30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (37 page)

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

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

works

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

Stratford-upon-Avon

Stubbes, Philip

Stubbs, Imogen

Sugg, Richard

Suzman, Janet

Swan Theatre, Bankside

Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (1987)

Tarlton, Richard

Taylor, Gary

Taylor, George Coffin

Taymor, Julie

Tennant, David

theater

Theatre, The

Theobald, Lewis

Theophrastus

Tourneur, Cyril

Vaughan, Alden T.

Vaughan, Virginia Mason

Vennar, Richard

Vickers, Brian

Virgil

Walter, Harriet

Warburton, William

Watson, Thomas

Webster, John

Welles, Orson

Wells, Stanley

Wesker, Arnold

Whelan, Peter

Whetstone, George

Wilkins, George

Wilson, Richard

Wilson Knight, G.

Zeffirelli, Franco