range of Shakespearean criticism and its history. The chapter is divided into three sections, histories, languages and subjectivities, and like chapter 1, there are information boxes placed in the text at intervals which contain biographies of key critics such as Foucault and Brecht. Shaughnessy covers critical theory from 1904 and the publication of A.C. Bradley's influential work, Shakespearean Tragedy, and goes on to talk about the development of different kinds of theory during the twentieth century. There was the New Bibliography movement who sought to identify “non‐authorial” parts of later published texts, the adherents to “New Criticism” who practised the “close reading” of the text itself without placing it in any sort of context and those who used historicism, deliberately examining texts within the context of the Elizabethan age. In the 1980s, the first collection of feminist essays on Shakespeare was published, and since that date, as Shaughnessy notes, there has been a huge output of cross‐disciplinary criticism such as post‐structuralist, queer theory or post‐colonial theory.
Part 4 deals with stage and screen adaptations in the context of film history and performance criticism. Shaughnessy structures this chapter by considering the ideas and works of Shakespearean film and stage critics, and at the same time, working through a chronology of films and performances through the lens of critical theory, contemporary thought and social change. The film section, for example, talks about the beginnings of Shakespeare on film – a 75 second clip of Herbert Beerbohm Tree performing the title role in King John in 1899 – and then traverses a huge film library which encompasses the static, “theatrically‐filmed” versions such as early BBC productions, through to “realistically” filmed versions which give greater scope for off‐stage events such as shipwrecks or battles to be brought into the audience's view. A third type, the avant‐garde Shakespeare film, such as Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, is also discussed as are the modern adaptations which take their context from the culture of youth, media and technology, for example Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet which was a huge mainstream hit, and contained elements of traditional Shakespeare, fantasy, avant‐garde and modern culture in the way it was filmed. The section on Stage then looks at the beginnings of the Royal Shakespeare Company and its remit, the reaction and sometimes disconnect between critics, academics and the choices of theatrical productions and the development of the Shakespearean performance from traditional Elizabethan to those which experiment with period, costume, structure and meaning of the plays. Shaughnessy also includes a section on the re‐building the Globe Theatre in London, and the clash between the desire to reclaim an authentic space for which the plays were originally created, and the problems the space actually caused for modern day actors.
Overall, this is a critical work which combines the biography of Shakespeare in the context of his social and theatrical background, an exploration of every canon work, a discussion of the extensive field of Shakespearean criticism and of the development and implications of stage and screen performances. The text is packed quite tightly in places – the final two sections in particular require particular concentration in their discussion of theory – but Shaughnessy also injects an element of humour in his commentary, for example, reflecting on the more outlandish narrative devices in some of the plays with a metaphorical raised brow. It is a satisfying read and one which manages to pull together the many Shakespearean themes, problems, questions and theory which have developed over five centuries. This book would be suitable for academic collections covering English literature, critical theory and drama.
