TY - JOUR
AU - Louise, Powell,
AB - Abstract This chapter has four sections: 1. Editions and Textual Matters; 2. Shakespeare in the Theatre; 3. Shakespeare on Screen; 4. Criticism. Section 1 is by Jennifer Young; section 2 is by Peter J. Smith; section 3 is by Elinor Parsons; section 4(a) is by Elisabetta Tarantino, Louise Powell, and Christian Griffiths; section 4(b) is by Emanuel Stelzer; section 4(c) is by Shirley Bell; section 4(d) is by Christian Griffiths; section 4(e) is by Kate Wilkinson; section 4(f) is by Sheilagh Ilona O’Brien; section 4(g) is by Louise Powell. 1. Editions and Textual Studies The year 2016 was an eventful one, with new complete works editions being published by two of the field’s major series. Complete works editions face the challenge of negotiating parameters from multiple influences: they must present and apply the latest in scholarly research and practices, they must address the notion of completeness, and they must push the boundaries of editorial practice while remaining accessible to their largest audience—typically college undergraduates. This year, the New Oxford Shakespeare and the Norton Shakespeare presented their latest visions of Shakespeare’s complete works. Each seeks to strike a balance between an editorial practice that reflects current scholarship and long-term accessibility to their anticipated readership. Inevitably each makes compromises to achieve its vision within the material constraints of the print edition (though both see their electronic editions as a means to exceed the limits of paper). At this point, however, it is still the weighty tomes that most students will carry into class, and so these editions remain at the forefront of our assessment. The general editors of The New Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition (hereafter MCE) recognize that their goal is not to please everyone, but to offer recent editorial theory in action. The editors recognize that some things might work, while others might be condemned. It is this posture that traditionally makes the Oxford complete works as a series so interesting to the textual scholar. The MCE is no exception; as with its predecessor, collaboration as theory and practice is the MCE’s driving energy and organizing principle. Most edited texts, commentary, and paratexts are the product of collaboration: the work of the main scholar is reviewed and/or modified by other members of the editing team, supporting consistency across the editorial work. The table of contents (‘The Complete Works’) publicizes Shakespeare as a collaborator by prominently listing all known (and in some instances speculated) co-authors alongside him. The table of contents also reinforces a more nuanced understanding of Shakespeare as a collaborating playwright: he is author, collaborator, reviser; he adapts the work of others and his work is likewise adapted. As a result, the MCE’s understanding of ‘completeness’ extends the list of complete works to include ‘holding’ pages for speculative manuscripts. For example, the ‘lost’ version of Sejanus, which Jonson claimed to have rewritten for the publication of his Workes, is here identified as by Jonson and ‘Anonymous (Shakespeare?)’ (p. viii). The presence of these non-existent texts at first feels like wistful reaching, but it is in line with the general editors’ goal to present the largest collection of Shakespeare. However, in the context of other features the presence of such outlier texts fulfils a further goal for this edition. ‘Great literature, great theatre’, Gary Taylor and Terrie Bourus assert, ‘inspire great conversations’ (p. 46). The MCE makes particular efforts to invite new readers into the conversations that surround Shakespeare and his canon with some imaginative new takes on how supporting materials connect readers to Shakespeare’s work. The MCE forgoes introductory essays in favour of a ‘bricolage’ of quotes for each play covering relevant themes or issues. These ready-made discussion prompts (intended to be more enticing to the essay-adverse undergraduate) are supported by a brief timeline and a box including information such as the date of writing, early performances, and textual origins. All of which creates a useful and concise information centre for the new or the returning reader. Each introduction also contains so-called ‘visual responses’ (p. 46) to the plays in the form of performance images (including global Shakespeare) and, happily, of adaptations across the performing arts including opera and ballet. Curiously, the rationale to include these prompts has meant a move away from early modern woodcuts or engravings, which are explained as generally incapable of inspiring readers to further study or discussion—a position those who research and teach textual criticism and material culture might take issue with. While the majority of the new student-oriented features may help keep the attention of the barely engaged a bit longer, the presentation of act/scene divisions remains a problematic collision of theory and practicality. Act/scene divisions are included in plays divided by scenes, but these notations only appear at the beginning of a new act and not as part of the catchword at the top of pages. For scholars it feels like a logical compromise, but it still leaves students scrambling to locate particular speeches. Perhaps the most startling change to this version of the New Oxford Shakespeare is the sentiment that ‘for most readers a single version is enough’ (p. 51). The editorial decision to include only the version that ‘contains the most Shakespeare’ may lead to some confusing omissions for readers who (for better or worse) understand a play like Hamlet, Othello or Lear from conflated editions. Edited texts of these omitted versions are promised to follow in an ‘Alternative Versions’ edition, but there is no mention of a publication of this edition on the OUP website. The complexity of Shakespeare’s material origins is further expunged from this edition by allocating all textual notes and commentary to the Critical Reference edition. While students are granted one-year free access to this text (and the Authorship Companion—both of which will be reviewed in subsequent volumes of YWES), the lack of any collation notes/variant readings in this text eliminates opportunities for students to discover the idea of textual instability when, for example, in the course of their reading they discover that Hamlet’s flesh might be ‘solid’ or ‘sallied’. Teachers may not be willing to forgo those moments in exchange for the theatrical commentary that is given sole ownership of the right margin. Traditionalists may scoff at many of the enhancements of the MCE as gimmicks that reduce the complexities and nuances that compel us as scholars to keep coming back to Shakespeare for the sake of appealing to new student readers. While the researcher in me misses these elements in the MCE, as a teacher I find that this text offers concise elements that might be useful for undergraduates who need context alongside study of a full playtext. No edition of Shakespeare is going to do everything for everyone, but the MCE offers an alternative to traditional complete works. In classrooms with increasingly diverse student cohorts, this is certainly not a bad thing. A new edition of the Norton Shakespeare was published in hardback in 2015 and paperback in 2016. The Norton has cast off being ‘based on the Oxford Edition’, and assembled its own international team of editors: the results are a well-researched, energetic presentation of Shakespeare’s canon that challenges its anticipated readership of university undergraduates while remaining accessible. The newly edited texts are supported by apparatus familiar to users of the Norton, including Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal introduction and high-quality, compellingly written introductions to each play. Throughout, the edition remains refreshingly unapologetic about its desire to situate Shakespeare’s work within the textual and material culture of the early modern period. Of particular note is the new ‘General Textual Introduction’ by Gordon McMullan and Suzanne Gossett. Always having the potential to be the driest and most technically inaccessible section of a student edition, this version is refreshingly vibrant. These two seasoned editors bring their knowledge and—equally important considering their audience—their enthusiasm for editing and issues of textual authority to the essay, giving this introduction an effective combination of technical detail and critical rigour. It is conveyed in a steady, concise narration that is happy to stop and explain the implications of a textual variant on a particular editing choice. The essay provides a fit prologue to the textual commentaries that appear in the print edition and in extended form in the digital edition. Where multiple texts are concerned, the Norton retains its editorial approach of editing the ‘text, not the work’ (p. 85). It contains Q and F editions of Hamlet and of King Lear (as well as a Folio Lear edited with additions from Q), making this a useful edition for classes taking a book history approach. In keeping with the editors’ goal of avoiding ‘excessive emendation and intervention’ (back cover), texts are edited with an informed but light touch; readers will find ample glossing appropriate for the undergraduate reader as well as historical context and etymology. Textual comments also appear at key moments, and variant readings are included in the notes at the bottom of the page, creating opportunities for discovery and discussion of textual transmission. If a reader’s interest is piqued, these comments are cross-referenced to extended textual commentary in the digital edition. However, the playtext remains the central focus, and while the text is close, as is typical in these editions, lines of dialogue are stretched horizontally, giving a clear view of shared lines and stage directions. The print edition contains vibrant images of relevant woodcuts, engravings, and facsimiles of documents and printed texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (as an added bonus, these images are available online to instructors as ready-made Powerpoint slides). The edition is further supplemented by a comprehensive collection of historical images and documents related to the transmission of Shakespeare’s works in the digital edition (access is provided with each print edition and does not seem to expire). This is because the Norton Shakespeare is marketed as the first digital edition ‘edited specifically for undergraduates’ (back cover). This is not empty marketing: identically edited texts exist in both paper and electronic form, allowing students to move between the print and digital versions. As a result, the digital edition amplifies the strengths of the printed version by doing what ebooks do best: take advantage of the expandable Internet to create an enviable archive of variant editions and relevant secondary material. The digital platform also includes essays on cultural geography and map culture in Shakespeare’s time, gives student opportunities to explore the fluidity of the textual space through parallel scenes of Q and F texts, and extended textual comments for comparing editorial preferences to those of the editors. Combined with the flexible reading options offered by most ebook platforms, The Norton is a unique digital experience that does not sacrifice its function as a tool of education for technical gimmicks. Future editions aiming particularly at classroom use will need to take note of what has been achieved here. There are also a number of features that expand the performance focus of the edition. A new essay on ‘The Theatre in Shakespeare’s Time’ by Holger Schott Syme provides a comprehensive account of the environments and practices of the theatre in Shakespeare’s time. Once again, the essays do not simply report, they teach. Syme begins with the records of theatre performance, introducing readers to the information we have by pointing out how much evidence we are missing, encouraging readers to keep questioning what he is telling them. Syme’s essay is a thorough and accessible account that will give readers a strong foundation in the topic. Performance notes for each play, written by Brett Gamboa, are another new feature. Gamboa highlights the challenges faced by directors and actors, pointing out the consequences of various production and acting choices. These essays will enable discussion of performance that emanates from the text rather than being dependent upon seeing a particular production, providing a valuable outlet for discussion of performance that also complements the Norton’s textual focus. Overall, Norton’s third edition (print and digital versions) successfully provides a thoughtfully constructed text that always keeps its readers and their modern practices of reading in mind. At the same time, there is no compromise on presenting well-edited texts and supporting materials that offer a comprehensive gateway to a dynamic and complex study of Shakespeare’s work. A number of single-play editions were also published this year. Norton Critical Editions released a new edition of Romeo and Juliet edited by Gordon McMullan (a new edition of Othello from NCE will be reviewed in the next volume). The edition follows the template of the series: a modern-spelling edition of the play supplemented with extracts from a variety of critical sources. There is productive freedom within this form as primary text, secondary sources, and editorial intervention create a cohesive narrative that engages readers in the thematic, historical, and poetic complexities of the play. From his introduction, McMullan seeks to entice readers who may think they know this tale of thwarted teenage love to return to the play with fresh eyes. This is just the first indication that McMullan is drawing on his expertise of teaching this play to engage his readers. Throughout, the introduction knows when to define a term or give the historical, religious, or literary context undergraduates need, and it is done in a straightforward style (and with a critical eye) that is accessible but not reductive. For example, when discussing the idea of ‘universal’, a topic that is often a pitfall for students, McMullan sees this as a valuable moment for shifting perspective by reminding readers that what appears universal in their world is more likely local in the larger world. Usefully, McMullan references a number of secondary sources from elsewhere in the edition in his discussion and includes their relevant page numbers, making this an introduction that is truly a starting point for further reading. Extracts from select secondary sources chosen for this edition allow for a variety of learning approaches. In particular, the generous collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources and rewritings, combined with commentary and screenplay excerpts from film adaptations by Zeffirelli and Luhrmann, facilitates studies of adaptation and changing tastes of popular culture. Traditional critical approaches are also represented, but with welcome awareness of modern concerns. For example, including an extract from the writings of Helena Faucit, a nineteenth-century actress and critic, is a happy addition amongst the male voices in the ‘Pre-Twentieth-Century Responses’ section. The text of the play and its editorial apparatus are similarly well pitched to engage the anticipated reader in a variety of learning activities. The textual note is followed by a number of facsimile pages from Q1 and Q2, providing a ready-made resource for activities on collation, textual variation, and editing. The edited playtext follows the traditional Norton practice of glossing words in the right margin and providing additional commentary to support reader comprehension in footnotes. Stage directions are the most visible editorial addition as McMullan highlights implied and embedded directions that are less obvious to the undergraduate reader. As in the Norton Shakespeare, a designated section on the page for collation notes (a list of textual variants is included at the end of the playtext) is replaced with textual commentary in the footnotes, addressing major variations from the Q2 copy-text. This is a helpful alternative for engaging new readers with textual instability—first encounters are no longer with intimidating and potentially indecipherable collation notes, but through discussion of a variant’s significance to the reader’s present experience of the text. One is often tempted to wonder if we need one more edition of a play like Romeo and Juliet; however, this edition has breathed some new life into the pedagogical potential of the play and should encourage teachers to reintroduce it into their course reading. The final new edition for review this year is King Henry IV Part 2 edited by James C. Bulman for the Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Bulman brings a clear and much-appreciated enthusiasm for this underestimated play to his introduction. Part 2, he argues, is ‘a sequel that need not rely on Part One to be understood’ (p. 9) and Bulman does a fine job of balancing the merits of Part 2 as a stand-alone play against its relationship with its more celebrated counterpart. The result is a number of insightful perspectives that deserve further consideration. For example, his theory that much of the comedy in Part 2 was initially overflow material from Part 1 offers an intriguing explanation for Part 2’s combination of elements shared with Part 1, but also explains the way themes that appear in both are expressed differently (they are often more dark) in the sequel. The introduction also covers traditional areas of critical interest for this play: Falstaff features prominently, interesting connections between nostalgia for ‘Merry Old England’ and Catholicism are considered, performance history examines the ‘separate sequel’ idea further, and there is detailed scrutiny of Shakespeare’s use of language devices to construct ‘low’ characters. Part 2’s sweeping representation of social classes outside the court is a particular interest of Bulman’s, and he draws on current interest in cultural geography to make a compelling case for reading the Gloucestershire scenes as a challenge to the expected binary of city versus green space. Like a number of the Arden Shakespeare editions reviewed this year, there is an effort to make performance studies sections more accessible by referencing theatrical and film versions readily available for classroom use. Bulman follows the Arden editorial guidelines for his edition (which uses the 1600 quarto as his copy-text). He does, however, add an extra layer of editorial intervention to identify Folio-only passages and additions included in his text with superscript ‘F’s. It is a subtle intervention that has been seen, for example in the Arden 3 King Lear. It is far less obtrusive here and so worth the effort to give readers a visual introduction to a less well-known multi-text narrative. The editorial apparatus combined with the interesting introduction offer a welcome new edition of this under-appreciated play. The ever-accelerating pace of research and information exchange poses a continuous challenge for the Shakespeare editor of balancing the need for editions that provide updated research alongside the meticulously edited texts that can take years to complete. In the wake of the upcoming fourth series, The Arden Shakespeare has released three revised editions of major plays from series 3. Each retains the edited text of its predecessors, but benefits from a new ‘Additions and Reconsiderations’ section written by its editor. In Claire McEachern’s Much Ado About Nothing the title ‘Additions and Reconsiderations’ doesn’t really do justice to the relevance of this new material. In the first half, McEachern provides insightful critiques of recent cinematic and stage productions of the play (thoughtfully limiting her discussion to performances available in digital format—a useful choice for classroom use). In particular, her comparison of Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 and Joss Whedon’s 2012 versions provides insightful analysis of how divergent cinematic techniques in the two films are used to emphasize similarly modern concerns. In addition to being interesting scholarship, this detailed discussion of Shakespeare on film focuses on particular cinematic techniques and terminology, providing a great model for students who include films in their studies, but are not always as prepared to discuss the technical elements of film as they are plot, character, or metaphor. In the other half of this section McEachern takes a more traditional turn, discussing how the play’s interest in knowing and not knowing engages with concerns of the Reformation, making this revised edition worth a look for staying up to date on Much Ado. Another revised Arden edition to appear this year was Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Thompson and Taylor have supplemented their edition (which is still the gold standard for editing and commentary on the play) with a comprehensive update of scholarship and artistic responses to the play since publication of their edition in 2006. An ‘Additions and Reconsiderations’ section is especially relevant for a play like Hamlet that remains in seemingly constant engagement in academia and popular culture, and happily the editors seem to agree. Thompson and Taylor survey four areas of recent work: biography, text, criticism, and afterlives (performance), applying their comprehensive knowledge of the critical and cultural Hamlet landscape to a chapter of concise yet informative assessments. They address new work in expected areas such as energetic disputes regarding the authority of Q1 and its place in editions such as the Arden, as well as recent biographical, psychological, and theological analysis of the play. There are a number of interesting additions, including an extended section on foreign-language performances in the UK and abroad as well as a section on the recent influx of responses to Hamlet in popular fiction, particularly in YA fiction that has inspired, among other things, a series of empowered Ophelias. In short, this is a valuable update that keeps this edition required reading. Arden’s most substantively revised edition is E.A.J. Honigmann’s Othello. The new introduction by Ayanna Thompson masterfully considers developments in studies of Othello and early modern race, theatrical practice, and Global Shakespeare. Thompson begins and ends her introduction with the centrality of storytelling to this play. This elegant frame establishes an approach for reading Othello, the play’s history, and literature more generally: that works of value contain multiple narratives and perspectives, and that there are benefits to exploring ‘the connections and fissures between them’ (p. 3). Establishing the tenet that there is no single meaning to Othello, Thompson prepares readers for the journey that follows. A sweeping but well-paced and enjoyable read, the introduction takes us from performances of Othello on the early modern stage to some surprising interests of performance in early twenty-first-century productions. Complex ideas are addressed with clarity and a knack for making thoughtful connections to our own time. For example, comparing modern definitions (both right and wrong) of the word ‘Arab’ becomes a way into the diverse uses of ‘Moor’ in the early modern period. Similarly, study of the handkerchief dyed in ‘mummy’ (pp. 49–50) offers an interesting (if morbid) connection between Africa and Europe within a play that is typically used to identify difference. The sections provide a narrative of changing performance practices told within shifting societal and cultural approaches to race. Of particular import and interest is the experience of actors of colour playing the lead part. It is, naturally, a story of firsts prompting celebrations, but also reveals confrontations (for example, Paul Robeson performing the title role at the Savoy Theatre, but prohibited from staying at the Savoy Hotel). But what truly makes this discussion so engrossing and valuable is how Thompson never lets the reader settle with a single either/or duality. Just when the reader thinks society has achieved the desired ending, Thompson compels us to question further: ‘Yet it is interesting to note that at precisely the historical moment when black actors dominate the role of Othello many productions choose to de-emphasize themes of racial difference in order to emphasize themes involving the personal strains on all military personnel’ (p. 83). In this way, Thompson provides a model for the wise doubting that good readers of Othello and, in fact, good humans should do. In addition to the meaningful testimonies of actors and theatre professionals given throughout, the greatest gift of this introduction is the opportunity to observe the continually shifting perspectives on Othello across time, cultures, countries, and ethnicities. The section on adaptations and appropriations is particularly striking—beginning with Othello in the culturally discursive practice of the Jim Crow minstrel shows to appropriation of the play into the Black Arts movement, to its powerful re-envisioning by twentieth-century feminist playwrights. The ‘Othello in the World’ section offers descriptions of three non-western performances (a South African production, an Asian production, and a German production in which Othello is play by a white woman) and accounts of experiences of performing in productions that are a far cry from the conventions of a West End or Broadway stage. There is a wealth of knowledge here to inspire further reading and thinking through and beyond Shakespeare’s playtext. Expected critical approaches are not ignored. Close reading and attention to the language of the play regularly ground larger themes. Compelling production questions are posed throughout on, for instance, the impact of swapping the roles of Othello and Iago if both were played by actors of colour or why recent millennial productions have turned from asserting Desdemona’s strength to emphasizing her youth and naivety. The section on the multiple genres that Shakespeare draws on in Othello also stands out as a useful example for readers to explore the blurred margins of such categories. The sources section provides useful discussion of other Moor plays that Shakespeare would have been aware of, teaching students how fiction begets fiction that can then drive cultural perception—an awareness of storytelling that seems all too pressing today. Overall, this is an important new introduction to Othello that should embolden a new generation of readers, students, and teachers to engage with this powerful and important play. The new monographs published this year look to extend our understanding of how technology and agency in the book trade impacted on the production, dissemination, and reception of Shakespeare in print. Adam G. Hooks’s monograph Selling Shakespeare Biography, Bibliography and the Booktrade examines the ways in which the inherent authority of bibliographical evidence is appropriated to support and confirm biographical narratives of Shakespeare’s life. Bibliography has always been an important part of biographical knowledge. But Hooks warns that anecdotes and related evidence, when solidified into biographical fact, reinstitute single-author agency, thereby eliminating narratives of collective agency in the development of Shakespeare’s work in print and of his reputation as an author. As a corrective, Hooks advocates a return to ‘bio-bibliography’ and a renewed awareness of how the intentions and motivations of book trade agents also construct a writer’s textual and biographical personas. Selling Shakespeare builds in multiple ways on the foundation of niche market studies in Zachary Lesser’s Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication. This is not a bad thing as Renaissance Drama left room for further research within its methodology—particularly considering Lesser’s focus was not Shakespeare. In a number of ways, Hooks’s book is a compelling and logical next step. Where Renaissance Drama established publishers as Shakespeare’s first readers, Hooks convincingly adds ‘the first bibliographers and biographers of Shakespeare’, providing new ways to consider the contributions of these agents (p. 15). Each of the four chapters demonstrates the benefits of using bibliography and book history to expand biographical narratives by bringing attention to the contributions of stationers, whose agency is often overlooked for the sake of reinforcing tidy biographical points. These additional stationer narratives add new nuance and context for interpreting textual details, but they also highlight the importance of larger professional networks to the book trade. Hooks’s work reiterates the fact that, if we wish to truly get an image of collective agency for the production of a book or an author’s ‘bio-bibliography’, we cannot limit collaborative agency to the author and a few predetermined Shakespearean stationers. Rather, we must follow as many of the connections and influences as possible. Hooks’s revelation, in chapter 1, of John Harrison’s generally overlooked role in the publication of Venus and Adonis is a case in point. Throughout, Hooks’s research is precise in its scope and intent. He is well aware of the difficulties of negotiating readings of well-known paratexts and carefully locates his work at a crossroads of biography, bibliography, and book history that does not condemn, but shows the benefits of combining the strengths of each. While I am not entirely sure Selling Shakespeare fulfils its ambitious promise of a ‘new history of Shakespeare’s career’ (p. 4), it is definitely an important additional perspective from which to view stationer contributions to our perception of Shakespeare the writer and the work. Connections between bibliographical evidence and narratives of Shakespeare’s agency are also the subject of James Purkis’s Shakespeare and Modern Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration and Text. In this meticulously researched and expertly analysed study of Shakespeare’s role as a writer within the early modern playhouse, Purkis challenges New Bibliography’s belief in the ‘completeness’ of playhouse manuscripts—what W.W. Greg and his contemporaries defined as ‘promptbooks’—particularly how bibliographers categorized any omissions or variations as errors that obscured the author’s true intentions. Purkis advocates looking at the variable evidence not as a failure but as an example of a broader understanding of manuscript revision and playhouse collaboration. Through detailed analysis of authorial and theatrical agents’ contributions to manuscripts by Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, and Anthony Munday, Purkis expands the parameters of what constitutes a viable theatrical manuscript, presenting a more inclusive and fully collaborative definition of writing and revision in the early modern playhouse. In the second half of the book, this new understanding of theatrical collaboration is used to examine existent narratives of Shakespeare as a collaborative playwright through the case study of the labyrinthine textual narrative of The Book of Sir Thomas More. A manuscript rarely seen in its entirety, it is very satisfying to have someone with Purkis’s eye for manuscript details take readers through evidence of the various hands and collaborative production that produced this playtext. Purkis’s study of the ‘coincidences’ amongst the other authorial hands in the manuscript indicates a more cohesive collaborative persona that creates difficulties in identifying individual attributions. Hand D reveals a similar cache of coincidences that problematize an exclusively Shakespearean attribution. Rather than seeing the removed playwright as working apart from known play-patchers like Chettle, Purkis makes a strong argument for a Shakespeare who is ‘fully participant’ in the collaborative process of writing More. At the same time, he makes a compelling argument for revisiting these valuable manuscripts to continue trying the evidence they contain against our developing knowledge of early modern drama. The research across this study is impeccable: the level of detail is impressive but not overwhelming as Purkis’s narrative moves easily from single details and agencies to larger collections of evidence and collaboration. In addition to becoming absorbed in his argument, the reader is also treated to profiles of individual bookkeepers, censors, and playwrights, making this book a valuable read for researchers of Shakespeare and his agents. Richard Dutton’s latest book, Shakespeare, Court Dramatist, draws upon his expertise in theatrical history and in editing the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to re-examine why Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights revised their plays. Dutton asserts that the motivations offered by current scholarship overlook how the courts of both Elizabeth I and James I as patrons of playing companies influenced the successes and failures of particular companies, in particular the importance of command performances at court. In Part I of his book, ‘Playing and the Court’, Dutton uses evidence from records of the Lord Chamberlain’s office in the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign to deduce that playwrights like Shakespeare would be hired to write special revisions for these all-important court performances. Key to this ‘gift-exchange’ economy between company and court was the Master of the Revels: Edward Tilney and later George Buc. Dutton paints a compelling portrait of Tilney as a conservative businessman whose increased authority made him a major factor in the rise (or fall) of a playing company. The difficulty with this approach, which Dutton freely discloses, is that the records from the time when Shakespeare was actively writing that would confirm patterns of performance and payments to play-patchers do not survive. Perhaps this is part of the reason such a theory has not been pursued more vigorously before. From contextual theatrical history, Dutton turns to the material evidence of revision in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Here writers such as Chettle and Dekker are paid to add a variety of embellishments ranging from framing devices to prologues and epilogues praising Gloriana. Not unlike their counterparts today, VIPs expected a little something extra for their patronage. Additional evidence is found in title-page claims that profess alterations to the playtext as a selling point. Dutton systematically approaches the use of well-known terms such as ‘amended’, ‘enlarged’, and ‘corrected’ by placing the examples from Shakespeare’s printed plays alongside their appearance in other quartos. The context creates clear narratives, though occasionally conclusions leave room for challenge as the pool of evidence seems drawn exclusively from dramatic publication. In Part II, ‘Shakespeare’s Multiple Texts’, Dutton situates evidence of revisions in Henry V, Romeo, Hamlet, Merry Wives, and a number of other multi-text plays in his conclusion that the expansive and ‘increased rhetorical range’ (p. 169) of these revisions was the singular work of Shakespeare in preparation for court performance. Whether you subscribe to revisionist theory or not, Dutton’s insistence that we attribute more agency to the influence of the court on multi-text plays is definitely worth considering in studies of authorial agency as well as of theatrical practice more generally. Two essay collections are reviewed this year. Shakespeare and Textual Studies [2015], edited by Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai, assembles an all-star cast of Shakespearean textual scholars, editors, digital humanists, and book historians at the forefront of Shakespearean scholarship to ask what has happened to these fields of study as a consequence of the ‘materialist turn’. The collection examines this question from six perspectives spanning the life cycle of a playtext: ‘Scripts and Manuscripts’, ‘Making Books; Building Reputations’, ‘From Print to Manuscript’, ‘Editorial Legacies’, ‘Editorial Practices’, and ‘Apparatus and the Fashioning of Knowledge’. The essays are concise (ten to fifteen pages), which enables the reader to get compelling ideas at the edge of textual scholarship in a comparatively short time. The length seems to play to some topics’ and writers’ strengths more than others, as there were moments when I wanted more of the analysis that produced such compelling results. The brevity is addressed by Kidnie and Massai’s positioning of the collection as an introduction—this is meant to be a starting point for the next wave of textual scholarship and indeed most essays fulfil this promise by suggesting areas for further enquiry. Part I, ‘Scripts and Manuscripts’, begins with Heather Hirschfeld’s essay, ‘Playwriting in Shakespeare’s Time: Authorship, Collaboration, and Attribution’ (pp. 13–26). Using the Renaissance commonplace of the ‘writer-as-pen’ (p. 17), Hirschfeld untangles the often contradictory stances of having an individual writing style and being a theatrical collaborator, ultimately arguing for a balanced approach. Most interesting is her assertion that a playwright like Shakespeare might be enticed to contribute to a manuscript like A Spanish Tragedy because of the play’s representation of authorship. In ‘Ralph Crane and Edward Knight: Professional Scribe and King’s Men’s Bookkeeper’ (pp. 27–38), Paul Werstine critiques the variable and often limited evidence used to attribute surviving and lost manuscripts transcribed by professional scribes Ralph Crane and Edward Knight. Werstine rightly insists that attributions be based on more expansive evidence. ‘Crane-spotting’, Werstine reminds us, ‘is hard to do’ (p. 34) and we should only ascribe manuscripts to these known professionals when they possess a substantial number of identifiable traits. (For a review of the material in the final essay in Part I, James Purkis’s ‘Shakespeare’s “Straying Manuscripts” ’, see the review of his monograph in this chapter.) Part II, ‘Making Books; Building Reputations’, reassesses Shakespeare’s position within various facets of early modern print culture. In her essay, ‘The Mixed Fortunes of Shakespeare in Print’ (pp. 57–68), Sonia Massai considers Shakespeare’s sometimes contentious status as a bestselling author. Massai examines how the rising popularity of children’s companies contributed to a dearth of first editions of Shakespeare plays during the supposed height of his career between 1603 and 1616. Whereas quartos of Shakespeare plays are notoriously light on details of readership, Massai finds that children’s plays actively encourage reader engagement with a text’s literary and artistic qualities, reflecting the more sophisticated tastes of the audiences of these plays. Massai asserts that this is not an anomaly, but follows a trend identified as the ‘Caroline Paradox’ in which the market for playbooks in the 1620s desired new experimental plays alongside a steady stream of ‘classic’ Elizabethan plays (see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England’, in Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642, ed. Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer [2006], pp. 17–41). Massai’s suggestion of a similar ‘Jacobean Paradox’ offers an intriguing new perspective on readers of printed drama in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The essay also prompts a number of pertinent questions regarding niche theatrical readerships, further nuances in the marketing of children’s company plays, and how such publication trends compare across different publishers’ repertoires. Helen Smith’s essay, ‘ “To London all”? Mapping Shakespeare in Print, 1593–1598’ (pp. 69–86), studies how the textual space of a printed quarto illuminates dynamic communities of agents from a variety of social and cultural institutions. In particular, Smith draws needed attention to the ways that communities both shape and are shaped by the texts they produce, tracking the shifting connections and influences of stationers and playing companies as well as more discrete interactions between texts sold at a particular bookstall. The essay provides a fully textual approach to studies of space and a strong argument for the need to study Shakespeare’s printed texts in the context of trends within the larger book market. The essay with the most paradigm-shifting potential is Alan B. Farmer’s ‘Shakespeare as Leading Playwright in Print, 1598–1608/09’ (pp. 87–104). Farmer’s compelling and well-reasoned argument builds on recent considerations of Shakespeare as a literary scholar and the continued establishment of early modern publishers as reliable textual agents. Farmer destabilizes the idea that Shakespeare had no interest in the publication of his plays by presenting him as an active agent in the preparation of copy-texts for print. Key to Farmer’s argument are title-page pledges utilizing variations of the ‘corrected and emended / by W.S.’ formula. Perceptions of Shakespeare as unconcerned with his plays in print have conditioned scholars to read these claims as if they identify the playwright and an additional corrector. However, placing these editorial pledges alongside comparable paratexts across the early modern book trade, Farmer demonstrates that such references typically reflect an author who is also the corrector. Shakespeare, Farmer asserts, has been treated wrongly as an exception to this convention. Once we begin to read the claims of these title pages as indicative of Shakespeare’s own textual interventions, the results are striking. As Farmer suggests, the playwright emerges not only as ‘a revising author attentive to the accuracy of the printed texts of his plays’ (p. 90) but as ‘distinctive’ in his interest in correcting the texts of second-plus editions. In addition to illuminating a potential Shakespeare of print, Farmer reminds us that scholars should approach each reading of primary evidence with fresh eyes. Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass’s essay, ‘Shakespeare between Pamphlet and Book 1608–1619’ (pp. 105–33), is an astute combination of Lesser’s book-trade expertise and Stallybrass’s keen eye for narratives of material texts’ form. The essay seeks to dispel the idea that there was an ‘inevitable trajectory’ (p. 133) of ever-increasing status for Shakespeare and his plays in print by reconsidering the Pavier Quartos’ status as the first collection of Shakespeare. Tracking the appearance of stab-stitch marks in surviving quartos from the Jaggard printing house, Shakespeare’s titles are shown to be part of a more inclusive collection of playwrights: the Pavier Quartos (which they persuasively argue might be more correctly identified as the Jaggard Quartos) are a stationer-driven collection of drama rather than a first attempt at an exclusively Shakespearean collection. The section concludes with Emma Smith’s essay, ‘The Canonisation of Shakespeare in Print’ (pp. 134–46). With brilliant concision, Smith draws attention to the little-considered character lists of F1. Like many of the essays in this collection, Smith’s seeks to challenge a textual ‘given’: in this case that the intention of F1 was to situate Shakespeare’s plays amongst the other high-status literary collections in print at the time. While F1’s preliminaries offer the pretence of a luxury publication with literary aspirations, the omission of character lists (a reader-oriented paratext) for all but seven plays becomes key to an often overlooked reality: that the F1 playtexts lack the kinds of revisions and refinements that were expected in literary texts of the time. Smith tactfully leads scholars away from the hefty prestige of the textual monument by connecting the presentation of F1 as a ‘folio of necessity’ (p. 145) to Heminges and Condell’s more modest goal to ‘gather’ the plays of their friend. Keeping in mind the number of Folio-only plays, that is surely prestige enough. Part III, ‘From Print to Manuscript’, focuses on the understandings and refashioning of the texts that emerge from the intense processes of reading and transcription. A highlight of this section is its interest in the habits of particular early modern readers. Laura Estill (‘Commonplacing Readers’, pp. 149–62) examines the commonplace book of Abraham Wright. A cleric, Wright collected sententiae from Othello and Hamlet for use in conversations and sermons, but also as a guide for his son ‘to read, imitate and use plays as he used other texts’ (p. 157). Estill’s attention to the ways that these readers shape Shakespeare (through cutting and selecting, glossing, and interpreting) is a fascinating look into early modern reading lives. Similarly, ‘Annotating and Transcribing for the Theatre: Shakespeare’s Early Modern Reader-Revisers at Work’ (pp. 163–76), Jean-Christophe Mayer’s survey of print editions that were annotated for theatrical performance and manuscripts based on printed editions of the plays is a fascinating look at readers reinterpreting Shakespeare’s plays for the changing requirements of theatrical audiences. Like other sections of this collection, the essay reminds us that Shakespeare’s work remains viable because from very early on it was seen as adaptable. Jeffrey Todd Knight’s intriguing essay, ‘Shakespeare and the Collection: Reading beyond Readers’ Marks’ (pp. 177–95) offers a new perspective on the traditionally vilified nineteenth and twentieth-century collectors who often re-bound and ‘perfected’ their copies of early modern plays by cleaning and cropping to remove any connection with their early readerships. The essay argues for reconsideration of conservation practices as narratives of reading Shakespeare, and this approach is exciting to consider as an additional area for repertoire studies. This section then takes a digital turn as Alan Galey’s and W.B. Worthen’s essays consider the reception of Shakespeare in digital form. Is hypertext the new manuscript where readers create/adapt their own Shakespeares? Galey’s essay, ‘Encoding as Editing as Reading’ (pp. 196–211), offers an enthusiastic ‘Yes’. Encoding early modern texts into digital form, Galey reminds us, shares the qualities of close scrutiny and ‘thinking through making’ familiar to anyone who has transcribed a manuscript. Galey even goes a step further, insisting that, in the face of mounting pressure for large digital projects, scholars not lose sight of the opportunities encoding provides for rigorous scrutiny of textual details. Rather than a simple act of proofing or copying, coding is optimistically positioned as the next space for textual discovery. Mobile apps, according to W.B. Worthen (‘Shax the App’, pp. 212–29), are also sites for readers to create. In spite of the detrimental preferencing of text over performance he observes in some prominent Shakespeare apps, Worthen believes apps can diversify readers’ interactions with Shakespeare, offering new angles for investigation and critique of literary and dramatic elements. Whether on paper, on velum, or on a screen, reading Shakespeare remains a transformational moment in which active engagement results in co-operative creation. Part IV, ‘Editorial Legacies’, shines light on overlooked editions and editorial practices. Peter Holland’s essay, ‘Theatrical Editions’ (pp. 233–48), shows how editions produced by and/or for the theatre struggle with the ephemeral nature of performance and the ‘timelessness’ of theatre—often with rather anti-theatrical results. As with many of the outlier topics in this collection, it was invigorating to learn about these under-considered editions. In his essay, ‘Editing Shakespeare by Pictures: Illustrated Editions’ (pp. 249–68), Keir Elam convincingly argues that illustrations, in their earliest appearances in Shakespeare editions, played as significant a part in shaping reader interpretation as does modern editorial commentary. Elam’s point that illustrations fell out of fashion when the first note-heavy editions by Johnson and others appeared is noteworthy, and suggests the need for further study of such trends. Elam also convincingly demonstrates that the images in illustrated editions can be as focused on making playtexts accessible as the commentary notes in scholarly editions. In the process, Elam establishes some valuable criteria for reading the editorial choices of recent ‘image-based’ manga and graphic-novel Shakespeare. Such editions are also seen as a response to modern market demands in Andrew Murphy’s essay, ‘Format and Readerships’ (pp. 269–84). Especially after the 1774 copyright law was passed, small-format editions made Shakespeare accessible to readers who could not afford large, more extensive editions. This essay hints at a striking economic story of continued tension between elite, scholarly (and expensive) Shakespeare and affordable ‘Shakespeare for the People’ (the title of an actual serial publication in 1839). The section then turns to the inner structures of the text. Lukas Erne’s ‘Emendation and the Editorial Reconfiguration of Shakespeare’ (pp. 300–13) reviews recent approaches to emendation to assess how ‘interventionist’ and ‘unediting’ editorial practices reflect current understandings of textual transmission and reception. Leah S. Marcus’s focus on editions of The Tempest in ‘A Man Who Needs No Introduction’ (pp. 285–99) is actually a compelling study of introductions. Marcus sees introductions as not only repositories for historical context, but also discursive spaces in which to examine issues of Britishness and empire. Most interesting is Marcus’s discussion of ‘colonial’ editions, where introductions presented images of empire to the colonized. Ironically, efforts to guide readers of these editions prompts the extended glossing and notes that are now a regular feature of ‘modern full-dress editions’ (p. 287). But this innovation also reveals how English publishers interpreted (and misinterpreted) the reading styles and needs of colonial readers. Marcus’s essay is textual studies at its best: a study of the book object reveals a cultural history of texts and readers that poignantly reminds us that books are products of their times. The penultimate section, ‘Editorial Practices’, is a pointed argument for the importance of the smallest details to the challenges of modern editing. John Jowett’s ‘Full Pricks and Great P’s: Spellings, Punctuation, Accidentals’ (pp. 317–31) is clear winner of best essay title. Jowett evaluates the practice of modernizing spelling and punctuation by challenging the binary categories of substantive and accidental variants. Dispensing with these terms, and the misleading connotations of stable substantive spellings and disposable ‘accidental’ punctuation that accompany them, Jowett frees the editor to acknowledge the collective textual agency that transmitted these elements in the earliest editions. As in other essays in the collection, Jowett’s essay highlights a need for further evaluation of established tools and categories to reflect our expanding knowledge of textual transmission in manuscript and print. Alan C. Dessen offers a similar deconstruction of the placement of act and scene divisions. His essay, ‘Divided Shakespeare: Configuring Acts and Scenes’ (pp. 332–41) considers the priorities all editors must negotiate between fidelity to the often intriguing insights and alternatives of early editions and producing a text for relatively new readers. Matthew Dimmock’s essay, ‘Shakespeare’s Strange Tongues: Editors and the “Foreign” Voice in Shakespearean Drama’ (pp. 342–57), is a sharp study of the relationship between modern editing and the experience/use of ‘strange’ languages on the early modern stage. Once again, the anxiety surrounding reader comprehension undermines the intended dissonance amongst different sections of the audience as lines in foreign languages are glossed or translated, erasing the sensation that Dimmock astutely describes as ‘frisson’. The section is concluded by Tiffany Stern’s essay, ‘Before the Beginning; After the End: When Did Plays Start and Stop?’ (pp. 358–74). Drawing on a fascinating collection of extracts from plays and commentaries, Stern sketches a vivid picture of the activities that begin and end a performance in order to consider how this element of the theatrical event might be presented in modern editions. Like the other essays in this section, Stern’s essay is inspiring in its attention to the small details and issues that editors angst over, honest in its insistence that there are no easy answers, and also frustrating as it offers another instance where editing for a general readership means muting many of the very complications that could entice the next generation of textual scholars and editors. Part VI, ‘Apparatus and the Fashioning of Knowledge’, concludes the collection, documenting the origins and evolution of the editorial apparatus and its role in shaping and presenting scholarly knowledge. Jill L. Levenson’s ‘Framing Shakespeare: Introductions and Commentary in Critical Editions of the Plays’ (pp. 377–90) provides a fascinating retrospective of developments in introductions and preliminaries in scholarly editions from the seventeenth century to the digital age. The lucky reader sees a seasoned editor engaging with the editorial practices of multiple series, highlighting changes in response to scholarly advances in knowledge, and observing how they translate into new editorial theory and practice. Her assessments of the most recent collected works editions are concise, clear, and focused on the textual components that will have the most impact on scholarship and reader experience, offering a starting point for further critiques of these newest editorial endeavours. Levenson ends with an optimistic hope that digital editions will create new opportunities for customized reading. In ‘Editorial Memory: The Origin and Evolution of Collation Notes’ (pp. 391–7), Eric Rasmussen highlights fascinating examples of how Internet editions are making variant readings more user-friendly, but reminds us that even within these repositories of collation data, editions must remain aware of the experience of the average reader. The real strength of digital editions, Rasmussen cogently asserts, is their scope for customizing: to be the rigorous variorums desired by editors and textual scholars as well as the clean and unintimidating edition new readers of Shakespeare require. The section (and the collection) concludes with the broadest consideration of textual scholarship: as an integrated network. David Weinberger’s forward-looking essay, ‘Shakespeare as Network’ (pp. 398–414), contextualizes Shakespeare within the burgeoning area of network analysis—an area where projects such as Six Degrees of Francis Bacon and ‘Tudor Networks of Power’ are already revolutionizing the way that literary and textual scholars understand the relationships between texts. The relational approach that drives network analysis, Weinberger argues, is a natural match for the complex textual histories of texts such as Hamlet (his primary example), but also for examination of the ubiquitous presence of the ‘work’ known as Hamlet across academic, historical and pop culture realms. Weinberger, like other contributors to this collection, recognizes digital platforms as places of potential freedom from the limitations of paper. Unique to this collection, Weinberger is also quite honest about the difficulties of shifting Shakespeare scholarship into electronic forms and, what is more, he looks ahead to some possible solutions suggesting a new generation of ‘electronic’ textual negotiations. This collection is ambitious in its scope and certainly informative in its range of ideas and areas covered. It is decidedly valuable as a snapshot of this moment in textual Shakespeare scholarship. Moreover, the scope and rigour of the research are testimony to the many energetic and resourceful scholars working in the field, and a call to continued research across this vibrant area of study. As such, Shakespeare and Textual Studies will be particularly useful for advanced students new to textual criticism as well as a great resource for catching up on current trends in the field. Another welcome collection published this year was The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s First Folio edited by Emma Smith. This is a comprehensive collection that tracks the material life of the Folio, covering all the traditional areas of Folio study as well as recent approaches to the textual transmission of F1. The choice to separate printing and publishing into different essays, for example, reflects current understandings of the complexities of both agencies, and essays in ‘Reading the First Folio’ and ‘Digital First Folios’ suggest new directions for Folio studies. The book is presented as aimed at ‘students and general readers’ (p. xii); the level of student seems to vary a bit from section to section, but the reader who does engage will gain a solid foundation in Folio studies and an introduction to book history. Tara L. Lyon’s ‘Shakespeare in Print before 1623’ (pp. 1–17) opens the collection with a pre-history of the Folio that dispels the idea that Shakespeare’s plays were always on a steady path to publishing greatness. The essay clearly elucidates the connections between the material form of Shakespeare’s plays in print and the business-minded choices of stationers, offering a useful introduction to issues of format, layout, and sheet length and major critical ideas regarding production and publication in a very accessible style. Readers are then introduced to the process of ‘Publishing the First Folio’ (pp. 18–29) through Eric Rasmussen’s contribution. This essay owes much of its energy and engagement to the fact that Rasmussen places the stationer syndicate responsible for production of the Folio at the centre of the story. As a result, Rasmussen’s essay is not just about entries in the Stationers’ Register, paper costs, and numbers of copies, but about people who in the course of their day jobs made a significant contribution to literary history. The inclusion of short biographies for the five major stationers and a concise narrative of publication practices lay a solid foundation for the understanding of early modern publication and Folio publication more generally. The difficult task of introducing readers to the mechanical process of a large printing job like the Folio is taken on by B.D.R. Higgins. Higgins’s task in ‘Printing the First Folio’ (pp. 30–47) is made more difficult by the lack of the typical images of printing presses, type, or examples of space-saving that usually support such narratives. The essay is a detailed narrative of the entire process from composition to binding; however, it is dense reading and that may limit its accessibility to only more advanced readers. Chris Laoutaris’s fascinating essay, ‘The Prefatorial Material’ (pp. 48–67), examines the motivating interests of the agents responsible for the opening moments of the Folio and how their preliminaries constructed the image of Shakespeare as a playwright for all time. Carefully unravelling the web of connections amongst the members of ‘Shakespeare, Inc.’, Laoutaris connects post-Reformation themes of iconography and courtly influence to concerns of the commercial theatre and the book trade, revealing Shakespeare, ‘the monument without a tomb’, to be the construct of a network of London institutions. Gabriel Egan’s ‘The Provenance of the Folio Texts’ (pp. 68–85) provides an overview of the copy-text origins of the Folio as well as a review of the major changes in scholarly understanding of these all-important, but often theoretical, texts. Most usefully, Egan highlights the relevance of this area of study for modern readers through examples of how editors engage with the details in different kinds of copy-texts. Peter Kirwin’s essay, ‘ “Complete” Works: The Folio and All of Shakespeare’ (pp. 86–102), uses the Folio’s ideas of a complete Shakespeare to examine the editorial underpinnings of modern complete works editions. A well-written essay that combines textual scholarship with philosophical reasoning, Kirwan’s contribution to the collection is an energetic and accessible introduction for readers new to the subject. Jean-Christophe Mayer’s ‘Early Buyers and Readers’ (pp. 103–19) introduces the question of who read the First Folio, with a survey of ‘ownership’. By defining ownership as being both individuals who purchased the Folio and those whose substantial engagement is recorded in their marginalia and annotations, Mayer broadens the image of the Folio reader, introducing modern readers to clergymen, theatre practitioners, and, most interestingly, a number of early modern women who not only read the plays, but documented their interactions as marks of understanding and autonomy. Edmund G.C. King introduces readers to another sustained relationship with the Folio: that of editors who have considered the Folio’s place in modern editions. King’s ‘Editors’ essay (pp. 120–36) is a concise review of evolving editorial approaches to F1 from the 1632 Second Folio to major recent editions by Oxford and the RSC. Steven K. Galbraith’s essay, ‘Collectors’ (pp. 137–54), covers the area perhaps least familiar to most scholars: the world of buying and selling First Folios. Galbraith’s history of the rising and falling of popularity and price of the Folio is instructive and fascinating; it is impossible not to wistfully tick off the centuries where one might still have afforded a First Folio. In an informative and accessible style, the essay presents a critical method of study and then applies it to the case study of Folger First Folio no. 23. In a model that would easily support a classroom activity, Galbraith instructs readers in the ways historians trace collectors of historical books to discover their individual stories. Emma Smith’s ‘Reading the First Folio’ (pp. 155–69) begins with the excellent example of confusing pairs of speech headings for the twins in Comedy of Errors to introduce the challenges that await readers of the Folio. Whereas print is often a place for clarification, Smith deftly guides the reader through some of the unique confusions that are caused by the material realities of printing playtexts in this form. Moreover, her suggestion that we embrace the confusion as a valuable way to shift our interrogation of Folio and texts from error to effect encourages readers to move past modern expectations of a uniform reading experience to explore the more nuanced relationships between form and content in early modern texts. The final essay in the collection, Sarah Werner’s ‘Digital First Folios’ (pp. 170–84), begins with a detailed review of several digitized First Folios currently available online. The bulk of the essay asks provocative questions regarding accessing the Folio in a digital format. Are these editions intended for seasoned readers of the Folio or the much larger populations of library users? Should their focus be on presenting the Folio text or the Folio as a material object? While immediate and practical, Werner’s enquiries also push for answers regarding the fundamental purpose of such digital projects. The range of approaches Werner reveals suggests this question has yet to be definitively answered, but should continue to be asked of digital representations of F1 and of similar projects that continue to expand their presence in the digital sphere. The collection ends with Adam Hooks’s ‘Afterword: The Folio as Fetish’ (pp. 185–96). Fascination with the Folio as a book object, Hooks reminds us, should not distract us from rigorous questioning and study of Shakespeare’s plays. His final appeal that we focus our energies on the multitude of agents who contributed to the preservation of the Shakespeare canon reiterates the project of this inspiring collection: to continue investigating the networks of production behind the monument. Shakespeare in Our Time, a collection published by the Shakespeare Association of America and edited by Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett, commemorates the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. Six contributions in the areas of ‘Editing’ and ‘Text and Authorship’ fall under the remit of this review. Each contribution is between five and seven pages, providing snapshots of the current state of Shakespeare studies. Regardless of their brevity, they provide intriguing ideas and pose pertinent questions about the past, present, and challenges for the future of Shakespeare scholarship. Barbara A. Mowat examines how shifts in scholarly perceptions of early printed Shakespeare inform editorial practice in ‘Facts, Theories, and Beliefs’ (pp. 57–63). Mowat takes us back to the seminar room at the SAA where a revisionist theory of King Lear was first introduced (she describes it vividly as nothing short of a ‘coup’). Her key point that the narrative of Shakespeare adopted by an editor acts as a kind of ‘internal bias’ for the entirety of her or his editorial approach acts as a pertinent warning for all scholars. Lukas Erne takes us from editorial warnings to celebration as he asks us to consider ‘What We Owe to Editors’ (pp. 64–8). The work of the editor is often invisible to the general reader, and Erne offers a quick overview of some of the important contributions editors make to modern understandings of Shakespeare, while also providing a brief introduction to editorial practice. From what editors do now to what may be on the horizon, Sonia Massai considers how scholarly editing over the last 400 years will influence future editions in ‘What’s Next in Editing Shakespeare’ (pp. 68–72). Analysing an often used Q1-only stage direction in Othello that when taken out of context actually distracts from cues in the dialogue, Massai effectively demonstrates how renewed focus on ‘single-text editing’ could generate fresh insights into Shakespeare’s plays. The other relevant section, ‘Text and Authorship’, begins with Gary Taylor’s ‘Collaboration 2016’ (pp. 141–9), which examines multiple factors contributing to the acceptance of Shakespeare as a collaborating playwright. The result of this change in understanding, Taylor observes, is increasing attribution of Shakespeare alongside other playwrights in recent editions, but also the emergence of additional questions of attribution, pointing to a future where collaboration remains a mainstay of Shakespeare studies. In ‘The Value of Stage Directions’ (pp. 149–53) Laurie Maguire urges reconsideration of stage directions as evidence of authorship attribution. Maguire highlights patterns of the direction ‘here enters’ and the ‘out/in’ formula for indicating entrances and exits. It seems these details are most useful as markers of exceptions or ‘non-Shakespearean’ directions that can support identification of playwrights working alongside Shakespeare. Adam G. Hooks’s ‘The Author Being Dead’ (pp. 153–7) concludes the section by reminding us how developments in material text and book-trade studies drew attention to the constructed nature of Shakespeare’s authorial persona. Hooks asserts that they continue to play a fundamental role in studies of Shakespeare’s textual authority, as well as in emerging interests in a literary or bibliography-driven biography of the playwright (see the review of Hooks’s Selling Shakespeare in this chapter). Paul Werstine’s essay, ‘Authorial Revision in the Tragedies’ (in Neill and Schalkwyk, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 301–15), is an example of how handbooks can effectively combine the concise, thorough introduction to a topic students require with rigorous examination of a current argument. The essay begins with an overview of how theories of authorial revision have shaped editing of Shakespeare’s tragedies since Alexander Pope. The result is a compelling narrative across three centuries recounting the repeated rise and fall of the idea that multiple texts of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello are evidence of Shakespeare’s personal revisions. The essay then turns to ‘Revisionist’ theory of the 1980s and its application in the Oxford Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Werstine hones in on the awkward interaction between the agency of ‘Shakespeare the reviser’ as advocated in The Division of the Kingdoms and the Oxford editors’ decision to use texts closest to the theatrical company’s promptbooks as their copy-texts. Including Shakespeare within the theatrical process, Werstine asserts, is not only potentially inaccurate (theatrical emendations tend to be cuts while most revision theories identify Shakespeare’s revisions as additions), but this approach also creates the impossible situation of positioning Shakespeare within a collective agency while needing to isolate his contributions as authorial. As an alternative, Werstine suggests editors acknowledge the indeterminacy of agency attribution in their commentaries, and he gives examples of how flexible thinking and meticulous expression can create an editorial practice more reflective of Shakespeare’s contributions to the playtext. As part of Arden Shakespeare’s ‘Critical Reader’ series, Robert N. Watson brings textual considerations to students and scholars in his essay, ‘New Directions: Why No One Hears Lord Capulet’s Line’ (in Lupton, ed., Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader, pp. 101–32). Watson considers the textual crux of the speech at III.i.184–8, where Romeo’s murder of Tybalt ‘concludes but what the law should end’ (l. 187). Resisting their own convention, modern editors almost unanimously make an exception here, following the less authoritative Q4 attribution to Lord Montague over Q2’s attribution to Lord Capulet. Combining close reading of Capulet’s lines with stylistic analysis of word–antonym pairings, Watson reveals how editing this speech follows a binary of opposition that runs throughout the language of the play. He concludes that the editorial history of attributing even remotely positive comments regarding Romeo to Montague rather than Capulet is ‘both a result and reinforcement of a tragic assumption’ (p. 106) that Shakespeare has ingrained in the play, a move that, Watson astutely suggests, may be meant to intentionally lead readers to the same surface misreadings of unwavering enmity engaged in by the characters. Many of the journal articles published this year focused on technology’s role in the future of attribution studies. In ‘Arden of Faversham and Shakespeare’s Early Collaborations: The Evidence of Meter’ (Style 50[2016] 65–79) MacDonald P. Jackson presents additional evidence for attributing scenes 4–9 of Arden of Faversham to Shakespeare. Jackson conducts a statistical analysis on metrical data from Marina Tarlinskaja’s computational analysis of Folio versions of the three parts of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, as well as Edward III. Playwrights, Jackson asserts, have an ‘individual verse style’ (p. 67) that remains distinguishable even in writings from the early decades of the commercial theatre. Analysing two verse styles that Tarlinskaja identified in Arden against the early collaborative plays mentioned above, Jackson confirms the findings of previous attribution studies, concluding that ‘Shakespeare was largely if not wholly’ (p. 76) responsible for scenes 4–9 of Arden. In ‘Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency’ (SQ 67[2016] 232–56), by Santiago Segarra, Mark Eisen, Gabriel Egan, and Alejandro Ribeiro, the proximity of identified target words across samples of a writer’s work confirms Shakespeare’s contributions in the Henry VI plays. The authors of this article provide ample tables and description to make their process transparent; they are also refreshingly forthcoming in revealing the limits of this kind of analysis: it is most successful when used to answer a binary question (for example whether the scene is by Shakespeare or by Marlowe). As the authors suggest, their findings will be comforting to attribution scholars because they affirm previously suggested divisions between Shakespeare and his collaborators. For others this article will continue to provoke questions regarding the extent to which quantitative approaches can decode the creative process. Michael L. Hays’s ‘Shakespeare’s Hand Unknown in Sir Thomas More: Thompson, Dawson, and the Futility of the Paleographic Argument’ (SQ 67[2016] 180–203) employs a critique of palaeographic studies of More to argue that palaeography has been employed using insufficiently scientific methods, and therefore cannot produce conclusions of any certainty. Central to his point is the lack of a sufficient amount of Shakespeare’s handwriting to create a control group that could be compared to the sample of Hand D. Hays’s point that the results of all research should be clearly conveyed is certainly relevant, and the problems of interpretation being enthusiastically misconstrued over time into fact is vital to the viability of all textual scholarship. The question that remains is how we interpret the evidence we do have even if it does not conform to ideal scientific conditions. A companion to other essays in this review that consider the benefits of bringing textual scholarship and editorial practice into the classroom is Michael LoMonico’s ‘Teaching Shakespeare’s First Folio and the Instability of the Text’ (CEA 78[2016] 148–64). Drawing on his experiences working with students and teachers for the Folger Shakespeare Library during the recent US tour of the First Folio, LoMonico presents multiple classroom activities in which students compare folio and quarto editions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet (though he rightly suggests that many other plays would also work). Refreshingly focused on student engagement through close attention to variant readings and exercises where students create their own editions of scenes, LoMonico reminds us how scrutiny of part of a speech can prompt discussions of the literary versus the theatrical, the importance of detail to performance, the role of stage directions, and that age-old question of ‘which speech just sounds better’ (p. 154). LoMonico is generous with his work, including a number of choice extracts from Q and F versions to use in classrooms, as well as relevant discussion questions that would be especially helpful for someone using this approach for the first time. The ways in which the material presentation of a playtext can impact on interpretation is the focus of Sujata Iyengar’s interesting article, ‘Intermediating the Book Beautiful: Shakespeare at the Doves Press’ (SQ 67[2016] 481–502). Iyengar’s case study is a ‘fine press’ edition of Hamlet produced by the printer and bookbinder T.J. Cobden-Sanderson in 1909. As part of the Arts and Crafts movement made famous by John Ruskin and William Morris, Cobden-Sanderson applied an aesthetic philosophy of the ‘Book Beautiful’ (p. 488) in which the composite book is made an aesthetic object by the beautification of each of its individual parts. Providing an artistic aspect to collaborative book production, Cobden-Sanderson applies what might best be described as expressive typesetting: employing a combination of rubricating and centring of speeches, stage directions, and other elements he determines to be ‘detached’ from the central action of a dramatic moment (p. 498). This colourized mise-en-page, Iyengar observes, constructs a Hamlet that is itself an interpretation of the play and its title character. Stephen Schillinger’s essay, ‘Conversations with Shylock: The Merchant of Venice, Authorship Trouble, and Interpretive Instability in the Period of Early Print’ (TSLL 58[2016] 84–107), makes an interesting parallel between early modern playwrights’ concern that their intended meaning for their work would be ignored or misconstrued and acts of interpretation and misreading in The Merchant of Venice. Schillinger draws on the parent/child imagery that runs through narratives of publication at the time to highlight the role of reader as judge. Reconsidering readings of some of Shylock’s most famous lines as well as common perceptions of Lorenzo and the Duke as citizen and enforcer of the law respectively, Schillinger convincingly situates this play in the emerging apprehension surrounding publication. In ‘Editing for Performance or Documenting Performance? Exploring the Relationship between Early Modern Text and Clowning’ (ShakB 34[2016] 5–27) Stephen Purcell examines representations of clowning on the early modern stage and page through an intriguing combination of textual analysis and theatrical workshop. Purcell posits that, although many improvisations are lost or only partially documented, based on the kinds of interactions signalled by the text, identifiable structures of clowning remain. He also suggests that these signals vary depending on whether the script is produced as either a record of or as a cue for performance. He then applies these categories to the multiple versions of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet. Observing that in many instances Shakespeare has structured his clowning scene in ways that seem intended to limit or manage improvisation, he is wisely reserved in his conclusion that the multiple texts of Hamlet cannot be categorized as ‘record-’ or ‘cue-oriented’ with the same level of certainty as Faustus. The potential for digital editions to serve as resources for studying early modern performance is the focus of Brett D. Hirsch and Janelle Jenstad’s ‘Beyond the Text: Digital Editions and Performance’ (ShakB 34[2016] 107–27). Hirsch and Jenstad explore the benefits of producing a performance edition of Fair Em as part of the Digital Renaissance Edition while using the Internet Shakespeare Editions as a comparative example and template. Not surprisingly, the main benefit of digital over print edition is the capacity for more of all things (variant texts, reading choices, access to historical evidence). This article also presents an interesting comparison of theories behind the editing of non-Shakespeare plays compared to Shakespeare plays, highlighting the challenges of creating editions that must remain relevant for far longer than the typical Shakespeare edition. The most extensive and detailed article reviewed for this section is Pervez Rizvi’s ‘The Use of Spellings for Compositor Attribution in the First Folio’ (PBSA 110[2016] 1–54). Rizvi’s goal is straightforward: to use statistical analysis to demonstrate that spelling preferences are insufficient evidence for compositor attribution. Once preferences are analysed as part of larger samples, Rizvi asserts, patterns consistently disintegrate. The most refreshing thing about this example of a technology-driven challenge to traditional bibliography and textual criticism is Rizvi’s willingness to explain the basic formulae behind his work and to provide access online to his data so that the keen reader can attempt to recreate his results, making this a worthwhile read for those interested in the composition practices behind F1. 2. Shakespeare in the Theatre In a challenging and vigorous examination of the representation of Lavinia, Christian M. Billing criticizes the tendency of modern productions (on both stage and film) to dwell naturalistically on the moment of her rape. ‘ “Though this be method, yet there is madness in’t”: Cutting Ovid’s Tongue in Recent Stage and Film Performances of Titus Andronicus’ (ShS 69[2016] 58–78) argues that reckless updating of Lavinia’s plight serves to divorce her from Ovid’s Philomela and thus severs the classical and literary antecedents Shakespeare has deliberately underlined. In so doing, modern directors are underestimating the importance of the classical intertext and so ‘we lose not only the possibility of understanding Greek and Roman history, culture and literature through Shakespeare, but also the possibility of understanding Shakespeare himself, because for Shakespeare, the classics held deep meanings, not only for his own, but for all historical periods’ (p. 78). The concentration on spectacle is often to blame, Billing argues, for the cutting of the Ovidian language uttered by Marcus on the discovery of his violated niece. Peter Brook’s 1955 version replaced graphic violence with a symbolic language which created ‘non-literal and non-naturalistic approaches to the play’s martial, homicidal and sexual violence’ (p. 62). But the Ovid had gone all the same—so too in productions by Gerald Freedman [1967] and Yukio Ninagawa [2006]. Billing is especially caustic towards directors who see the play as being about modern sexual violence, and here he is on thin ice: ‘For a director to guide an actor who is to play Lavinia towards a rape crisis centre [in order to do research] rather than to offer her a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis … is to place the performer in a social and psychological context that neither suits the play, nor from which it is easy to escape’ (pp. 67–8). While this essay is roundly alert to the impoverishment of cutting Shakespeare’s classical sources, it is also stubbornly convinced that to do so is simply wrong: ‘so many critics and theatre directors have misunderstood [Titus] over the years’ (p. 58); Taymor’s film version ‘goes against the sense of Shakespeare’s writing’ (p. 74). For a performance critic of such distinction, Billing is oddly tunnel-visioned about his way of doing things. In ‘People’s Theatre and Shakespeare in Wartime: Donald Wolfit’s King Lear in London and Leeds, 1944–45’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 55–66), Laurence Raw attempts to set right the injustice that Wolfit’s company, Advance Players, ‘has received scant recognition for the contribution it made to performing Shakespeare in wartime, not just in London but throughout the provinces’ (p. 55). Touring, though, took its toll, and complaints about the battered scenery led to the withdrawal of funding support from the Council for the Encouragement of Music and Arts. In spite of this weakness (and that of his supporting cast), Kenneth Tynan raved about Wolfit’s own performance: ‘There has never been a performer of greater gusto … he has dynamism, energy, bulk and stature, and he joins these together with the sheer relish for resonance which splits small theatres as Caruso did wine-glasses … He dominates the stage not with the effortless authority of kingship, but by a mighty exercise of talent, thrust and will’ (cited on p. 56). Raw suggests that the high profile of the central performance was to do with the influence of Henry Irving and Randle Ayrton, the latter of whom ‘had played the part at Stratford in 1936 with Wolfit as Kent’ (p. 57). Intriguingly, Raw notes that, ‘Although Wolfit’s personal politics remained resolutely conservative, his repertoire offered a good example of the kind of popular theatre that tried to inspire all men and women to continue their fight for better lives’ (pp. 56–7). Key here are two factors: a new sense of post-war enlightenment signalled by the founding of the Workers’ Educational Association in Leeds as well as the Play Reading Group, and the increasing cosmopolitanism of the major cites bolstered by the presence of foreign service personnel: ‘Although Wolfit’s King Lear was highly old-fashioned in the sense that it was modelled on great Lears of the past, his revival [in the autumn of 1945] nonetheless struck a chord with wartime audiences with its emphasis on community values’ (p. 60). The problem was that Wolfit was determined to remain the star attraction, and his refusal to work ‘alongside actors of similar stature reduced his chances of obtaining government subsidies’ (p. 62). This was exacerbated by the prominence of Gielgud and Olivier at the Old Vic. When Wolfit took the production to New York in 1947 ‘most critics slaughtered it on account of its cheap and tatty sets and costumes and old-fashioned acting style’ (p. 62). Back home the sense of post-war triumph had receded into a mood of disappointment at continued austerity and fatigue, but low ticket prices continued to ensure ‘a nationwide public willing to set aside its prejudices against so-called “highbrow” drama and enjoy Lear on its own terms’ (p. 63). Raw concludes by asserting that the production, in spite of the influence of its antecedents, ‘was ahead of its time’ and that its appeal to popular audiences ‘adumbrated the work of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in the early 1950s, which assiduously rejected what they perceived as the bourgeois standards of the West End and the Old Vic’ (p. 63). The post-war period is the focus of the Theatre Archive Project, of which Sarah Olive gives an excellent account and a judicious appreciation of its virtues and problems. In ‘Researching Post-War British Shakespearean Productions: A Review of the Theatre Archive Project’ (CahiersE 89[2016] 45–57) she explains the origins of the project (around 2003) as a collaboration between Dominic Shellard (then of Sheffield University but latterly of De Montfort) and the British Library. Now housed in the BL, TAP attempts to capture, via interview, the usually ephemeral oral criticism of theatre with particular attention to the period 1945 to 1968: ‘full transcripts and sound recordings [of the interviews] are freely available on the BL website’ (p. 46). Olive has gathered evidence about the most prominent features and trends of these interviews and her results, though not always unanticipated, are nonetheless fascinating and significant. Unsurprising is the prominence of Shakespeare’s great tragedies in the memories of the interviewees. Perhaps the same goes for the number of mentions of the period’s great actors, though Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud are way out in front (with well over seventy mentions between them to Wolfit’s five). The top four directors named are Peter Hall, Peter Brook, Tyrone Guthrie, and Joan Littlewood, and the two most prominent venues are SMT/RST (Stratford) and the Old Vic. None of this is especially unexpected, but the interest of Olive’s work is in the reflective and thoughtful way she evaluates the project itself. She considers such vital components of reviewing as the criteria of evaluation such as actors’ ‘energy, presence and movement; actors’ transcendence of physical constraints, especially age; their physical, emotional and intellectual impact on audiences; as well as the distinguished nature and chemistry of the cast (although the director’s role in constructing this is barely acknowledged)’ (pp. 49–50). One advantage of the TAP is a critical freedom ‘from the constraints of practising theatre professionals afforded by their retirement and/or the passage of time between production and interview’ (p. 51). Another is the capacity to attend to ‘subjects and collect voices not historically given their due share of serious consideration’ (p. 51)—the obvious instance being attention to ‘female directors, actors and other theatre company members’. But Olive is not unequivocally admiring of the project either. She is alert to problems such as the tendency for some interviews to be ‘weighed down with factual recall’ (p. 53) such as a list of cast members, the kind of information, she points out, now easily accessible via the Internet. The over-reliance on such evaluative clichés as ‘wonderful’, ‘good’, ‘extraordinary’, she goes on, ‘contributes to an understanding of how well-received particular actors and productions were, but reveals very little about how such judgements were made’ (p. 55). This is a fine and astute evaluation. In the same issue of Cahiers Élisabéthains is my own ‘Inaugurating the Complete Works (Again): Shakespeare Nation, Doranism and Literalism in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2014 Summer Season’ (CahiersE 89[2016] 58–73). Modesty forbids that I wax too lyrical about it so here is the (almost-neutral) abstract: ‘Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, inaugurated his Shakespeare Nation project in 2014. This involves yet another staging of the complete works. This article examines his production of the two parts of Henry IV as well The Witch of Edmonton. It also covers the production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona in the main house and three other shows in the Swan, labelled the “Roaring Girls” season. The article exposes a tendency towards literalism in Doran’s own work (which it labels “Doranism”) and argues that this quality leads to an imaginative diminution of Shakespeare’s theatricality’ (p. 58). Doran is one of the four theatre professionals interviewed by Abigail Rokison-Woodall in Shakespeare Bulletin. Her article ‘Interviews with Theatre Practitioners about Texts for Performance’ (ShakB 34[2016] 47–68) is, as the title suggests, primarily about the methods employed by three directors and one actor in finalizing their acting texts. Doran, for instance, cuts scripts in order to end up with a timely production: ‘I have a sense of my own productions running at about a slow 800 and trippingly 900 lines per hour. I guess when I took over the job [of Artistic Director of the RSC], I knew that I didn’t want directors to be in the position that I have often seen them here, of getting to a final run-through and the production being four and a half hours and they haven’t clocked it until then’ (pp. 54–5). For Trevor Nunn the less well-known plays offer more scope for textual tinkering: ‘when you get to the plays that are so rarely done because there is something incomplete or problematic about them, then … textual intervention, I think, is understandable and forgivable’ (p. 48). Nunn is extremely honest about the autocracy of directors in the rehearsal room, but notes that this is a reign that is coming to an end because of the ubiquity of the Internet: ‘everyone has their iPhone or their iPad immediately available’ (p. 49). No longer is the footnote or the obscure meaning solely the preserve of the omniscient director: ‘directorial authority is a diminishing ingredient these days, and rehearsal room democracy, which we all believe in, is very much on the increase’ (p. 50). Not so for Simon Russell Beale, who describes how textual changes might be negotiated between director and actor. For Beale it’s all about eminence: ‘I hate to say it, but it’s to do with status in the rehearsal room. There are certain people who can say to the director—“I think this is essential”—and the director will often say “Yes, sorry”. There are other people who, I hate to say it, can’t do that, or don’t have the guts to’ (p. 64). Other contextual issues emerge. For Lucy Bailey, sources, historical context, and production history are a vital part of her preparation. Of the latter, she opines, ‘You’re not looking to do the same, but you are looking for a kind of debate, and when you hear another director talk about the play. I find that really great’ (pp. 61–2). For Beale, on the other hand, asked whether he reads production history of a play he is about to rehearse, he responds, ‘I think that is a no-no, isn’t it?’ (p. 65). Doran sits on the fence somewhere between the two of them. Of former Stratford performances he remarks: ‘I find that it is a weight, but it is both intimidating and inspiring and you’ve just got to be grown up about it’ (p. 58). Nunn too is alert to the very peculiar houses Stratford attracts: ‘[In Stratford you] can be playing to people who’ve never been in a theatre before, and they can be sitting next to somebody who’s written two books about it’ (p. 52). Margaret Jane Kidnie relocates us to another Stratford—in Ontario. In ‘Proximal Dreams: Peter Sellars at the Stratford Festival of Canada’ (ShIntY 16[2016] 11–28), she offers an account of two productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which took place, unusually, at the same festival under the artistic directorship of Antoni Cimolino. The first, directed by Chris Abraham for the festival stage in Stratford’s main house was not traditional in as much as it introduced ‘a framing device to Dream that situated the enactment of the play as the entertainment at a same-sex wedding … Lysander was cross-cast as a woman (played by Tara Rosling), and Jonathan Goad and Evan Buliung played Oberon and Titania, switching roles on alternate nights’ (p. 12). Even more radical however, was Peter Sellars’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play, staged in the Masonic Concert Hall and designed by ‘Harlem-based visual artist Abigail De Ville’ (p. 13), who raided two local junkyards for old furniture and detritus which she installed over the heads of the audience. Kidnie writes, ‘It was an immersive—almost an oppressively immersive—space, and the festival encouraged spectators to arrive early to partake of it’ (p. 16). As well as the performance space being reinterpreted, so too dramatic character was redrawn. An acting company of four amalgamated various roles. This was not doubling or tripling in the conventional sense but rather the superimposition of the play’s characters to form an amalgam. Kidnie quotes Dion Johnstone, ‘I’m not switching from Bottom to Demetrius—I am Bottom/Demetrius/Theseus. I’m all of these; these are all facets of who I am’ (p. 18). Sellars also dispensed with ‘all of Shakespeare’s “plot points” ’ and there was no blocking. Kidnie explains: ‘The show’s deep-rootedness in the actors’ personal stories along with its intimate, almost claustrophobic, performance space were inherent to Sellars’ conception of the piece as “a chamber play” ’ (p. 19). Without plot or single identifiable characters, the play darkened considerably: ‘The tone of A Chamber Play was dominated by hurt, confusions, and anger, and the result was a production that seemed to mine relentlessly the dark subconscious of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy’ (p. 20). Such a challenging performance was intensified by the director’s refusal to cosset its spectators: ‘Sellars instructed his actors in rehearsal not to “take care of” the audience’ (p. 25). The production’s epilogue was spoken by an actor (Sarah Afful) with her back to the audience. For Kidnie this radical reinvention of Shakespeare’s play seemed to offer something of value: ‘Sellars took Shakespeare’s theatrical language, and by releasing it from plot and opening it to rehearsal, immersed audiences in the under-belly of this almost too-well-known comedy’ (p. 26). I guess we’ll have to take her word for it! Coen Heijes considers not a single production but a single play’s post-war performance history in Holland. ‘ “I am not Shakespeare’s Shylock”: The Merchant of Venice on the Dutch Stage’ (ShakB 34[2016] 645–78) is an assiduous and engaging piece which explores this difficult and dangerous play against the traditional belief that the Netherlands is tolerant of ‘outsiders’: ‘The virulent anti-Semitism that dominated Europe from the second half of the Middle Ages onwards never gained a foothold in the Netherlands, which had no ghettos, no pogroms, no job prohibitions, and no mass expulsions, unlike Great Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Poland, and Russia’ (p. 649). In the light of this history, then, Heijes is rightly at a loss to account for the humiliating fact that ‘In no other country in Western Europe were so many Jews deported and killed as in the Netherlands’ (p. 650). The effect of this was to underplay the anti-Semitism of the productions of Merchant throughout the 1950s and 1960s. These productions ‘tended to stress the comic and fairytale elements of the play and depicted Shylock as a rather timid, shy, and gentle man, devoid of any threat or viciousness’ (p. 655). All this changed in 1982 when the RO Theatre Company staged the play, directed by Franz Marijnen. Peter Tuinman played Shylock ‘as a dignified and assimilated banker’ (p. 657) until the trial scene, wherein ‘he changed into the almost archetypal caricature of the spiteful Jew: he began to spit and hiss, his tongue rolled over his lips, his body posture became bent, he put on a phony, crooked nose, and his movements were almost ritualistic’. In spite of the fact that the intention seemed to be ‘to demonstrate to his opponents how ridiculous their stereotypes really were’, the production was attacked as a reproduction of anti-Semitic prejudice. It caused widespread outrage and in ‘an ultimate blow to the production, the Anne Frank Foundation placed the Merchant of Marijnen on its annual list of anti-Semitic incidents’. Heijes goes on to demonstrate how productions since 1982 have rowed back on the play’s anti-Semitism. For instance in 1992 the play was directed by Ger Thijs, who enjoyed a ‘reputation as a traditional, trustworthy craftsman who was averse to controversy’ (p. 659). Ducking a polemical approach, Thijs reverted to the comedy which characterized mid-twentieth-century productions. Twenty-first-century productions have followed this uncontroversial lead: ‘A 2004 production directed by Iris Jansen with DTG theatre company presented a playful, fairytale-like production in which Shylock was a thoroughly sympathetic character haunted by uncertainty and powerlessness’ (p. 661). In 2002 the Amsterdam theatre company staged a production, directed by Ola Mafaalani, in which the words outsider or stranger replaced Jew throughout the text and, in 2007, De Nieuwe Amsterdam’s production (directed by Justus van Oel), entitled The Arab of Amsterdam, made the persecuted protagonist not Shylock but Rafi, an Arab Jew. Heijes concludes that this kaleidoscopic play will continue to shift its future identity. Let’s hope he continues to track it for us; this is a fine essay. Kara Northway examines the imagery of speed and motion in Hamlet. ‘ “Bid the players make haste”: Speed-Making and Motion Sickness in Hamlet’ (ShakS 44[2016] 263–90) concludes that ‘Hamlet attests to Shakespeare’s fascination with the processes of manipulating and perceiving speed, especially for artistic, emotional, and visceral effects in the theater’ (p. 284). Northway points out that, although haste and the passing of time are constantly alluded to in Macbeth or the sonnets, for instance, Hamlet is a play more readily associated with hesitation and stasis. But as she points out, intriguingly, ‘Hamlet has more references to the words “speed” and “haste” than any other Shakespearean work except for Romeo and Juliet, which has an equal number’ (p. 272). Northway contextualizes this concern against an early modern period obsessed by the speeds of new technology in handwriting, sword-fighting, horse-riding, communication, and shipping. She also points out that the emblem-book writers Geffrey Whitney and George Wither urged caution against too much alacrity, advising their readers to ‘judge and adjust speed with decorum’ (p. 269). In the theatre industry, speed meant profit in terms of composing, copying, licensing, and performing plays: this ‘necessary hasty output made for profits—new plays sold to hungry audiences’ (p. 270). Speed was not just essential to the success of the theatre industry but became dramatized within the plays themselves. Hamlet is typical here and stages ‘dizzyingly abrupt accelerations of movement’ (p. 277). Its frequent use of messengers serves ‘to quicken the pace of the plot or explain in only a few lines events that take place over much more time’ (p. 275). Northway considers the mismatch that arises frequently in Hamlet between on-stage and off-stage time, which she likens to the disorientating effects of motion sickness. This, she argues is the evidence that ‘Shakespeare’s attitude towards speed appears to have been conflicted’ (p. 284). ‘King Lear and the Uses of Mortification’ (SQ 67[2016] 319–43) is a beautifully eloquent and sensitive essay by Giulio J. Pertile in which he addresses the multiple and ambiguous meanings of self-harm and its psychological and physiological consequences. On one level, Edgar’s disguise as Poor Tom is a kind of performance but, unlike a costume of disguise, the wounds he inflicts on his own body cannot be taken off. It is a convincing performance precisely because it changes the very skin of the body. Edmund, too, attempts to persuade his father of his stepbrother’s violent nature by wounding himself. In fact, Pertile notes tellingly, ‘King Lear is unique among Shakespeare’s works in its recurrent depiction of wounds that are self-inflicted’ (p. 321). Pertile traces the ambiguities of self-harm and the variety of early modern meanings that it generated—as a Catholic form of perversion (in self-flagellation), as a purifying ritual, but also as a practice which ‘can serve therapeutically to eliminate negative affect and to restore sensation and vitality’ (p. 325). It is this multiplicity of meanings which makes the practice so difficult to read: ‘What is striking is that the same act could bring about both results: to mortify could be to numb, but it could also be to stimulate and enlighten … self-inflicted pain brings numbness and feeling into close proximity’ (p. 327). Pertile suggests that the stepbrothers’ use of pain is opposite to that of Lear himself: ‘Where Edgar and Edmund puncture themselves in order to anesthetize a flesh that is all too permeable, Lear, who has “lost his senses” to madness, mortifies his flesh for the opposite reason: in order to restore feeling in a skin that has become “too tough” for penetration’ (p. 336). Pertile argues that it is after Lear awakes and pricks himself with the pin that his new sentience is fully activated. Here it is that he recovers his humanity: ‘Self-inflicted pain serves, in the final instance of its use in the play, to “enforce charity” not from others but from a self whose very structure would otherwise become uncharitable, hardened against the suffering of others inasmuch as it is hardened against its own’ (p. 343). This is a wise and considerate essay. In her modestly entitled ‘Performance History’ (in Thompson and Taylor, eds., Hamlet: A Critical Reader, pp. 53–81) Lois Potter tracks the theatrical afterlife of Shakespeare’s most frustratingly ambiguous play, Hamlet. This is the kind of performance history I’d love to be able to write. Potter is fluent, magisterially in charge of a bewildering amount of material and—best of all—riveting. She condenses her enormous experience of the play and her historical sources with vigour and her insights are genuinely enlightening. Her opening and closing sentences illustrate her critical acumen as well as the refreshing eloquence of her critical discourse: at the beginning, ‘Hamlet loves the theatre, and the theatre has returned his love’ (p. 53). She closes by pondering an English-language version of the play with surtitles in modern English: ‘This would be a logical conclusion of the process by which Shakespeare’s play has conquered the world by vanishing into it’ (p. 81). Along the way we encounter much familiar material—the 1607 performance off the coast of Sierra Leone, Garrick, Sarah Bernhardt, Peter Brook, and so on. But this is no archival trawl; rather, Potter uses her prodigious knowledge of the play’s history on stage to formulate some intriguing hypotheses. On the rise of the scholarly editor she notes an increasing gap between stage and study, so that ‘some readings of the play became so philosophical that it is hard to imagine any production that could do them justice and some productions were so heavily cut that there was no room for philosophy anyway’ (pp. 55–6). Potter tracks the play around the globe, to France, Germany, Spain but also across Asia and the Antipodes: ‘Curiously, many Europeans seem to have identified more deeply with Hamlet than did English-speaking spectators’ (p. 62). Potter contextualizes the circulation of Shakespeare against larger cultural concerns: ‘Increasingly’, in China, she writes, ‘instead of studying English in order to read Shakespeare, people studied Shakespeare in order to gain entrance into a dominant culture’ (p. 63). Other highlights include her discussion of the nineteenth-century ‘national malaise’ of Hamletism as well as her explanation, influenced by the criticism of Tony Howard, of the decline of female Hamlets after the First World War: ‘the growing uneasiness over homosexuality (and lesbianism, which Parliament attempted to criminalize in 1920) meant that reactions to female Hamlets were sometimes both homophobic and misogynistic’ (p. 72). While ‘there are now so many Hamlets that generalization seems impossible’ (p. 77), she does venture, in the way of summation, that a ‘basically psychological, apolitical stance [is the one] that still characterizes most Anglophone productions’ (p. 81). This is an authoritative essay from one of performance history’s most dependable practitioners. 3. Shakespeare on Screen While there have been more publications than there were last year, the Shakespeare on screen scholarship in 2016 comprised a modest number of journal articles. An inevitably tighter focus contrasts with the wealth of topics that were examined two years ago. A special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin focuses on auteur cinema. Greg M. Colón Semenza’s ‘Introduction: Shakespeare and the Auteurs: Rethinking Adaptation through the Director’s Cinema’ (ShakB 34[2016] 353–71) notes that, while there is an established tradition of a focus on directors to organize materials, what is missing is sustained engagement with the theoretical implications of ‘auteur’. Semenza dissects arguments surrounding auteur theory within film studies in order to suggest that ‘to the degree that it clearly endorses infidelity and distinct departures from literature and literary source material, it can be said to champion more radical adaptation methods’ (p. 365). The adaptations examined in the special issue range widely. Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well [1960], and Almereyda’s Hamlet [2000] and his Cymbeline [2014] appear alongside hybrid films such as Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death [1946], Deepa Mehta’s Water [2005], and James Gray’s We Own the Night [2007]. Douglas Lanier’s article, ‘Shakespeare and the Indie Auteur: Michael Almereyda and James Gray’ (ShakB 34[2016] 451–68), argues that, in contrast with Almereyda’s approach, Gray’s characters ‘are better understood as Shakespearean composites than simple updates’ (p. 463). Lanier’s argument concludes with the suggestion that ‘what these two indie auteurs share is resistance to the predominant modes of cinematizing Shakespeare that emerged in the ’90s … they have pressed beyond nostalgia for a golden past’ (pp. 465–6). A definition of auteur is complicated with the consideration of television production in Ramona Wray’s analysis of the BBC’s The Hollow Crown [2012]: ‘The Shakespearean Auteur and the Televisual Medium’ (ShakB 34[2016] 469–85). Sam Mendes is the producer of the television project, and Wray identifies his role more precisely as that of a ‘showrunner’, which the OED defines as the individual with ‘overall creative authority and management responsibility for a television programme’ (p. 470). While Wray suggests that it is ‘possible that Mendes’s artistic vision and imprint are noticeable in the connections running across the series as a whole’ (p. 471), the article examines ‘auteurism as an overlapping phenomenon’ (p. 471) by exploring the influence of the directors Rupert Goold (Richard II), Richard Eyre (the two parts of Henry IV), and Thea Sharrock (Henry V). Wray interrogates the series’ choices in relation to casting, the shooting locations, masculinity, visual aesthetics, and textual choices, and concludes by suggesting that ‘what is demonstrated by The Hollow Crown is a complex interplay between a “showrunner” and a range of practitioners who take on board a variety of responsibilities so as to revivify Shakespeare’s work for a changing art-form’ (p. 484). Linda McJannet and Emily Winerock, in ‘Dancing on Her Grave: Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroines on Film’ (DanChron 39[2016] 56–76), focus on the physical animation of episodes in the tragedies in a range of screen adaptations. Their piece examines dance sequences in three screen versions: Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet [1964], Oliver Parker’s Othello [1995], and Rupert Goold’s Macbeth [2010]. While the article draws attention to the fact that ‘thirteen of Shakespeare’s plays explicitly call for dance’, it chooses to focus on when ‘a modern director adds dance to a scene that does not explicitly call for it’. The decision to focus on tragedies accommodates examination of the extent to which ‘directors challenge their audiences’ expectations regarding the genre’ (p. 57). Particular focus is given to setting so that the dancing sequences are contextualized historically. Detailed engagement with the choreography for Ophelia, Desdemona, and Lady Macbeth highlights decisions which are incongruous in relation to the films’ period setting (such as the number of times Ophelia curtsies, her female instructor and Desdemona’s expansive arm movements). A notable feature of the writing is its technical dissection of the dances, which works alongside analysis of the costume, music, camerawork, and textual choices. A contrast is drawn between the weight of scholarly attention that Ophelia’s dancing in Kozintsev’s film has received in contrast with the lack of notice given to Desdemona in Parker’s film and Lady Macbeth in Goold’s 2007 stage production (which was filmed for PBS in 2010). In arguing a compelling case for the ways that the dances ‘make important contributions to the stage history of the plays’ (p. 74), McJannet and Winerock call for far more attention to be paid to dance. John Blakeley’s essay on Christine Edzard’s As You Like It [1992] shares a desire to draw attention to a neglected (and by some scholars unfairly maligned) Shakespearean film: ‘Rotherhithe’s Ephemeral Arden: Christine Edzard’s As You Like It Revisited’ (Adaptation 9[2016] 68–85). Blakeley’s article is politically engaged, and his reading of the film is framed with awareness of social concerns at the time of writing. The essay mounts a persuasive case for the ways that the urban location of Edzard’s film highlights the play’s concern with exploitation and social class. The argument includes wide-ranging engagement with critical perspectives on the play. Particular rewards come in the focus upon the actor Andrew Tiernan (Orlando/Oliver) who, in the previous year, had played Gaveston in Derek Jarman’s Edward II [1992]. Blakeley’s interest in Tiernan works alongside analysis of Edzard’s production company, Sands. Its studio is situated in east London’s Rotherhithe, where the process of gentrification means that it ‘is now almost wholly in the hands of mercantile capitalism’ (p. 82). Close scrutiny of the production contexts of Edzard’s film leads to the rather bleak conclusion that shifts in access to the creative industries mean ‘the effective silencing of the poor and the dispossessed’ (p. 81). 4. Criticism (a) General This year marked the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. This led to an increase in the overall number of Shakespeare offerings, some of which will be reviewed in the next issue of YWES. It also, of course, saw the publication of a number of volumes that explicitly commemorate this anniversary. Israel Gollancz’s 1916 Book of Homage to Shakespeare was reissued for the quatercentenary by the original publisher, Oxford University Press. In a new introduction to this volume (pp. v–xxxiii), Gordon McMullan highlights the book’s ‘complex relationship to its cultural moment and to global politics’ (p. xxv), as well as the contributors’ self-fashioning through the 105 essays and sixty-one poems from four continents included in the original volume. Like the other quatercentenary offerings discussed here, the volume edited by Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn on Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory [2015] stresses how Shakespeare is now not only ‘an icon of Englishness’ but is also ‘woven into the cultural fabric of many nations’ (p. 1). The editors explain that what sets this book apart from other celebration volumes is that it consists in a set of critical analyses on the practice of Shakespearean commemoration itself. The majority of the fifteen substantial essays in this book discuss previous Shakespeare celebrations, starting with Garrick’s Jubilee (Peter Holland) and moving on to Betterton and Irving (Richard Schoch). There is a chapter by Adrian Poole on the ‘sharply contrasted motives’ (p. 63) that characterized the commemoration in the year after the Waterloo victory, while Graham Holderness discusses the role of Shakespeare in the years of the Great Exhibition, the Festival of Britain, and the London Olympics. Supriya Chaudhuri addresses Shakespearean ‘colonial and postcolonial memory’ in India, while Marta Cerezo analyses the significance of the celebrations for the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth in relation to the Second Vatican Council, including an interesting section on a performance of the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice and how it would have highlighted the Vatican’s attitude towards the Jewish question, particularly, during the Second World War. Not all the chapters are arranged in chronological order, and this is followed by Douglas M. Lanier’s account of the 1864 tercentenary in America, and by four chapters on 1916, with Andrew Murphy focusing on the Easter Rising, Gordon McMullan on ‘anti-semitism and the invention of “global Shakespeare” ’, and Ailsa Grant Ferguson on ‘Shakespeare galas in London’, while Philip Mead compares celebrations in Sydney and in London. The next two chapters address Shakespeare and his works as represented in comics (Clara Calvo) and in statues of the Bard (Ton Hoenselaars). Nicola J. Watson is inspired by the Shakespeare garden created in 1916 at Chicago’s Northwestern University to explore ‘the long history of imagining Shakespeare in cultivated spaces’ (p. 301). The concluding chapter, by Katherine West Scheil, is on Anne Hathaway’s cottage, from its ‘discovery’ by Samuel Ireland in 1793 to its US replicas and their uses during diplomatic visits. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett’s edited collection Shakespeare in Our Time contains over sixty essays on twenty different themes (with each chapter consisting of three essays by different authors), and admirably fulfils its aim to offer a comprehensive overview of scholarship at the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The chapters omitted from this review are covered in Section 1 above and Section 4(g) below. Callaghan and Gossett’s ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1–5) emphasizes that Shakespeare studies remains an important field because of its ability to perpetuate connections between past and present, and offer a space in which to ‘discuss what culture means’ (p. 4). Chapter 1, ‘Feminism’ (pp. 7–22), begins with Phyllis Rackin’s essay ‘Why Feminism Still Matters’ (pp. 7–14), which highlights the benefits created by feminist scholarship on Shakespeare, and asserts its continued relevance to the field. In ‘Just Imagine’ (pp. 14–18), Kathryn Schwarz argues that feminist Shakespearean critics must embrace fluidity and uncertainty, while Wendy Wall’s ‘Letters, Characters and Roots’ (pp. 18–22) highlights the difficulties which archival research poses to feminist scholars through a close reading of Cymbeline. Chapter 2, ‘Sexuality’ (pp. 23–39), features Bruce R. Smith’s article ‘Deeds, Desire, Delight’ (pp. 23–31), which outlines a continuum of sexuality in Shakespeare’s works. Mario DiGangi’s ‘Rethinking Sexual Acts and Identities’ (pp. 31–5) explains the complexity of the relationship between the two titular concepts. Madhavi Menon’s ‘HexaSexuality’ (pp. 35–9) meanwhile offers the convincing argument that desire complicates, rather than equates to, sexual identity in Shakespeare. ‘Teaching’ (pp. 41–56) is the focus of chapter 3, which opens with David Bevington’s ‘The Classroom’ (pp. 41–8). Bevington argues that students engage much more positively with Shakespeare’s plays when they are encouraged to approach them like directors. Marjorie Garber’s ‘Money for Jam’ (pp. 48–52) charts the changing attitudes towards teaching Shakespeare, while Patricia Cahill’s important essay ‘Extension Work’ (pp. 52–6) discusses the benefits which drama-based pedagogy has had, and continues to have, upon the African American community. Chapter 5, ‘Mortality’ (pp. 73–90), features Mary Beth Rose’s article ‘Suicide as Profit or Loss’ (pp. 73–80), which considers whether the suicides of Julius Caesar’s Cassius and Brutus, or the titular characters of Antony and Cleopatra, can be viewed as victorious. Michael Neill’s ‘Death and King Lear’ (pp. 81–5) illustrates that nothingness is at the centre of the tragedy, and Scott L. Newstok’s ‘Shakespeare’s Here’ (pp. 85–90) examines the ways in which Shakespeare seems to live on after death. There is great variety in chapter 6, ‘Media’ (pp. 91–106), which begins with James C. Bulman’s consideration of how various cinematic and televisual portrayals of Hamlet have positioned spectators in his essay ‘Spectatorship, Remediation, and One Hundred Years of Hamlet’ (pp. 91–9). Pascale Aebischer’s ‘Performing Shakespeare through Social Media’ (pp. 100–3) offers a lively discussion of various social media responses to the #Dream40 RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The sixth chapter culminates with Alan Galey’s article ‘Reading Shakespeare through Media Archaeology’ (pp. 103–6), which outlines the difficulties and frustrations that the nineteenth-century scholar Howard Staunton experienced when dealing with a photo-lithograph of the First Folio. In chapter 7, ‘Race and Class’ (pp. 107–22), Jean E. Howard’s ‘Is Black So Base a Hue?’ (pp. 107–14) contemplates the link between race and class for Aaron of Titus Andronicus and the eponymous protagonist of Othello, while Lara Bovilsky’s ‘The Race of Shakespeare’s Mind’ (pp. 114–18) highlights the similarities between dialogues about race and class in The Winter’s Tale. Ian Smith’s ‘Speaking of Race’ (pp. 118–22) is one of the most timely and important essays within this collection. Smith uses Othello’s request to ‘Speak of me as I am’ as a powerful introduction to his argument that literary scholars must be aware of their white positioning as readers, and consider how they can most effectively and truthfully discuss the still-pertinent issue of race. ‘Sources’ (pp. 123–39) are the focus of chapter 8, which opens with Robert S. Miola’s article ‘Shakespeare and the Bible’ (pp. 123–31). Miola examines previous scholarship on biblical references and allusions in Shakespeare, then suggests that reception studies might offer a future direction of study for those interested in this area. Ania Loomba’s ‘Shakespeare’s Sources’ (pp. 131–5) convincingly argues for the usefulness of historical sources on race when reading such texts as Othello. Sarah Beckwith’s article ‘Volver, or Coming Back’ (pp. 135–9) demonstrates the need for ‘a new vocabulary for source studies: echoes, hauntings, resurrections’ (p. 139) in its discussion of how the titular Almodóvar film relates to The Winter’s Tale. Chapter 10, ‘Globalization’ (pp. 159–75), begins with Suzanne L. Wofford’s important article ‘Against Our Own Ignorance’ (pp. 159–67), which warns that critics can misread Shakespeare’s plays because they are ignorant of how globalism functioned at the time of their composition. Daniel Viktus issues another warning in ‘Circumnavigation, Shakespeare, and the Origins of Globalization’ (pp. 167–71) when he argues that the global capitalism which began in Shakespeare’s time is reaching its terrible climax now. Jyotsna G. Singh’s ‘The Bard in Calcutta, India, 1835–2014’ (pp. 171–5) strikes a more positive tone, with its concise but illuminating history of Shakespeare studies in Calcutta and India more broadly, and its suggestion that ‘Postcolonial Shakespeare’ is gaining particular scholarly momentum in India. ‘Bodies and Emotions’ (pp. 177–93) is the title of chapter 11, which contains two articles of relevance to this section. Gail Kern Paster’s ‘Bodies without Borders in Lear and Macbeth’ (pp. 177–84) asserts that the apostrophes made by Lear and Lady Macbeth reflect the early modern notion of the passible body, while David Houston Wood’s important piece ‘Shakespeare and Variant Embodiment’ (pp. 189–93) highlights the relative lack of critical attention which scholars of early modern embodiment have paid to disability studies, and convincingly argues that disabled characters are present in almost all of Shakespeare’s drama. Chapter 12, ‘Social Context’ (pp. 195–210), begins with Frances E. Dolan’s ‘Social Contexting’ (pp. 195–202), which maintains that the notion of ‘context’ needs to become much more open-ended and collaborative. Bradin Cormack’s ‘ “Hic et ubique”: Hamlet in Sync’ (pp. 202–6) pinpoints several instances within the titular tragedy when the text provides the context for the play’s action; William N. West’s ‘Playing in Context, Playing out Context’ (pp. 206–10) meanwhile suggests that the plays of Shakespeare’s time drew upon context from the surrounding world. Chapter 13 focuses upon ‘Historicism’ (pp. 211–27), with William C. Carroll’s article ‘Historicizing Historicism’ (p. 211–19) offering a succinct history of this approach, and giving several examples of its profound influence on Shakespeare studies through a summary of its impact upon critical views of Macbeth’s witches, Lady Macbeth, and Malcolm. In ‘Minding Anachronism’ (pp. 219–23), Margreta de Grazia compellingly asserts that what critics view as anachronisms in Shakespearean drama may not actually have been viewed as such by their original audience, as even the most ‘historical’ plays were performed in contemporary dress. Gina Bloom’s ‘The Historicist as Gamer’ (pp. 223–7) employs the chess game from The Tempest to suggest that historicist critics should see themselves as ‘a gamer’ (p. 223) who can hold debates and experiments into historical practice with other scholars. Chapter 14, ‘Appropriations’ (pp. 229–43), begins with Georgianna Ziegler’s fascinating essay on American Civil War appropriations of Shakespeare, ‘American Appropriation through the Centuries’ (pp. 229–36). Christy Desmet argues in ‘Appropriation 2.0’ (pp. 236–40) that the growth of Shakespearean databases has meant that scholarship within this area has become a form of appropriation itself, while Andrew Hartley’s ‘Appropriation in Contemporary Fiction’ (pp. 240–3) discovers similarities in attitudes towards appropriation between early modern and contemporary writers. Chapter 15 focuses upon ‘Biography’ (pp. 245–60), with Peter Holland’s ‘Shakespeare and Biography’ (pp. 245–52) beginning the section with an engaging discussion of the different approaches taken by Shakespearean biographers, and the various pitfalls that have dogged them. David Kathman’s ‘Shakespeare’s Friends and Family in the Archives’ (pp. 252–6) demonstrates that archival discoveries of sources relating to Shakespeare’s connections can offer new insights into his life. Lois Potter’s ‘Biography vs. Novel’ (pp. 256–60) gives an important reminder that the gap between fact and fiction in biographies and novels about Shakespeare is not as large as it may seem to be. ‘Classicism’ (pp. 261–76) is the focus of chapter 16, which opens with Coppélia Kahn’s illuminating article ‘The Classics as Popular Discourse’ (pp. 261–8). Kahn convincingly argues that Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary oral conversations about the classics, and examines the use of the name ‘Pompey’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Measure for Measure. Lynn Enterline’s ‘Shakespeare’s Classicism, Redux’ (pp. 268–72) is a fascinating examination of how grammar school training in Latin did not necessarily produce the strict masculine identity which it was supposed to. Heather James’s ‘Time, Verisimilitude, and the Counter-Classical Ovid’ (pp. 272–6) meanwhile argues that ‘Shakespeare’s Ovid cultivated a boldness, force, and audacity in poetic intervention and expression’ (p. 272). Chapter 17, ‘Public Shakespeare’ (pp. 277–93), opens with Paul Yachnin’s article ‘The Publicity of the Look’ (pp. 277–85), which maintains that Cymbeline moves gradually towards a kind of seeing that was already present in the Globe: one which allowed people to look freely at each other, irrespective of social rank. Julia Reinhard Lupton’s ‘Public Women/Women of Valor’ (pp. 285–9) reveals that several of Shakespeare’s heroines exert a form of courage that renders them public figures, while Henry S. Turner’s ‘The Ghost of the Public University’ (pp. 289–93) likens the Ghost of Hamlet to the public university at the present moment, and speculates what its fate will be. Chapter 18, ‘Style’ (pp. 295–310), features Russ McDonald’s admirably close reading of 3 Henry VI in ‘William Shakespeare, Elizabethan Stylist’ (pp. 295–303), as well as Stephen Guy-Bray’s excellent article on the profusion of similes and metaphors in Venus and Adonis in ‘Nondramatic Style’ (pp. 303–6). The chapter ends with Alysia Kolentsis’s ‘Shakespeare’s Lexical Style’ (pp. 306–10), which argues that formalism is still a valid approach to Shakespeare, for even single words are important to an understanding of his style. Chapter 19 focuses on ‘Performance’ (pp. 311–26), with Diana E. Henderson’s excellent ‘Pluralizing Performance’ (pp. 311–19) arguing that scholars of Shakespearean performance should seek to adopt an interpretative role that other theatre critics are unable to supply. Tiffany Stern’s equally admirable ‘The Study of Historical Performance’ (pp. 319–23) echoes Henderson somewhat with its argument that theatre historians need to remember to link their work back to interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays themselves. W.B. Worthen’s ‘Shakespeare/Performance’ (pp. 323–6) meanwhile offers a discussion of the false dichotomy which exists between the two titular notions. The twentieth, and last, substantial chapter is ‘Ecocriticism’ (pp. 327–41), which features three articles that focus on Troilus and Cressida. Rebecca Bushnell’s ‘Shakespeare and Nature’ (pp. 327–34) highlights how comparisons of animals frequently fail within the play, thereby disrupting the Great Chain of Being, while Steve Mentz uses his essay ‘Shakespeare without Nature’ (pp. 334–8) to trace the presence of the ocean in Ulysses’ remarks on degree and highlight multiple concepts of nature. Karen Raber’s entertaining ‘The Chicken and the Egg’ (pp. 338–41) links the image of the addled egg to the muddled nature of human interaction. Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Afterword: Shakespeare in Tehran’ (pp. 343–52) closes the edited collection with an uplifting account of his experience as the keynote speaker at the inaugural Iranian Shakespeare Congress at the University of Tehran. His inclusion of several of the insightful questions posed by audience members reflects his argument that ‘Shakespeare functions as a place to think intensely and with freedom’ (p. 352), and reinforces the impression given by the rest of Callaghan and Gossett’s edited collection of an area of study which remains as attractive to scholars as ever. Shakespeare’s Dead: Stages of Death in Shakespeare’s Playworlds, by Simon Palfrey and Emma Smith, is the Bodleian Library’s contribution to the Shakespeare quatercentenary celebrations. It is richly illustrated, and doubles as exhibition catalogue. While it is addressed primarily to the general public, its emphasis on the idea of death allows the authors to view the plays according to an original and unified perspective. Starting and ending with Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy and including a reference to the ‘suggestive’ ‘fault lines’ (p. 20) in the difference between the 1603 and 1604 versions, chapter 1, ‘Something after Death’, points out the ‘magnified terrors of mortality’ (Robert Watson, The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance [1994], p. 7, quoted on p. 16) that resulted from the Reformation. Chapters 2 and 3 from this book are reviewed below in Sections 4(b) and 4(g) respectively. Chapter 4, ‘A Plague on Your Houses’, points out that ‘Shakespeare’s life was bracketed by the plague’. No one actually dies of this in the plays (on the other hand, for various reasons, ‘the infant mortality rate is almost 100 per cent’, p. 73), though a delay caused by the plague is indirectly responsible for the death of Romeo and Juliet. The chapter reviews mentions of the plague in Shakespeare’s works, and shows how ‘the urgency of the plague year’ (p. 76) surfaces through the poems that Shakespeare wrote when the plague caused the theatres to be closed. Chapter 5, ‘Joy of the Worm: Death and Sex’, takes as its starting point the well-known use of the verb ‘to die’ to indicate orgasm and looks at the conjunction of eros and thanatos in a number of plays, including Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Romeo and Juliet, and, especially, Antony and Cleopatra. Chapter 6, entitled ‘Dying Again: English Histories’, covers the history plays. Chapter 7, ‘Another Golgotha: Places of Death’, focuses on the actual ‘staging of death’ (p. 125) and offers perceptive readings of a variety of plays across the canon, from Romeo and Juliet to Timon of Athens. In chapter 8, ‘Die, Die, Die, Die, Die: Cueing Death’, the authors highlight the ‘extraordinary care that Shakespeare takes in scripting death scenes’ (p. 147) and the importance of the ‘repeated dying cue’ (p. 150) as a staging device, with examples from Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Othello. Finally, chapter 9, ‘Kindle Again: Life in Death’, discusses ghosts (‘principally a marker of the protagonist’s guilt’, p. 167), with an inevitable emphasis on Hamlet, before moving on to the different ways in which ‘the finality of death is redeemed’ (p. 176) in the late plays. The book is concluded by a brief ‘Coda’ with variations on the theme of Shakespeare’s ‘Afterlives’. Though the editors Paul Edmondson and Peter Holbrook refrain from doing so, Shakespeare’s Creative Legacies: Artists, Writers, Performers, Readers could itself have been subtitled ‘A book of homage to Shakespeare’. It is also a homage to the International Shakespeare Association, to which all proceeds from the book are donated. After Stanley Wells’s foreword, the book opens with Roger Pringle’s moving poem on Shakespeare’s last days, and it concludes with a fantasmagoric vision in sonnet form by Paul Edmondson (another poem, translated from the Bengali, is appended to Chaudhuri’s essay, and there is also a contribution by John Ashbery). Edmondson and Holbrook’s introduction starts from the accusation of ‘sketchiness’ levelled at Shakespeare’s plays by Wittgenstein, which they interpret to be in fact something close to Keats’s famous ‘negative capability’, or Empsonian ambiguity, or what Indira Ghose, in her wide-ranging concluding contribution on ‘Shakespeare’s Legacy of Storytelling’, describes as lack of ‘moral closure’ (p. 171). There is of course a direct connection between this and the ‘natural’ quality of Shakespeare’s works, which is the other characteristic highlighted in this introduction. Part I consists of seven essays, by Paul Prescott, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Tom Bishop, David Fuller, Penny Gay, Graham Holderness, and Russell Jackson, on Shakespeare and the theatre, poetry, music, dance, opera, the novel, and film and television respectively. Part II offers a series of reflections by theatre practitioners, writers, and other prominent figures, including Rowan Williams, on how their personal relationship with Shakespeare began, which amounts to a fascinating first-hand account of what ‘global Shakespeare’ means in practice. A special anniversary issue of Cahiers Élisabéthains collects selected papers from the 2013 ‘Shakespeare and Myth’ ESRA conference at the University of Montpellier. In an interesting preface (CahiersE 90[2016] 3–6) Ton Hoenselaars recalls two slightly different versions of a reported interview in which President Charles de Gaulle seemed inclined to deny Shakespeare a place in European literature. In the opening lines of their ‘Introduction: Mythologizing Shakespeare—A European Perspective’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 7–18), Florence March, Jean-Christophe Mayer, and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin respond by quoting Ben Jonson on the ‘homage’ that ‘all scenes of Europe’ owed Shakespeare, and point out how this judgement should now be extended globally. Of the two ‘mythological’ directions explored at the original conference, the presence of classical figures in Shakespeare and his contemporaries is dealt with in a separate volume (to be reviewed in YWES 98[2019]). This special issue focuses instead on the ‘downstream perspective’ of ‘Shakespeare as myth and myth-maker’ (p. 8), particularly as a European ‘myth’ and in a trans-medial dimension. The introduction concludes by enrolling Shakespeare among Foucault’s ‘founders of discursivity’, i.e. those authors who ‘have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they have founded’ (p. 15). In the first article, Patrick Cheney, ‘The Myth Behind “The Shakespeare Myth”: Contemporary Reports, 1592–1640’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 19–29), after classifying three modern ‘critical waves’, focuses on the formation of the Myth in Shakespeare’s own day and the remainder of the seventeenth century, when it was fuelled by the poems as much as by the plays and led to Shakespeare being himself equated to mythological figures. Cheney further links this to the popularity of Longinus’s On Sublimity from the 1570s onwards. John Baxter, ‘ “My Shakespeare, rise”: Ben Jonson’s Celebration of His Shakespeare’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 30–41), addresses the discrepancy between Jonson’s First Folio poem and his comments in Discoveries in the light of Jonson’s engagement with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy via the Dutch humanist Heinsius. The remaining essays are on Shakespeare’s adaptations and fortune in later centuries. Michael Hattaway, ‘ “By indirections find directions out”: Shakespeare, His Restoration Adapters, and Early Modern Myths of Nature’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 42–57), discusses Nahum Tate and his contemporaries, while Michèle Willems, ‘From Janus to Prometheus: The Paradoxical Construction of the Shakespeare Myth from the Restoration Onwards’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 58–68), focuses on eighteenth-century neoclassicism. These are followed by Andreas Höfele, ‘Beware the Ides of March: Shakespeare and the Nineteenth-Century Caesar Myth’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 69–84). In ‘The Myth of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 85–100), Paul J.C.M. Franssen discusses British, American, Dutch, and German responses to the question of the addressees’ gender and the speaker’s sexual orientation in the sonnets. Two articles are on performances in the former Soviet block: Jerzy Limon, ‘Jan Klata’s H. [amlet]: Questioning the Myth of Solidarity’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 101–14), examines a version of the play performed in 2004 in the Gdańsk shipyard, while Georgi Niagolov, ‘Demythologizing and Remythologizing Shakespeare in the Context of Bulgarian Politics’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 115–28), looks at three Bulgarian productions from 2011 to 2013 that were inspired by Macbeth, Richard III, and Hamlet. The status of the latter as Shakespeare’s most globally iconic play is again confirmed by the next article, ‘Spectres of Shakespeare: Ong Keng Sen’s Search: Hamlet and the Intercultural Myth’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 129–40), in which Marcus Tan describes a 2002 Singaporean production ‘which has actors speak in their native tongues: Bahasa Melayu, Chinese Mandarin, Kawi (Old Javanese), Japanese and English’ (p. 131). Finally, Roger Chartier, ‘Mythical Ghost: Cardenio Again’ (CahiersE 90[2016] 141–50), surveys the history and manifestations of this ‘textual ghost’ (abstract, p. 141) down to our day. In 2016 Critical Survey devoted the greatest portion of its space to Shakespeare. Number 28:i, a thematic issue on British Gothic and Penny Dreadful, nevertheless includes articles by Vassiliki Markidou on ‘William Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a Spatial Palimpsest’ (CS 28:i[2016] 51–66) and a witty, creative piece by Richard Wilson that links conspiracy theories on ‘the Assassination of William Shakespeare’ and the mysterious death of Italian banker Roberto Calvi in 1982. (There is also an essay by Emanuel Stelzer on ‘Social Implications of Love Suicide in Early Modern English Drama’ (CS 28:i[2016] 67–77) with passing references to Shakespeare.) CS 28:ii and iii are Shakespeare-based thematic issues, on ‘Creative Critical Shakespeares’ and ‘Arab Shakespeares’ respectively. The former, introduced by Rob Conkie and Scott Maisano, consists of pieces that seek to put across critical insights using a creative writing mode, while the latter (guest-edited by Katherine Hennessey and Margaret Litvin) discusses instances of the performance and reception of The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and the sonnets in the Arab world, including Egypt, Oman, and Palestine. This issue also features an interesting article on global responses to the Shakespeare anniversaries, Hazem Azmy’s ‘Egypt between Two Shakespeare Quadricentennials 1964 through 2016: Reflective Remarks in Three Snapshots’ (CS 28:iii[2016] 102–18). As stated in the abstract, the three case studies discussed in this article ‘exhibit compelling evidence of cultural hegemony, entrenched gerontocracy and both the subtle and not so subtle continuing subjugation of feminized voices’. The interview and reviews in this issue continue its Arab theme. Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare: Place, ‘Race’, Politics, by Shaul Bassi, focuses on the Italian reception of Shakespeare. As helpfully summarized by the author, the book examines ‘a Victorian racialist interpretation of Shakespeare that casts Iago as the archetypal Italian specimen, a Romantic adaptation of Othello written in Venice under Austrian rule, the Fascist appropriations of Shakespeare, the disparate uses of Machiavelli in recent Shakespearean criticism, the absence of Giordano Bruno in Shakespeare studies after Frances Yates [but on this see Hilary Gatti’s work, including a 2012 essay and the continuation of this line of research by the present reviewer], an essay on Hamlet by a prominent Italian philosopher and politician, monuments and sites associated with Shakespeare in Verona and Venice, and the Taviano brothers’ filmic version of Julius Caesar’ (p. 3). Almost every chapter includes ‘a brief etymological or linguistic analysis of an Italian word that exists in some sort of tension with its English cognate’ (p. 2n.2). In the first chapter, which is also the introduction, the word ‘country’ is discussed in the context of Iago’s claim in Othello III.iii that he knows ‘our country disposition’, a remark through which he undermines the protagonist’s faith not only in his wife but also in his successful integration within his adoptive nation. The etymological derivation from Latin contra (Italian contro) highlights the wider interest of this volume as a discussion of how Shakespeare’s reception outside England can serve to illustrate the process of cultural self-definition through opposition with the Other. Accordingly, this study addresses both some ‘points of failure’ in Italian culture and some ‘blind spots’ in Shakespeare criticism (p. 6). (As a point of interest, the other words discussed in the individual chapters from an etymological point of view are ‘race’, ciao-‘slave’, different Italian renditions of ‘Machiavellian’, ‘hermetic’, amletico, ‘Ghetto’, ‘Moor’, and ‘prison’-‘comprehension’.) Cambridge Scholars Publishing brings us three edited volumes from different kinds of East. Two are from the same pair of editors, Maryam Beyad and Ali Salami, who swap top billing in the second volume, and are both professors at the University of Teheran (the third volume, from Bosnia Herzegovina, will be reviewed in the next issue of YWES). Culture-Blind Shakespeare: Multiculturalism and Diversity includes eleven essays across three sections. Some readers will be disappointed that the ‘Diversity’ in the subtitle and in the heading for Part I refers simply to ‘a diversity of issues’ and approaches (p. 3). In this section, Gabriel Schenk looks at different and intriguing ways in which Shakespeare’s works and the Arthurian legend are connected, especially in terms of joint reception. In a short, densely packed essay (unfortunately rather let down by hasty editing), Maryam Beyad and Bamshad Hekmatshoar Tabari describe ‘King Lear as a tragedy depicting the dubious [ambivalent or doubting?] post-Reformation epistemology prevalent in English society’ (p. 23), for instance by pointing out how Lear is equated, at different moments, both with the pagan Green Man and the figure of Christ. Maryam Beyad again, this time with Hossein Torkamannejad, points to Steve Sohmer’s thesis of a coincidence of dates between the start of Luther’s Reformation and the appearance of Old Hamlet’s ghost—a ghost that, the authors argue, must have issued out of hell, not purgatory as the younger Hamlet accepts. They conclude that ‘the plot can be interpreted as a critique of Catholic doctrine’ and that ‘the root of Hamlet’s tragic flaw and his eventual ruin is the collapse of his faith’ (p. 38). William Badger’s chapter is discussed below in Section 4(d). Masoud Ghafoori and Mina Ghafoori question both happy endings in Much Ado About Nothing, and follow Stephen Greenblatt in saying that it may not be true that Benedick and Beatrice are really in love from the beginning. The concluding essay in this section and the first ones in Parts II and III are discussed below with works on the late plays (Section 4(f)). Part II is on ‘Popular Culture’, and again the rationale for this heading is not obvious. In the second of only two chapters in this section, Hossein Fathi and Mohsen Rezaeian apply Todorov’s concept of ‘the fantastic’ to the interaction between the dream world of the fairies and the real world of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Part III does indeed engage with ‘Multiculturalism’, meaning, with the exception of the chapter reviewed in Section 4(f) below, the reception of Shakespeare in Iran. The second chapter in this part of the volume, by Shekufeh Owlia, looks at Tardid, an Iranian film based on Hamlet. S. Habib Mousavi and Babak Rajabi provide a comprehensive overview of ‘Shakespeare in Iran’, while Zakarya Bezdoode discusses how Reza Goran’s ‘extreme performance’ of Hamlet adapted by Mohammad Charmsheer ‘Iranised’ Shakespeare’s play (p. 137). The book concludes with a chapter by Amir Ghajarieh and Zuraidah Mohd Don on ‘Gender Differences in Teaching Hamlet to Iranian EFL Students’. The second volume by these editors is entitled Fundamental Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Gender, Psychology and Politics and offers fourteen essays, which are again arranged over three parts. Chapters mostly deal with one individual play each and announce in their title which particular critic or critical current they are following. In Part I, ‘Political Discourse’, Ali Salami and Amir Riahi, ‘The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: Where Does the Bard Stand in Richard II?’, considers this play as Shakespeare’s foremost analysis of political justice and indictment of political violence, in which the author ‘deprives Richard II and Bolingbroke of their divine mandates’ (p. 19); Ensieh Shabanirad and Hossein Keramatfar, in ‘Knowledge and Power in Measure for Measure’, read the play in light of Foucault’s delineation of the interactions among power, sexuality, and discipline; and Behzad Sadeghian and Mohsen Maleki, ‘Unsifted in Perilous Circumstance: A Bourdieusian Reading of Hamlet’, is based on Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of ‘a feel for the game’, and shows how ‘by removing the discordant elements’, i.e. three successive kings or heirs to the throne of Denmark, and installing Fortinbras in their place, ‘the field of power manages to reproduce itself’ (pp. 43–4). Part II, ‘Fundamental Shakespeare’, includes Ali Salami and Fatemeh Gholipour Fereydouni, ‘Shakespeare’s Fragmentary World in Othello’, which describes ways in which the author deliberately puzzles his audience, such as the well-known ‘double time scheme’ or withholding information; Mahmoud Reza Ghorban Sabbagh and Manzar Feyz, ‘A Multimodal Study of Blood Imagery in Macbeth’, which looks at the interaction of the visual and the verbal in Shakespeare’s play and Roman Polanski’s film adaptation; Erfan Rajabi, ‘A CDA/Deleuzian Reading of The Merchant of Venice: Discourse, City, Politics, and Economy’, in which a combination of Theo van Leeuwen’s critical discourse analysis and other critical theories is applied to an analysis of the ‘socioeconomic transformations … adumbrated’ in the play (p. 82); Hossein Keramatfar and Ensieh Shabani, ‘The King’s Fragmentation in Richard II’, which looks at ways in which the title character perceives his own identity, the role of king, and the identity of his subjects; and Ali Salami and Amir Barati, ‘A Purgatory of Zombies: The Žižekian Death Drive in Hamlet’, where the work of the Slovenian philosopher is used in relation to a psychoanalytic reading of the play. Finally, in Part III, ‘Psychology and Gender’, Abolfazl Ramazani and Naghmeh Fazlzadeh, in ‘Hamlet, “Poor Wretch” of Elsinore: Trauma and Witness’, describe Hamlet as a victim of trauma; Farnoosh Pirayesh and Leyli Jamali, in ‘The Androgynous Heroine: As You Like It through the Eyes of Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Mary Daly’, deal with the development of Rosalind’s androgynous, or fuller and empowered, self; Zahra Amini, ‘Out of the Hurly-Burly of Genders and Still Feminine: A Cixousian Reading of Lady Macbeth’, argues that this character is driven by the ferocious desire to free her oppressed femininity rather than by male-like ambition; Nafiseh Salman Saleh, ‘Female Iconography in King Lear’, keeps referring to ‘Elizabethan’ issues, including, on one occasion, the delineation of ‘the monarch’s sovereignty through the discourse of language’ (p. 150); Ali Salami, ‘The Psychological Province of the Reader in Hamlet’, ‘seeks to show how the reader can detach themselves from Hamlet and let their imagination run free’ (p. 162), but in fact seems more like a Bildungsdrama reading of the play as progression ‘from introversion to extraversion, from monologue to dialogue, and from rebellion to submission’ (p. 172). The volume concludes with Narges Montakhabi, ‘Shakespeare the Nomad: Schizoanalysis in Henry V and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, where Shakespeare’s works are discussed in the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a ‘minor literature’, which ‘enjoys a schizoid, “molecular” language’, or a language of ‘ “infinite postponement” ’ (p. 176). As described in her introduction, when taking on the task of producing what was originally billed as a feminist companion to Shakespeare, Valerie Traub had to overcome misgivings as to the continued vitality of feminism as an aspect of Shakespeare studies. Through the intersection with other diversity issues, the eventual result was the 800-page Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, in which the very crisis of an approach that has become more fragmented and less ‘consistent’ becomes part of its usefulness. Traub’s introduction is in itself an important contribution, as it provides an avowedly subjective overview of the current state of feminist Shakespeare studies, or indeed of feminist criticism itself. Gender is thus now seen ‘as historically contingent, relationally diacritical, performative, and intersectional’ (the latter in the sense in which it was used by Kimberlé Crenshaw; p. 7). In Shakespeare studies, it is no longer a matter of ascertaining whether Shakespeare was a feminist or a misogynist, but rather of deriving a picture of gender-related issues from his works. Concurrently, feminist Shakespeare criticism has become more historicized, and textual studies, ecocriticism, and performance studies have all become part of feminist ways of reading Shakespeare. This is borne out by the topics included in this volume, whose sections discuss the ‘Lives’ of William Shakespeare and of early modern women, race and ethnicity, sexualities, ‘Embodied Worlds’, textual production, and cultural performances. Some of the forty articles in this volume are discussed in more detail in the genre-specific sections below. In Shakespeare’s Money: How Much Did He Make and What Did This Mean? Robert Bearman, former head of archives and local studies at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, re-examines the body of evidence on Shakespeare’s financial dealings. On the basis of this, Bearman argues that Shakespeare overcame familial financial difficulties in the early days but did not go on to attain huge wealth: in his later days he was a man of considerable means, who, however, failed to attain gentry status and remained careful about his finances, and whose ‘upward trajectory’ was not ‘sustained’ (p. 176). While the greatest part of his income derived from his share in his acting company’s profits, we do not really know to how much this amounted, and it would have been surrendered in or soon after 1612, though his purchase of the Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1613 is evidence that he continued to retain a financial foothold in the London theatrical world. Bearman defines this as an ‘uncharacteristic move’ (p. 175), the motives behind which may be difficult to resolve (whether this has any bearing on the matter or not, Richard Wilson has pointed out that this building had been used to shelter clandestine Catholic clergy). The emphasis in this book is on Stratford records, which provide the majority of evidence on Shakespeare’s financial dealings, though he virtually stopped acquiring assets in Stratford after 1605. Overall, the picture that emerges is that of a cautious and sensible man who, having not been averse to taking risks in his youth—like purchasing a share in a theatre company soon after the period of closure due to the plague—later in life favoured safe property investments and, compared to his contemporaries, was remarkably successful in staying out of the financial courts of law. As explained in the initial blurb and in the introduction, Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Exchange, edited by David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton, examines the scenes of hospitality in Shakespeare with reference to both contemporary theory and early modern texts and objects. This study finds that the theme of hospitality provides ‘a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare’s time and our own’ (references are to the ebook, hence no page numbers). The introduction opens with a detailed discussion of the tragic breach of hospitality in Macbeth, with a focus on the physical objects that would have provided that hospitality on a material level. It goes on to explain that ‘these essays explore hospitality as vernacular phenomenology’, or engagement with ‘the conditions of human co-existence’. A recurring theme in the volume is the contemporary perception of a ‘decay of hospitality and good housekeeping’ as a result of the Reformation and the onset of capitalism—see the essays by Andrew Hiscock on Troilus and Cressida (reviewed in Section 4(b) below), Jessica Rosenberg on Hamlet, Michael Noschka on Timon of Athens, and James Kuzner on As You Like It (reviewed in Section 4(g)). Other essays (by James Kearney and Sean Lawrence) deal with the philosophy of hospitality, while Thomas P. Anderson writes on the politics and theology of hospitality with respect to Coriolanus. There are also two essays, by David Hillman on Othello and Thomas J. Moretti on King Lear, that look at hospitality as theatre. The volume is organized into four sections, dealing with the interchange between private and public spaces, economy and ecology, ‘the theatrical rhythms native to hospitality’, and the theological dimension (with essays by Sheiba Kian Kaufman on The Travels of the Three English Brothers and Joan Pong Linton on Twelfth Night—on which see Section 4(g) below). Thomas P. Anderson also produced a monograph, Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics. He defines ‘fugitive politics’ as ‘dissensual’, where dissent is understood as a resistance to consensus. In this respect the fugitive is distinguished from mainstream forms of protest, which usually carry the assertion of a counter-consensus of political truth behind their action. Anderson notes that no consensus or counter-consensus can be located in Shakespeare, and concludes that, for Shakespeare, politics is something that emerges as a fleeting philosophical formula where the consensual no longer endures. Such an approach must inevitably draw on modern discussions of how Shakespeare’s politics are understood in light of the upheavals of the late seventeenth century. Materialist critics, for example, have linked the spirit of dissent of the public theatres in the early seventeenth century to the mid-century Civil War, but none go so far as to suggest that Shakespeare was actively a republican propagandist. Pursuing a similar conviction, Anderson describes how Shakespeare’s politics can be understood in light of contested ideas of ‘democracy’ in early modern Britain (p. 7). He suggests that the concept was not opposed to sovereignty; rather, democracy was characterized in ephemeral action by the individual within totalizing structures. Following similar arguments from Gil (p. 9), Anderson asserts that politics in Shakespeare resists the total structure, and therefore occurs on the most local and subjective levels. Anderson applies this critique to an intriguingly narrow selection of Shakespeare’s plays: the great tragedies and comedies remain untouched, with the analysis applied to two Roman plays (Julius Caesar, Coriolanus), two histories (King John, Henry V), an early tragedy (Titus Andronicus), and a romance (The Winter’s Tale). Given the universalizing claims of Shakespeare’s ‘fugitive’ politics, one might suppose that the formula may be applied to all Shakespeare, indeed to all early modern English drama, and that the current volume merely reflects the starting point for a new methodology, to be applied more broadly by others. Nonetheless, the examples that Anderson covers are claimed to be particularly illuminating for the methodology. For instance, the analysis of Coriolanus offers to resolve some of the traditional critical issues surrounding the play through the claim that Caius Martius, the ‘reluctant’ politician, embodies this principle more effectively than any other figure in Shakespeare (p. 29). Anderson argues that the contradictions of Martius’s politics oppose the consensual utopianism of the Roman plebeians, and actively critique the corruption and complacency that such ideals pose for the state (p. 32). By drawing on poststructuralism, particularly the late works of Jacques Derrida, Anderson’s arguments sometimes threaten to divert into impenetrability; nonetheless, the examples covered in the text offer further clarifications of the generally concrete model that Anderson proposes. Henry V, for example, is adduced as an analysis of a sovereignty that functions effectively alongside the democratic; Harry, it is suggested, embodies a ‘seductive absolutism’ that is reflexively critiqued through the manner in which the king (literally) presses his subjects into forms of dissent (p. 66). In relation to King John, Anderson argues that the play offers a complementary depiction of sovereignty divided at its core, the result of the contestation over the crown within the play, and proposes that the emergence of bureaucracy, rather than reinforcing sovereignty, serves to equalize and empower the political subject (p. 102). In respect of this methodical approach, which is consistent throughout the volume, it is clear that Anderson engages with his subject conscientiously, and uses his examples to build a convincing and valuable argument. Richard Wilson’s Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Good Will consists in essays previously published between 2004 and 2013, plus a new introduction and two new chapters. The book follows on from and enters into a dialogue with Wilson’s previous books: Will Power [1993], Secret Shakespeare [2004], and Free Will [2013], whose aims are expounded in the introductory chapter. Taking as its mantra Peter Quince’s ‘If we offend, it is with our good will’, the introduction, ‘No Offence in the World’, explains that Shakespeare expressly ‘gave offence’ in his plays as a therapeutic measure, a way of responding to what, as was by then obvious, were the irreconcilable differences created by the Reformation. The result is a series of ‘non-cathartic plays’ (p. 5), which, ‘by staging toleration in conflict … continue to provide us with pretexts for our globalised yet multifaceted communities’ (p. 14). The constant underlying comparison with political issues of our own globalized world is highlighted by the use of expressly anachronistic terms, whereby, for instance, the ‘green world’ in As You Like It becomes a ‘rogue state’. Overall, the thesis of the book is that the plays seek to defuse violence by foregrounding and displacing intolerance from the antagonistic to the agonistic plane (p. 19 and passim). Chapter 1, ‘A Globe of Sinful Continents: Shakespeare Thinks the World’, previously unpublished, considers the name of Shakespeare’s theatre ‘in the context of twenty-first-century debates about the competing claims of universalism and pluralism’ (p. 32): far from triumphantly asserting the universal compass of its art, the theatre seems to have questioned England’s unique and privileged position in this new, well-charted world. The chapter also contrasts Marlowe’s ‘globalisation’ with Shakespeare’s ‘true worldliness’ or mondialisation (p. 38), a term borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy that Wilson glosses as ‘a world without mastery’ (p. 48). Chapter 2, ‘Too Long for a Play: Shakespeare and the Wars of Religion’, is an illuminating discussion of Shakespeare’s engagement with this topic throughout his career. Besides Love’s Labour’s Lost, where character names famously allude to the French wars, there are especially valuable accounts of how this subject informs The Merry Wives of Windsor and All’s Well That Ends Well. In chapter 3, ‘Shakespeare in Hate: Performing the Virgin Queen’, as indeed throughout the book, Wilson surveys a wealth of examples from a wide range of Elizabethan and Jacobean texts. References to the Moon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and particularly Starveling’s performance of it in the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ playlet, are singled out as powerful representations of Shakespeare’s antagonism to the queen. Chapter 4, ‘No Enemy But Winter: Shakespeare’s Rogue State’, the other new essay in the volume, is on ‘the play that announces by its title the agreement to differ’ (p. 17), and discusses the different ways in which the forest in As You Like It, like the Globe theatre itself, functions as a locale ‘on the margins of the Protestant state’ (p. 113). Chapter 5, ‘Fools of Time: Shakespeare and the Martyrs’, sets Hamlet against the vividly described backdrop of the (Catholic) religious terrorism of the time, implicitly separating ‘Shakespeare’s own recoil from the martyrs’ (p. 135) from the character of Hamlet as a suicide-bomber equivalent. The latter part of the article is on King Lear, Macbeth, and the Gunpowder Plot. Chapter 6, ‘Veiling an Indian Beauty: Shakespeare and the Hijab’, finds that the stratagem of the veiled face functions as ‘a symbolic form of ritualised aggression’ that seeks to neutralize intolerance by putting it on display, against the background of a ‘Moorish Catholic subtext’ (p. 19). Taking as its starting point an episode in The Merchant of Venice, the essay concludes that ‘masking’ is a form of ‘ritualisation of antagonism’, and ‘the precondition of racial, religious, sexual and artistic freedoms’ (p. 165). In reaction to the Shah ‘Abbas exhibition at the British Museum in 2009, chapter 7, ‘When Golden Time Convents: Shakespeare and the Shah’, builds a complex but interesting case for the relevance to Twelfth Night of the Essex rebellion and its failed pro-toleration project, which had involved the Sherley brothers’ mission to the Shah of Persia, a treasonous attempt to scupper the English government’s ‘pro-Turkish anti-Catholic strategy’ (p. 184). Of the last three chapters, two whole chapters are devoted to Measure for Measure and All’s Well, and are discussed in the relevant section in this review. In the epilogue, a portion of which appeared in 2011, Wilson argues that Shakespeare’s use of a plot by Robert Greene in The Winter’s Tale means that the dramatist is ‘welcoming enmity into his work’ (p. 25; see also p. 275), since ‘Greene’ had notoriously called Shakespeare a plagiarist at the start of his career (Wilson mentions recent attributions of this attack to Chettle rather than Greene on p. 289n.9). Thus, ‘Shakespeare’s rustics … exemplify their creator’s lifelong strategy of minimising his own “royalty”, in order to disarm professional enmity and convert antagonism into agonism’ (p. 285). Graham Holderness’s book on The Faith of William Shakespeare differs from Wilson’s both in its main placement of Shakespeare on the religious spectrum and in speaking to the general public rather more than to the specialist academic. The preface briefly explains that it is only recently that critics have started to address the question of Shakespeare’s religious beliefs, but in fact adherence to orthodoxy was not a matter of course among early modern English dramatists. As in many other respects, critics tend to project onto Shakespeare their own ways of being (an atheist Shakespeare suits that 25 per cent of the UK population who hold the same view—and academia probably hosts an overall higher percentage), though the view of a Catholic Shakespeare may appeal mostly because it implies rebelliousness rather than acquiescence in the status quo by the dramatist. By contrast, this book argues that ‘Shakespeare was, both as a believing individual and as a writer, a faithful Protestant’, but in a Church of England kind of Protestantism, which did not entirely reject the Catholic ‘model of personal piety’ (p. 14). The first two chapters are overviews for the general public. Chapter 1 provides a helpful account of the Reformation, though Holderness believes that Anabaptism ‘is now the normal model for all mainstream Christian churches in Western Europe’ (p. 24). Chapter 2 homes in on religion in Shakespeare’s life. Adopting the inevitable ‘circling’ approach, the chapter first looks at historical and social conditions and Shakespeare’s family connections, then discusses the respective evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholicism and Protestantism, acknowledging that he ‘was closely hemmed in by Catholicism’ (p. 47), but concluding that overall he lived and died a Protestant. The chapter then highlights Shakespeare’s ‘eclectic’ use of Bible texts from different confessions (p. 54) and his references to the Book of Common Prayer. Chapters 3–10 are on individual plays and are reviewed in the sections below. By taking ‘the play as the basic unit of religious thought and feeling’ (p. 57), Holderness concludes that ‘Shakespeare may have grown up in the shadow of recusant Catholicism, but he committed to the Church of England and, far from reverting to any childhood Catholicism at the end of his life, grew more Protestant as he grew older’ (p. 57). In reply to the question ‘What role did religion play in Shakespeare’s own personal life?’ (p. 216), the conclusion summarizes the discussions of individual plays from the previous chapters and describes Shakespeare’s progressive acceptance of the idea of an incomprehensible but just providence. Shakespeare and Consciousness, edited by Paul Budra and Clifford Werier, originates from a seminar held at the 2013 conference of the Shakespeare Association of America and is part of Palgrave’s Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance series. This volume modifies current cognitive approaches to Shakespeare by focusing on consciousness as something which is ‘always both problematic and obvious’ (p. 12). While the word itself did not exist in Shakespeare’s time, he ‘wrote on the cusp of the mind-body revolution’ and his characters are famous for their ‘apparent consciousness’ (p. 5). The eleven essays in this book that follow the first, introductory, chapter are divided across four sections: I, ‘Consciousness, Cognitive Science, and Character’; II, ‘Consciousness and Theatrical Practice’; III, ‘Consciousness and the Body’; IV, ‘Consciousness, Emotion, and Memory’. The first two essays (Part I, chapters 2 and 3) focus on the possibility of new theoretical approaches. Clifford Werier, ‘Consciousness and Cognition in Shakespeare and Beyond’ (pp. 19–42), reviews recent work on the use of the cognitive approach in literature, and concludes that consciousness provides a more suitable category than cognition, being less likely to steer the study of literature away from the metaphorical or ‘soft science’ field into an illusion of ‘hard scientific’ results. An equally disenchanted outlook defines Edward Pechter’s chapter on ‘Shakespeare Studies and Consciousness’ (pp. 43–77), which is based on a 2014 article (see YWES 95[2016] 421–2) and surveys the history of character criticism and its current comeback in light of its relationship with the cognitive turn. Confirming the importance of Hamlet as a symbol of consciousness, four articles in this volume focus on this play (Part I, chapter 4; Part II, chapters 6 and 7; Part III, chapter 10) and are discussed in Section 4(e), together with the two chapters on Antony and Cleopatra (Part II, chapter 8 and Part III, chapter 12). Two chapters are discussed below in Section 4(g) (Part II, chapter 5, on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Part IV, chapter 11, on The Merchant of Venice). In the remaining chapter, chapter 9, in Part III, Jan Purnis addresses ‘Bodies and Selves: Autoscopy, Out-of-Body Experiences, Mind-Wandering and Early Modern Consciousness’ (pp. 191–213). Purnis reviews several historical instances and modern critical analyses of these forms of ‘divisibility of consciousness’ (p. 10), and relates them to a number of Shakespeare’s plays by discussing the double self with reference to Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors, and Richard III, mirror ideas in Hamlet, and ecstasy (or being ‘beside oneself’) in a number of works, including The Winter’s Tale, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Merchant of Venice. The chapter concludes by linking the state of ‘Ecstasis’ with issues of attention and distraction in both the characters and the audience. In ‘Montaignian Moments: Shakespeare and the Essays’ (in Kenny, Scholar, and Williams, eds., Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean, pp. 239–52), Colin Burrow asks why so many critics believe that there is a direct relationship between certain passages in Shakespeare and Montaigne, but are not prepared to state this as an incontrovertible fact. One of the difficulties is, of course, that Montaigne is not a narrative source, and thus we do not have plot elements to guide us. There are some striking verbal parallels, not only, famously, with the Tempest, but also with King Lear, via Florio’s translation. However, it is the idea of specific thoughts constituting a source that many are reluctant to fully endorse. In reply to the objection that there was a general ‘Montaignian moment’ in English culture at the time, Burrow goes on to examine some precise such ‘moments’ that appear in Shakespeare’s works after 1600 (after a parenthesis in which he points out that the influence of this non-narrative source tends to come through in moments of stasis in the plays and affect what characters do next), specifically in Measure for Measure. In relation to both this play and King Lear Burrow concludes that Shakespeare ‘might be said to have Montaignianized his “narrative” sources’ (p. 249), thus ‘[c]reating a play which appeared to be as much an interconnected argument as a narrative’ (p. 250). Issue 152 of Shakespeare Jahrbuch is on heroes and heroines. It includes articles on specific plays (Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Troilus and Cressida, and two articles on performing Othello—as Verdi’s opera and as theatre in Germany in the light of the ‘blackfacing’ debate). Four articles have a more general import. Drawing especially on Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, but also on Troilus and Cressida, the history plays, Hamlet, and, more briefly, the comedies, Barbara Korte’s wide-ranging article, ‘Konzeptionen des Heroischen bei Shakespeare’ (ShJ 152[2016] 11–29), draws on research on the theme of the heroic, from Thomas Carlyle to the work of Jenni Calder, Eugene M. Waith, Reuben A. Brower, and others to show the continuing relevance to our day of Shakespeare’s ‘meta-heroic reflection’ (p. 29). The article’s three sections examine how Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines tend to deviate from the standard of ‘heroism’; the relationship between heroes and society; and the specificities of the cultural representation of heroes in early modern literature and through the theatrical medium. Andrew James Johnston, ‘Heroic Performance: The Multiple Temporalities of Shakespeare’s Robin Hoods’ (ShJ 152[2016] 60–72), discusses how heroes tend to be represented as a thing of the past as a way of reflecting on ‘issues of periodization and temporality’ (p. 62). This is illustrated with reference to the three instances in which Shakespeare engages with the figure of Robin Hood in As You Like It, the prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen, and, more indirectly, the prologue to Pericles, i.e. in the last two cases directly in relation to canonical medieval authors. In the process, Johnston argues in favour of the generally accepted emendation of the reading ‘holy days’ to ‘holy ales’ in Pericles not only because of the (OP) rhyme with ‘festivals’ but also in terms of contextualization. Richard Wilson, ‘The Sweet War-Man Is Dead and Rotten: Frances Yates and the Shakespearean Culture Hero’ (ShJ 152[2016] 104–25), traces the origins of Frances Yates’s pioneering cultural history reading of ‘Shakespearean theatre as a … multilayered mystery, in which a “silly play” might “have some secret bearing” on “a European sequence of very great politico-religious and artistic importance” ’ (p. 108) and links it back to her family’s involvement in the First World War. The article then focuses on Yates’s equally pioneering interpretation of Love’s Labour’s Lost from 1936, with the importance she assigned to the ‘brainy impudence’ (p. 111) of Moth and her equating of the School of Night’s atheists with Nazi materialism (a view she later modified). The article includes a discussion of Yates’s later views on Giordano Bruno’s role in relation to this play and John Bossy’s outright rejection of those views. Throughout the article, Wilson describes how current historical circumstances shaped Yates’s view of Shakespeare as her ‘culture hero’ (pp. 118, 122). In ‘Shakespeare, the Peacemaker: Views from the Sidelines’ (ShJ 152[2016] 126–41), Paul Franssen adduces examples from Britain, Holland, and Denmark in order to argue that in 1916 Shakespeare was not only appropriated (by the British and the Germans alike) as the nationalist author of Henry V, but also figured as a peace-making Prospero situated above all warring parties. As Franssen shows, the latter view applies especially to Gollancz’s 1916 Book of Homage to Shakespeare (whose current reissue we mentioned above). The chapter in Ronald Huebert’s Privacy in the Age of Shakespeare that is relevant to this section is on ‘Invasions of Privacy in Shakespeare’ (pp. 28–56). It forms a pair with the chapter on devotional practices, and together they illustrate the link between privacy and interiority (the other three pairs of chapters are on secrecy, ownership, and absence of official status). Huebert admits that the interiority meaning does not often apply to the word ‘private’ in Shakespeare, but, in contrast with new historicist assumptions to the contrary, sets out to show that privacy did matter in the eyes of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He does so by pointing out how Hamlet defends his private space against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, grants the audience a privileged view with his soliloquies, and, conversely, assaults Ophelia’s and Gertrude’s privacy and violently intrudes on Laertes’ mourning. His relationship with Claudius is all about their attempt to invade each other’s consciousness, while Horatio’s ‘neutrality’ is due to his status as an audience representative, a role that is ‘filled with an inwardness other than his own’ (p. 45). In Twelfth Night both Olivia and Malvolio at different stages in the play experience the cost of privacy, Maria has a private life offstage, Feste transcends privacy, and Fabian is, like Horatio, an audience representative. Close Reading without Readings: Essays on Shakespeare and Others contains seven new essays by Stephen Booth alongside five that were originally published between 1984 and 2010 (on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander) and his famous 1969 essay, ‘On the Value of Hamlet’, which rounds off the volume. Several new essays originated as conference papers and retain the genial tone used on those occasions. The book comes with a foreword by the director of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press that highlights Stephen Booth’s contribution to Shakespeare studies and describes his specific brand of criticism, and is therefore as much a tribute to Booth as a new offering by him. Apart from chapter 10, on ‘Prelapsarian Eroticism’ and Paradise Lost, most of the new chapters deal with individual works by Shakespeare. The exception is chapter 2, ‘The Acquiescent Audience’, which finds that throughout the canon Shakespeare seems to be trying out his ability to charm the audience into accepting the unlikely or unpalatable, resembling none of his characters so much as Richard III when wooing Lady Anne and then exulting in his victory ‘of rhetoric over circumstance’ (p. 15). In the final lines of the essay, Booth allows us to realize that he himself has been doing what he claims that Shakespeare did, a trick that, in terms of linguistic style, the ‘Publisher’s Foreword’ indicates as a Boothian constant. Booth’s sprezzatura and paradoxical style are another constant. As it turns out, chapter 2 provides an unofficial introduction to the other new Shakespearean essays in this book, which variously reprise its theme. In chapter 3, Booth sets out to discuss ‘remarkable, unremarked phenomena in Othello’, which, we are told a few lines down, ‘have probably all been noticed before’ (p. 23)—meaning that they are not remarked in the theatre and in editions. Which is fine as far as Booth is concerned because throughout this book he is ‘selling the idea that unobserved anomalies are of the essence of our experiences of the art we value most’ (p. 24). Chapter 4, ‘2 Henry IV and the Aesthetics of Failure’, discusses what makes the play ‘so variously and disturbingly unpleasant for its audience’ (p. 35). Chapter 5, ‘Faith in The Winter’s Tale and Faith in The Winter’s Tale’, highlights the play’s implausibilities. Chapter 8 tries to answer the question ‘What does Shakespeare do for his clients that makes him so special?’ (p. 83) through a close reading of the first stanza of Venus and Adonis, including Booth’s own ‘unfortunate verse paraphrase’ (p. 86). But why offer it then? Perhaps to show by contrast, as well as tell, the unassuming beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Finally, chapter 11 is a substantial, twenty-five-page essay on a thirty-seven-line scene in Romeo and Juliet—the marriage in Friar Laurence’s cell—that illustrates the effect achieved by ‘utterly recessive’ patterns that are ‘heard but not noticed’ by the audience or readers (p. 118). While this review has focused on the new chapters only, there is also a great deal of value in the previously published essays, as in the parallel reading of Twelfth Night and Othello around the theme of ‘evidence’. Another important collection consisting, in this case, entirely of previously published essays dating from 1963 to 2015 is Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare on Page and Stage. The selection was made by Wells himself, but the essays are reprinted here, with ‘no substantive revisions’ (p. v), under the editorship of Paul Edmondson. There are twenty-nine essays divided into four sections: ‘Shakespearian Influences’ (two essays); ‘Essays on Particular Works’ (thirteen essays on plays across the canon, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to the romances via Richard II and King Lear); ‘Shakespeare in the Theatre’ (eight essays); and ‘Shakespeare’s Text’ (six essays, the last two of which, from 1999 and 2010, the latter co-written with Edmondson, are on the First Folio and thus make an interesting counterpoint to Emma Smith’s work reviewed elsewhere in this issue of YWES). Peter Holland gives an overview of each essay in his introduction (pp. 1–8), and an ‘Afterword’ by Margreta de Grazia (pp. 449–52) highlights the appropriateness of the title, with attention to the plays both as drama and as text being a constant aspect of Wells’s criticism, unlike that of many of his predecessors. The cumulative index of names and plays is an additional helpful feature. In ‘ “Smoke like incense”: Sacrifice, Shakespeare and the Shoah’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 20–32) Richard Wilson revises his 1985 evaluation of Richard Marienstras’s Le Proche et le lointain (New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World) as a work of structuralist anthropology because of the critic’s insistence that literary criticism should highlight the connection between literature and the world of its readers. In the process, Wilson sets the current renewed attention towards Shakespeare’s royalism (which he links to Agamben’s discussion of the dialectics of the law and unrestrained aggression in the figure of the sovereign) against our persistent urge to read Shakespeare as ‘our contemporary’. Taking as its starting point David Margolies’s 2012 study of Shakespeare’s Irrational Endings, ‘ “The vile conclusion”: Crises of Resolution in Shakespeare’s Love Plots’, by Ben Wiebracht (Shakespeare 12[2016] 241–59), discusses the dynamics of plot and resolution as opposing forces that tend towards complication and simplification respectively. The article argues that romantic love in Shakespeare is characteristically allied with the former. It describes the different kinds of intervention deployed by the author in his comedies, tragedies, problem plays, and late plays: for instance, how in the tragedies the destructiveness of this passion is allowed to run its course, or how the problem plays feature a double ending, i.e. a ‘vile’, averted one and a happy resolution that is more like a near-miss. A substantial part of the article is devoted to the phrase ‘a proper man’, in particular as used by Desdemona in Othello. These proper men, as stressed at the end of the article, ‘are conspicuous … for having nothing to do with love at all’, which, in relation to this theme, is the main difference between Shakespeare’s theatre and the classical novel. Shakespeare 12:iv[2016] is a special issue that in some ways challenges traditional views of the relationship between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. James Loxley and Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning’s brief introduction is followed by four articles. In ‘Skeltonics: Jonson, Shakespeare, the Literary Past and Imagined Futures’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 338–50), an essay that seeks to reconcile historicist and presentist points of view, Lucy Munro focuses on the use of the Skeltonic form in King Lear, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, and The Fortunate Isles and their Union as a way to engage ‘with contemporary aesthetics and politics’ (p. 349; Munro does not address the question of the actual Shakespearean authorship of the third passage she discusses from King Lear, i.e. the Fool’s prophecy). Jakub Boguszak, ‘ “A thing studied and rehearsed”: Ben Jonson in Parts’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 351–63), looks for indications of actors’ parts in Ben Jonson’s plays (in contrast with the widespread tendency to view them mostly as literary constructs), and compares them with Shakespeare’s in the wake of Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern’s 2007 Shakespeare in Parts. Lee Morrissey’s historicist essay, ‘ “Obedience doth not well in parts”: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Atlantic Archipelago’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 364–74) discusses the way in which the Irish are represented in Henry V and The Irish Masque at Court, in the latter case with reference to James I’s Plantation of Ulster. In the final article, ‘ “Works, not Playes”: Print, Reformatory Theatre and the Privileging of Jonson over Shakespeare in 1640s and 1650s Britain’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 375–88), Christopher Orchard illustrates how in the 1640s and 1650s Ben Jonson was not viewed in ‘co-dependency’ with Shakespeare but rather achieved greater popularity because his work was potentially more attuned to royalist politics or the cultural attitudes of the time. By contrast, Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and its 1655 continuation by John Quarles ‘could be perceived as sympathetic to the ideological position of a republic that fashioned itself according to Roman principles’ (p. 383). Starting from ‘the precipitous transition Lear makes from the ordinary meaning of “nothing” to the language of philosophy’, Gerard Passannante, ‘Making “Anything of Anything” in the Age of Shakespeare’ (ELH 83[2016] 989–1008), asks: ‘Why, in Shakespeare’s plays, does this connection between making too much of too little (or “nothing”) and the language of ontology so often feel like second nature?’ (p. 989). Accordingly, Passannante describes the phrase quidlibet ex quolibet and the concept of wilful reading as found in the early modern imagination, and then explores their ability to shed light on the protagonists’ ‘habit of mind’ in King Lear and The Winter’s Tale. The uses of the concept in Montaigne and in theological controversy are particularly interesting, as is the fact that it is reflected in the titles of Shakespeare’s mature comedies (especially, in fact, in the one Passannante omits to mention: As You Like It). However, as the author shows, the implications of this epistemological tendency can be extremely serious, and it is in the tragedies and tragicomedies that its effect is especially felt, as Shakespeare shows us ‘how dangerous it can be when the “anything” of interpretation is converted into the “anything” of substance’ (p. 995). In Shakespeare’s Binding Language John Kerrigan analyses speech acts and legal utterances across the canon. The rich and extensive introduction (or chapter 1) sets out the main research questions with reference to Troilus and Cressida (for instance, how actually binding these utterances are); provides an overview of the use of such language in the plays; illustrates the ‘set of beliefs that people held about oaths, vows, bonds, and the rest between the 1530s and the 1660s’ (p. ix), including gender, status, and cultural differences; and reviews relevant secondary literature. The chapters are arranged in chronological order, with some overlap. Chapter 2 discusses ‘Early Revenge: 3 Henry VI to Titus Andronicus’, where ‘early’ also refers to the fact that these acts of revenge anticipate and act as ‘earnest’ of the main catastrophe. Shakespeare’s plays are compared both to Senecan antecedents and to plays by later contemporaries, especially Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (it is not absolutely clear why the chosen terms of comparison are contemporary with Hamlet, while there is much less focus on The Spanish Tragedy). This chapter includes a striking discussion of the mnemonic value of the pain inflicted in Titus Andronicus. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with Love’s Labour’s Lost, which is rightly given special attention in this book because of its focus on a broken collective vow (see Section 4(g) below). Chapter 5 again contains an extensive discussion of Titus Andronicus. It focuses on the bodily aspects of ‘Group Revenge’ oath, and how the pattern established in the earlier plays varies in Julius Caesar, Othello (‘Oath/hell/o’, p. 129) and Hamlet. This chapter also draws on The Rape of Lucrece and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and discusses the thematic link with the 1584 Bond of Association. Kerrigan shows how group oath scenes in fact tend to be omitted or somehow ‘voided’ (p. 142) in the more mature tragedies. The Merchant of Venice is also central to the theme of this book and is treated over chapters 6 (which it shares with The Comedy of Errors) and 7 (see Section 4(g) below). Chapter 8 looks at the trial by combat from 2 Henry VI to Hamlet as a ritual that is poised between divine vengeance and an opportunity for human revenge despite its main function being to provide supposed proof. This chapter includes a discussion of the ‘theologically loaded’ relationship between oaths and wagers (like Holderness, Kerrigan is concerned with the contrast between chance and Protestant providence in Hamlet) and, as helpfully summarized in the chapter abstract, of ‘Bracton, Holinshed, Segar, Saviolo, Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, Belleforest (as a source of Hamlet), and the anonymous play Edmund Ironside’. Chapter 9, on Henry V, is discussed in Section 4(d), and Chapters 10–12 in Section 4(b). Chapter 13 discusses ‘Benefits and Bonds’ in King Lear and Timon of Athens, two plays on ingratitude and exile in which Shakespeare is ‘thinking about how societies can function without Christian values’ (p. 337), and in which oaths tend to morph into curses. The chapter draws on Plutarch (his discussion of usury in the Moralia being presented as an additional source), Seneca’s De Beneficiis, and, for Timon, on Montaigne. There are also brief discussions of Derrida and Marcel Mauss. The next two chapters deal with the issue of the Reformation. Chapter 14, on King John in Bale and Shakespeare, is reviewed with the histories below. Chapter 15, ‘Reformation II’, looks at the ‘Tudor ideology of obedience’ as embodied in personal vows and state-imposed oaths in Sir Thomas More and Henry VIII. The chapter includes a discussion of the Jesuit Latin play Thomas Morus, which was contemporary with Henry VIII, in order to describe the shift in the representation of the Henrician period after the Gunpowder Plot and the Oath of Allegiance. The sympathetic treatment of Catherine of Aragon notwithstanding, Kerrigan finds that Henry VIII displays an essentially Protestant attitude, which, like the play itself, climaxes in the scene of the baptism of Elizabeth. Chapter 16 looks at the dilemma of fides (or keeping one’s oath) in Coriolanus. It examines such sources as Plutarch’s Lives, Cicero, Livy, and Ulpian, and discusses Stanley Fish’s definition of Coriolanus as ‘a speech-act play’ in the light of the paradox ‘that it can be right not to keep a promise’ (p. 422). Several illuminating points are made, like the fact that ‘voting’ is etymologically linked to vows, or relating the ‘Cor’ in the protagonist’s name to mentions of his excessively outspoken ‘heart’, which is a form of being true to oneself. With reference to Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, the final chapter examines how the virtues needed in counselling princes relate to those that apply to oaths and vows, with betrothal and marriage vows being the most prominent form of the latter in the late romances, including Cardenio. Again Kerrigan mentions several contemporary documents and authors, such as the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses, and authors Cornwallis, Bacon, Goslicki, and Lipsius. A particularly interesting concept explored in this chapter is ‘the post-1606 substitution of saying for swearing’ (p. 459) and its gender implications. The epilogue mentions Prospero’s farewell-to-magic speech as a symptomatic moment of resolution. It rounds up the works, like the sonnets, that have not been discussed fully within the volume, and indicates that the same kind of investigation of binding language could be usefully applied to the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Kerrigan’s investigation brings to mind the specifically historical implications of the idea of ‘faith’, especially with the recurring mention of whether one is bound to keep an unjust oath, a dilemma that was directly faced by people of a different religious faith from the dominant one in their country. Gary Watt’s study of Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance focuses on the late Elizabethan plays. In Watt’s opinion, ‘all theatrical drama is in a deep sense testamentary’; however, it is in Shakespeare’s plays written between c.1595 and 1603 that ‘the themes and language of testament, inheritance and succession’ are prevalent (p. 3), probably because of the urgency of the problem of royal succession in this period. This is also the period in which both Shakespeare’s son and his father died. Watt finds a deep analogy between performance in a theatrical sense and the ‘operative words’ used in legal documents, which are indeed ‘performative utterances’, Austin’s theory having originated from legal language. Accordingly, this study ‘aims to appreciate the practices by which will is expressed in the form of words, and specifically to appreciate how words produce physical forms in the mind and how the materiality of the playhouse contributes to this process’ (p. 6). A recurrent point is that Shakespeare shows an awareness of ‘the dramatic power inherent in testamentary wills’ (p. 11). Particularly dramatic instances of this occur when ‘stubborn will’ can avail itself of royal, legal, or marital authority. Another interesting concept at the basis of this study is how ancient Roman testamentary practices originally involved public performance (see pp. 12–14). The importance of this subject for the early modern period in general is highlighted by the fact that the 1540 Statute of Wills enacted a shift from the feudal succession scheme to individual will (an aspect of the more general transition from feudal obligation to modern freedom), and Watt draws a parallel between this and the way in which Elizabeth had succeeded to the throne. These questions are explored in the subsequent five chapters with reference to individual plays. Chapter 2 examines the conflict between royal succession and succession by will in Richard II and King John. Chapter 3 discusses As You Like It, ‘Shakespeare’s most obviously testamentary play’ and, according to Juliet Dusinberre, ‘the most dynastic’ (p. 75), and The Merchant of Venice. Chapter 4 is on ‘rhetorical stasis and moving will’ in Julius Caesar, and brings up questions of will and fate, as it links Brutus’s faction with the Puritans and points out Antony’s Catholic-like hagiographical treatment of Caesar, though from a rhetorical point of view both orators seem to have appropriated the ‘wrong’ style. Chapter 5 reads Hamlet as a legal hearing, with the audience sitting in judgement on whether and to what extent Hamlet is free to act according to his own will. Watt’s concluding chapter focuses on on-stage accounts of materials being handled as ‘evidentiary narrative’ through which Shakespeare engages ‘the sympathy of playgoing witnesses’ (p. 204), and concludes with a discussion of Shakespeare’s own will and testament. Overall, as Watt reminds us in his Hamlet chapter, ‘Even when Shakespeare uses legal terminology [as in the interesting parallels with Henry Swinburne’s 1590 Treatise of Testaments and Wills], we have to guard against the assumption that he is making a technical point about law. It is often the case that his “point” is to exploit the textures of legal language and to show his appreciation for lawyers as fellow practitioners in arts of wordplay and rhetoric’ (p. 181). This is an enlightening study, which, appropriately, weighs its claims very carefully. We conclude this section with two very different dictionaries. With its brightly illustrated dustjacket and modest price for a book this size, David Crystal’s Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation is obviously aimed at the general reader as well as the specialist. The book took over ten years to write, and its results were applied in the theatre, not least by Ben Crystal’s Passion in Practice Shakespeare Ensemble. The study is based on a First Folio text with the addition of the other works in the canon, including the poems. It includes characters’ names alongside lexical items. The extensive introduction, Part I of the book, describes it as an ‘artistic-scientific endeavour’. It explains that about half the vowel sounds have changed between OP (original pronunciation) and modern pronunciation, while consonants and stress patterns mostly remain the same. There is not always incontrovertible evidence, and the book aims to present recommendations that are ‘usable and effective’ in the theatre, rather than absolutely authentic reconstructions (p. ix). The evidence used is described on pages xx–xxv and includes rhymes and puns. This is followed by an important section on the uses of original pronunciation, such as allowing us to appreciate wordplay and ‘phonaesthetic effects’ (p. xxvii). After a discussion of the ‘history of OP studies’, the introduction concludes with a section on ‘Transcription’ (pp. xl–xlix), which explains the reasons why, in contrast to Crystal’s previous works, the entries in this dictionary use ‘a broad phonetic transcription’, and includes two diagrams and six pages of descriptions of the sounds corresponding to the IPA symbols. Each copy of the book comes with a unique code that gives access to online sound files. Part II consists in the dictionary proper. Besides phonetic transcriptions, word entries list spelling variations and, where applicable, rhymes. Superscript numbers indicate frequency in the First Folio. Line references to individual works are given in the case of idiosyncratic pronunciations. The entries are clearly set out and easy to read, though a preliminary look over the introduction is required in order to work out the listing conventions. Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin’s Shakespeare’s Insults: A Pragmatic Dictionary, part of the Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries series, came out some nine months before Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, so the novelist would not have been able to use it when writing about her inmate characters who are only allowed to swear using terms of abuse from The Tempest (Atwood’s title itself heads the H section in the dictionary). In her preface, Vienne-Guerrin points out that Shakespeare’s insults have a ‘marketable’ value as well as educational currency. There are also ‘invisible’ insults, as when Oswald calls Lear ‘My lady’s father’, i.e. not his king. This is a ‘pragmatic’ dictionary because it explains the use of an insult in its context, both within and outside the work in which it appears. See, for instance, how the longest entry, that on ‘ass’, refers to contemporary dictionaries and plays, and elucidates a passage in King John with reference to the Aesopian tale of ‘The ass in the lion’s skin’. This is a substantial work, featuring 431 entries over 456 pages. Some of the entries offer an interpretation of the data. For instance, under ‘Amaimon’ Vienne-Guerrin remarks that Master Ford’s list of insults in Merry Wives II.ii ‘gives Shakespeare the opportunity to offer a metalinguistic reflection on insults by suggesting that there are various degrees of insult and that “devil” additions are less abusive, because nobler, than sexual accusations’ (p. 10). Shakespeare—or Master Ford? Vienne-Guerrin here temporarily forgets that a doll and its maker are never identical. Useful features include a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, an index of Shakespeare’s characters and a work-by-work list. The latter reveals that the Falstaff plays, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and The Merry Wives of Windsor outstrip all the others—except, in the case of the latter, King Lear—in the number of abuse words they contain. Character names used as insults include ‘Benedick’ and, of course ‘Pandar’ (Cressida imagining for her own name the fate that would in fact befall her uncle’s), though not those of the obvious villains: no ‘Iago’ or ‘Macbeth’, and ‘Richard’ refers to Richard II. Intriguing entries include ‘Banbury cheese’, the Italian ‘Cornuto’ alongside its English equivalent, ‘Cuckold’ (all in Merry Wives), and ‘football player’ (in King Lear). (b) Problem Plays This year’s scholarship on the problem plays has been particularly generous, with one book wholly focused on Troilus and Cressida, and numerous studies that have explored the plays from different critical perspectives. At the outset, it may be important to stress that there is less and less consensus over the conventional usefulness of the ‘problem play’ label. For various reasons concerning old and new questions of dating, genre, and authorship, most of the following books and articles do not analyse Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well together, as a group. Before turning to the criticism on the individual plays, it is appropriate to begin with two books which have chapters devoted to at least some of them. While not devoted solely to the problem plays, all three figure prominently in John Kerrigan’s insightful book, Shakespeare’s Binding Language. Indeed, the introduction begins with a discussion of Troilus and Cressida V.ii. The questions arising from this scene prompted Kerrigan’s interest in Shakespeare’s dramatization of vows and oaths. In chapter 10, he discusses oaths and inconstancy in Troilus and Cressida. He notices that ‘The emphasis on “Words, vows, gifts” sets Shakespeare’s play apart from earlier, extant versions of the story’ (p. 269). Troilus’s character is examined from the point of view of how he reacts to a particular form of neo-Stoicism which ‘shapes, or at least rationalizes, a defensive, unhealthy desire to be proven in his constancy and to see Cressida put to the test’ (p. 259). Kerrigan painstakingly analyses the multiple facets of early modern definitions of interrelated terms such as ‘plight’ and ‘troth’, and makes us read Troilus’s and Cressida’s protestations and actions in this new perspective. Moreover, the scholar has a keen eye for the performative dimension and writes with insight on the actors’ proxemic and rhetorical options, for example in the case of Cressida giving Diomed Troilus’s sleeve (p. 276). Chapter 11 analyses binding language in Measure for Measure. Kerrigan’s method, joining speech-act theory with an immersion in the historical context of the play, is particularly convincing. He takes the reader from observing that ‘the higher the speech act, the harder, more dramatic its fall’ (p. 291) to considerations such as the following: ‘the status of confession as a scene of binding and loosing was topical in 1604 because of controversy at the Hampton Court conference about the survival of pre-Reformation wording about absolution in the Book of Common Prayer’ (p. 293). The next chapter innovatively discusses Macbeth side by side with All’s Well That Ends Well. The later dating of the latter invites such an analysis and proves fruitful. Kerrigan begins his examination with an original angle: he suggests that Middleton’s The Witch was influenced both by Macbeth (which is agreed) and All’s Well (which had never been suggested). All three plays make much of the polysemy of words such as knot, charm, and plot in magical as well as legalistic language. The Gunpowder Plot and previous conspiracies are important contextual references: ‘All’s Well owes much to this moment’ (p. 317). Kerrigan discusses what he terms ‘an early Jacobean crisis in oath-taking’ (p. 313): indeed, the reaction to the Gunpowder Plot triggered a ‘war of oaths’ (p. 324). While the recusants’ equivocating practices have long been recognized to be thematized in Macbeth, Kerrigan notes that there are echoes also in All’s Well: he suggests that in this play there are examples of ‘Macbeth-speak. The last act … is shot through with references to the Divine, the demonic, and the blasphemous, and the spiritual perils of oath-breaking’ (p. 329). Kerrigan’s learned arguments are always conveyed in perspicuous language. Richard Wilson’s Worldly Shakespeare addresses relevant contemporary questions concerning religious tolerance and globalization. Although all three plays are examined, two whole chapters are devoted to Measure for Measure and All’s Well. As for the former (‘As Mice by Lions: Political Theology and Measure for Measure’, pp. 224–46), Wilson tackles the new interrogatives arising from Middleton’s revisions to the play: the chapter ‘is concerned with how the evidence for its co-authorship adds yet another level to the mise en abyme that is Measure for Measure’ (p. 224). His argument takes a while to develop, but the second half of the chapter is rewarding. Wilson argues that ‘The textual disintegration of Measure for Measure is fatal to the myth of Shakespeare as a mystic royalist’ and scathingly criticizes Debora Shuger’s views: ‘the theocratic Shakespeare of 1604 is exploded by the evidence that the Measure for Measure we possess was actually finished by an altogether different writer, in 1621’ (p. 237). At the same time, Wilson disagrees (rightly) with some critics’ ‘construction of a more “modern Middleton”, who “took the part of the people” ’ (p. 239), showing the royalist and elitarian elements of Middleton’s oeuvre. In the chapter devoted to All’s Well (‘Incensing Relics: All’s Well That Ends Well in Shakespeare’s Spain’, pp. 247–70), Wilson turns his attention to how Catholicism is negotiated in the play and, in particular, the subject of Helen’s mysterious stratagem of pretending to be a pilgrim headed to St Jacques’s shrine, generally understood as Santiago de Compostela. ‘[I]t is possible that with All’s Well That Ends Well Shakespeare turned to the name of Santiago … for a true catharsis, in a therapeutic scenario that casts his exiled heroine in the role of pharmakos, and locates in the toxic site of an outlawed religion a model for his own agonistic theatre’ (p. 247). This chapter contains a plethora of interesting little-known facts and anecdotes on English pilgrims, and the contested worship of holy wells. However, Wilson’s arguments seem here slightly far-fetched, for example when Helen’s ability ‘to araise King Pepin’ (II.i.74) is connected with King Pepin and Charlemagne being ‘splashed [sic]’ by the Pope ‘with the holy chrism’ (p. 251), or that ‘it is in the spirit of Grotto Day [i.e. St James’s day] that Lafew throws pennies to Paroles’ (p. 257). As stated in the premise, this year has seen the publication of a book entirely devoted to the relations between Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Andrew James Johnston, Russell West-Palov, and Elisabeth Kempf, the editors of Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida, fulfil their aim to think about these relations in alternative ways to new historicist paradigms. On the one hand, they interrogate the dynamics of intertextual synchronicity, while on the other hand, and more successfully, they focus on textual ‘affective valencies’ which influence narrative: ‘each reading of affect, driven itself by a new configuration of affect, rereads and rewrites … earlier accounts of affect’ (p. 5). This book is also notable in trying to go beyond the medieval/early modern divide that still marks university departments as well as scholarship. On the whole, this book is an essential contribution to the field and is most likely to remain so. Kai Wiegandt’s chapter, ‘ “Expectation whirls me round”: Hope, Fear and Time in Troilus and Cressida’, focuses on temporality in Shakespeare’s play. While previous scholars have found it difficult to relate to these characters, Wiegandt intriguingly exposes how Shakespeare deploys ‘a triangle of narrative, emotion, and temporality’, which has a dual function: firstly, to make these characters interesting, and secondly, ‘to interrogate its [i.e. the play’s] own position in literary history’ (p. 17). Andreas Mahler’s ‘ “Potent raisings”: Performing Passion in Chaucer and Shakespeare’ also takes as its focus emotions in the two texts, but with a very different angle. He does not feel moved by Troilus and Cressida’s plight and considers Shakespeare’s play only as a typical, ‘highly allusive satirical Inns of Court play’ (p. 33)—referring of course to William Elton’s 2000 monograph Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels. For Mahler, Shakespeare’s play can aspire simply to represent ‘a happy-go-lucky, if not carnivalesque, juxtaposition of all the different erotic discourses circulating at the time’ (p. 39). Paul Strohm, in his essay ‘The Space of Desire in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Troy’, examines the representation of the ancient city which is ‘shadowed and abetted by each poet’s (and each audience’s) experience of London’ (p. 46). Hester Lees-Jeffries, ‘What’s Hecuba to Him? Absence, Silence and Lament in Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida’, wonders why Hecuba has such a ghostly significance in Shakespeare’s play, and argues that ‘Hecuba is a potent absent presence’ (p. 61), one that has important impact on the representation of Cressida. Next, Russell West-Pavlov, ‘Remembering to Forget in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: Narrative Palimpsests and Moribund Epochalities’, addresses the question of time in the play as paradoxical, and argues that the play’s narrative exposes ‘a perhaps perennial sense of crisis’ (p. 76) inherent in chivalric values, ‘which may, paradoxically, be part of its temporal structure’ (p. 77). While Stephanie Trigg, ‘ “Language in her eye”: The Expressive Face of Criseyde/Cressida’, focuses on prosopopeia techniques in Chaucer’s work, John Drakakis, ‘The Presence of Troilus and Cressida: Shakespeare’s Refurbishment of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, gives a highly valuable reading of the play in terms of genre, gender, and its relationship with Chaucer’s work: in the play, what is a stake is ‘a question of identity, of the female subjectivity that is both the cause of war and the irruptive force that sustains it’ (p. 111). This happens because the spectator can see Time at work: ‘In a sense, Time is the villain of this piece, and it performs the role which, say, Iago primarily has in Othello, of reducing spiritual values to a merely worldly status’ (p. 112). Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, ‘ “Stewed phrase” and the Impassioned Imagination in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’, wonders why so many readers and spectators find this play unpleasant and yet interesting. She argues, rather cryptically, that the answer lies in the attitude towards received knowledge displayed by the main characters: ‘the unpleasantness … does not arise from a sense that the characters are somehow ill-equipped to cope with their lives. On the contrary, in general they appear too smart for their own good’ (p. 137). The next chapter, Wolfram R. Keller’s ‘Arrogant Authorial Performances: Criseyde to Cressida’, offers an interesting reading on the values associated with arrogance in early modern drama, and in Shakespeare’s play in particular. According to Keller, while haughtiness was problematic during the Middle Ages, as it was associated with the sin of pride, Chaucer first, and then Shakespeare, ‘utilize[d] arrogance in their Troy stories to test notions of “counter-authorship” by means of poet-playwright characters who self-consciously, albeit obliquely stage their own literary-historical predicaments’ (p. 142). The next chapter, David Wallace’s ‘Changing Emotions in Troilus: The Crucial Year’, is both ambitious and very entertaining. Wallace claims that ‘The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga is a perfect vehicle for tracing the history of the emotions, in that it offers an unparalleled darkening of mood over time’ (p. 156). Wallace reads Shakespeare’s engagement with Chaucer almost on Bloomian lines: he notes ‘authorial animus at work in this play’ (p. 158). Wallace’s explanation for this operation lies in the year 1532, when William Thynne published Chaucer’s complete works ‘including Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid immediately after Troilus and Cressida’. For almost all following readers, Chaucer wrote both texts, and Wallace, disagreeing with E. Talbot Donaldson’s authority (p. 167), argues that this must have influenced Shakespeare. The book closes with James Simpson’s chapter, ‘ “The formless ruin of oblivion”: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Literary Defacement’, which, like Wallace’s, tries to come to terms with Shakespeare’s strong alterations to Chaucer’s poem. Not only does Simpson see Shakespeare doing violence to Chaucer, but he also recontextualizes these authorial oppositions, stating that the traditions of the Trojan matter had always been ‘for the most part intensely hostile to each other’: ‘Virgil competes with Homer; Ovid is hostile to Virgil; Dares and Dictys are hostile to Homer and Virgil’, etc. (p. 190). However, hostility is perhaps a too simplistic framework by which to understand these intertextual links. Andrew Hiscock’s essay, ‘ “Will you walk in, my lord?”: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Anxiety of Oikos’ (in Goldstein and Lupton, eds., pp. 17–38), explores the theme of hospitality and its breaches in Shakespeare’s play, which, according to him, ‘unveils a human environment deeply exercised by excessive appetites for control and subjugation—for the righting of past wrongs, the claiming of territories and bodies—and thus one wholly unfitted for the enacting of the sacred rites of hospitality’ (p. 21). Hiscock notes that Troilus and Cressida ‘focuses most particularly upon the figures of the resisting host, the unruly guest and the violation of sacred obligations’ (p. 19). In her article, ‘ “Tis but the Chance of War”: Fortune and Opportunity in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’ (EIRC 42[2016] 28–58), Marina Ansaldo notes that the play’s devaluation of honour and chivalry is deeply linked with ‘the iconography of Fortune, especially in her guise as Occasio or Opportunity [which] is pervasive in Troilus and Cressida’ (p. 29). Ansaldo discusses key moments in the play, such as Agamemnon’s speech on Fortune in Act III, and also, more interestingly, the relationship between Fortune and each of the main characters. Douglas Arrell’s article, ‘Heywood, Shakespeare, and the Mystery of Troye’ (EMLS 19:i[2016]), deals only tangentially with Troilus and Cressida, but his findings could be very important for studies on this play’s sources. Arrell proves that the no longer extant Troye was expanded into Heywood’s Iron Age plays and that Shakespeare was probably inspired by it. The much-studied dynamics between outside and inside in Troilus and Cressida is given a new angle in Daniel M. Murtaugh’s article, ‘Troilus and Cressida in the Light of Day: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer’ (English 65[2016] 191–210). Murtaugh argues that, in Shakespeare’s play, ‘Nothing that exists can be secret from the omniscient state, and a corollary drawn from this has already been put forward by Ulysses in his earlier argument that Achilles must return to battle: what is truly secret, kept to oneself, does not exist’ (p. 205). Jennifer Ann Bates’s ‘Absolute Knowing: Consternation and Preservation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’ (Angelaki 26:iii[2016] 65–82) is one of this year’s few studies not to use a new historicist or philological approach. She sets side by side Troilus and Cressida and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit because, she writes, both ‘are tragicomic consternations. They are theatres of ethical panentheism [presenting] dramatic “absolute” ethical interpretations and actions, each of which is at once ungrounded and completely seeded’ (p. 65). Bates’s focus is wide-ranging, though couched in technical terminology. It is fitting to end the review of studies devoted to Troilus and Cressida with Anna Kamaralli’s engaging chapter, ‘Putting On the Destined Livery: Isabella, Cressida, and our Virgin/Whore Obsession’ (in Callaghan, ed., A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, pp. 395–410), because it provides a bridge to the next section concerning the scholarship on Measure for Measure. Kamaralli compares what has been written on Isabella and Cressida: these seemingly very different characters ‘encapsulate all the major difficulties with attitudes to female sexuality in Shakespeare’s time and in ours’ (p. 395). Importantly, she suggests future critical perspectives on Isabella and Cressida: ‘Possibly the next step we are waiting for is a shift from treating them as pure victim to acknowledging the intellectual and verbal power that Shakespeare grants them’ (p. 398). Shakespeare and Judgment, edited by Kevin Curran, contains three chapters on Measure for Measure, which should indeed be read together, as they deal with the same issues in the play but examine them from different angles and, especially, come to different interpretations. Far from being problematic, this multiplicity of views testifies to the complexity and divisiveness of Shakespeare’s play. As the title of Virginia Lee Strain’s essay reads, ‘Preventive Justice in Measure for Measure’ (pp. 21–44), the focus here is on the operational ethics brought about by preventive justice, a field that has received much scanter attention than punitive justice. The scholar argues that the play characterizes Escalus and Angelo as Justices of the Peace (p. 33), and, since ‘In early modern England, maintaining social order [was] … considered a more effective and just strategy than punishing’ (p. 21), Angelo fails not because of the legal system’s corruption, but because of his warped discretion as a JP. Vincentio’s pardoning of Barnardine is very interestingly interpreted as follows: ‘Far from representing a disappointing return to the lax state of the law at the opening of the play, the Duke’s improvised resolution re-imagines and enormously expands the potential content of the life of the Viennese law’ (p. 29). Paul Yachnin, ‘The Laws of Measure for Measure’ (pp. 139–56), provides a valuable articulation of three genres of law, which he finds in this play and in Shakespeare’s work in general: ‘the law of sovereign will’; ‘the law of kind’; ‘the law of judgment’. While these generalizations may be too broad for Shakespeare in general, they are very useful in the case of Measure for Measure. In the context of a nascent public sphere, ‘the orientation of the comedy, perhaps to a degree greater than in any other Shakespeare play, is toward the cultivation of the law of judgment’, i.e. a genre that is ‘of a piece with active, collective public life, action, and discourse’ (p. 148). This can very profitably be complemented by Carolyn Sale’s contribution to the book, ‘ “Practis[ing] judgment with the disposition of natures”: Measure for Measure, the “Discoursive” Common Law, and the “Open Court” of the Theatre’ (pp. 115–38). Sale agrees that the conclusion of the play serves as an ‘occasion for audiences to experience their own “discoursive” potential not simply to participate in practices of judgment at common law, but to comprehend themselves in their aggregate as the common law’s makers’ (p. 117). This argument would gain in persuasiveness if Vincentio actually proved to ‘stan[d] not for law, but, from the common law’s perspective, lawlessness’ (p. 123), which perhaps remains controversial, considering the explosiveness of such issues at the time of the play’s staging. Mention should also be made of a further chapter, John Parker’s ‘Antinomian Shakespeare: English Drama and Confession across the Reformation Divide’ (pp. 175–94), which uses Measure for Measure as its departing point for a discussion of the staging of auricular confession in early modern drama. Religion has been the most frequently investigated topic in this year’s scholarship on Measure for Measure. Brian Walsh’s chapter, ‘ “O just but severe law!”: Weighing Puritanism in Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure’ in his book Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage (pp. 86–128), investigates the representation of Angelo as a Puritan, comparing Shakespeare’s treatment of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. The question of Puritanism in Measure for Measure has long been the subject of scholarly debate, but Walsh’s argument is particularly illuminating. ‘In Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure, [Shakespeare] is not interested in showing how the mutual wariness of the Puritan and the non-Puritan might resolve in varieties of toleration, accommodation, and coexistence. Rather, he is interested in heightening the tension and maintaining, through to and beyond the plays’ endings, suspense over whether any form of coexistence is even possible’ (p. 86). Brian Walsh’s chapter can be fruitfully read together with Graham Holderness’s essay, ‘ “A pattern in himself”: Measure for Measure’ (in Holderness’s monograph The Faith of William Shakespeare, pp. 113–36). Holderness’s chapter can serve as a good general introduction to the thematization of religion in the play. It is interesting to see how he discusses the theme of penitence. Drawing our attention to the fact that the Catholic method ‘relies on auricular confession, private absolution, and personal penance’, Holderness shows that Measure for Measure seems to follow a Protestant approach: ‘the play is brought to its comedic resolution … by public humiliation and general absolution’ (p. 134). Simon Palfrey and Emma Smith’s lushly illustrated book on mortality in Shakespeare’s works, Shakespeare’s Dead, devotes a whole chapter to Measure for Measure (‘Measure for Measure: The Art of Dying’, pp. 23–42) because this tragicomedy ‘Of all Shakespeare’s plays [is the one] which is most engaged with the art of dying, and which has the most sustained imaginings of being dead’ (p. 23). The authors make a case that ‘the play is always implying a world beyond the grave, and trying to peep into the world’s secrets’ (p. 24), but they rightly complicate this transcendental perspective. Also concerning the nexus between religion and politics, Andrew Moore’s thesis in his chapter ‘Faith, Morality, and Contractual Politics: The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure’ (in his monograph Shakespeare Between Hobbes and Machiavelli: Dead Body Politics, pp. 101–24) is that, in these plays, ‘Shakespeare exposes a tension between religion and materialist politics’ (p. 102). Moore seems to suggest the same argument as that proposed by Brian Walsh, but he then chooses a different angle, succeeding in showing how Shakespeare, to a certain extent, seems to anticipate Hobbes. In his article ‘Bent Speech and Borrowed Selves: Substitutionary Logic and Intercessory Acts in Measure for Measure’ (JMEMS 42[2016] 405–32), Devin Byker starts his analysis by quoting Alexander Leggatt’s interpretation of the logic of exchange in the play, but explores it by introducing the notion of intercession. Byker insightfully joins the intercessory logic of verbal utterances (building on Stanley Cavell) with a historicization of intercession in early modern religious discourses. This analysis is accessible and, refreshingly, knows how to link form with content. Viola Timm, ‘A Modern Classic: The Cute and the Uncanny in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure’ (JEMCS 16:iii[2016] 60–78), claims that ‘This late work of Shakespeare’s prefigures the modern aesthetics of mass technology’ (p. 61). Readers unfamiliar with Donald Winnicott’s studies and the contemporary philosophical articulation of the concept of the cute will find Timm’s article difficult. Timm’s use of technical jargon finds a strange juxtaposition with impassioned arguments such as the following: ‘Shakespeare would hardly be the masterful dramaturge of the human subject, whose good counsel we have learned to value over the centuries, if he did not show the magical workings of his art in the plain view he affords of the psychological reality of the cute and the uncanny’ (p. 67). Nathalie Rivère de Carles’s chapter, ‘The Ambassador as Proteus: Indirect Characterization and Diplomatic Appeasement in Catiline and Measure for Measure’ (pp. in De Carles, ed., Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power, pp. 113–38), studies the dramatization of the ambassador’s role in early modern culture, seeing it not simply as that of a political mediator but also as that of a ‘negotiator between theatrical genres’ (p. 114). De Carles acknowledges that, in Measure for Measure, ‘Shakespeare does not name his characters “ambassadors” but instead superimposes on them certain features belonging to ambassadors’ (p. 115). While this chapter provides several interesting insights, it must be said that its language frequently tends to be cryptic (e.g. ‘Vincentio’s endogenous diplomacy of the fringes’, p. 129), and would need clarification. This year’s scholarship also includes a note by Matthew Steggle, ‘Two Emendations to Measure for Measure’ (N&Q 63[2016] 425–7). Thanks to searches using EEBO-TPC, he shows that II.iv.76 should read ‘Let be ignorant and in nothing good’, instead of the usual ‘Let me be ignorant’ (as found in F2): very probably, ‘what was originally written “let’ be” has lost its apostrophe in transmission’ (p. 425). The other emendation refers to IV.i.54, when Mariana says: ‘Good Frier, I know you do, and haue found it’. The line is unmetrical and Steggle proposes this emendation: ‘and so haue found it’, a collocation which has ‘six occurrences’ (p. 426) in EEBO-TPC. This year’s scholarship on All’s Well is transitional because in 2017 very important studies are scheduled to appear which will challenge the ways in which we have thought of the play’s authorship and dating. This year, however, has seen the publication of Rory Loughnane’s essay, ‘The Virginity Dialogue in All’s Well That Ends Well: Feminism, Editing, and Adaptation’ (in Callaghan, ed., pp. 411–27), which introduces us to such new investigations. Instead of a co-authorship scenario, it seems that ‘Middleton contributed “new additions” to Shakespeare’s original play’ (p. 412). Among these additions, the virginity dialogue (I.i) stands out. Loughnane’s aim is to ‘consider whether or not the Shakespearean text, irrecoverable though it may be, suggested a different reading of Helen’s character’ (p. 413). Loughnane argues that Middleton, instead of altering, ‘complement[ed]’ Shakespeare’s Helen (p. 424). These new perspectives given by Rory Loughnane and the other forthcoming studies clearly make essays working on more traditional intertextual research problematic. For instance, Lewis Walker’s article, ‘The Wife of Bath and All’s Well That Ends Well’ (RenP [2015] 51–68) aims to prove that the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales influenced Shakespeare when he wrote All’s Well. However, if Middleton did indeed write the virginity dialogue, as Rory Loughnane suggests, then Walker’s argument risks being invalidated when he argues: ‘Of all the personas the Wife exhibits, one that is perhaps most immediately relevant to All’s Well is the [one] that preaches against virginity’ (p. 56). In ‘Bad Faith in All’s Well That Ends Well’ (PalCom 2[2016]), Andrew Hadfield casts light on original aspects of All’s Well with clarity and persuasiveness. ‘[E]ven if All’s Well is left with its original date of 1604–1605’, it should be read together with King Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus as a ‘cluster’ that could be called ‘Gunpowder Plot plays’ (p. 2). Hadfield refers to John Kerrigan’s book, and concludes that All’s Well ‘dramatizes the reality of life for many Catholics living in Jacobean England around the time of the Gunpowder Plot’ (p. 6). From the perspective of gender studies, Wendy Wall’s essay, ‘All’s Well That Ends Well and Recipe Cultures of Knowledge’ (in Traub, ed, pp. 131–54), very intriguingly notes that Shakespeare departed from his source, William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure, in dealing with the cure of the king’s disease: ‘Rather than learning her craft empirically by watching her father work, Helena manipulates a pointedly literate form of knowledge, one that English people offstage were avidly publishing, writing, exchanging, editing, and using’ (p. 132). In contrast with much previous scholarship, Wall remarks that, since ‘Helena is not sexually stigmatized for healing the king … the play is relatively unanxious about the pleasure produced from a female knowledge-practice’ (p. 137). In his note, ‘ “Some sport with the fox”: The Later Dating of All’s Well That Ends Well in Relation to Jonson’s Volpone” (N&Q 63[2016] 427–31), Emanuel Stelzer states that ‘there are affinities in tone and subject matter between Ben Jonson’s Volpone and All’s Well which become especially evident in, respectively, III.vii (Corvino offering Celia to Volpone) and II.i (Helena’s arrival at the French court)’ (p. 428). Stelzer considers that a terminal date of early 1606 would mean that Shakespeare’s scenes ‘would then be reminiscent of Volpone’ (p. 430), rather than vice versa. Eric Hyman’s article, ‘Maudlin in William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well’ (Expl 74[2016] 210–12), tries to explain why Shakespeare introduced the evanescent character of Maudlin in his play. Hyman suggests that Shakespeare chose this name because Mary Magdalene ‘was an important saint for France’, but, more controversially, adds that, since apocryphal legends saw Mary Magdalene marry Jesus or St John, Shakespeare inserted a second wedding using Maudlin’s presence as ‘necessary, or contributory, to a less secular resonance, more sacral and salvific, perhaps even miraculous, grace without merit, to All’s Well ending well’ (p. 211). (c) Poetry The year 2016 has been an extremely popular one for work on Shakespeare’s sonnets, especially since it marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poet’s Celebration, edited by Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, published this year, is a book drawn out of a recent project to commemorate the year’s significant anniversary, and presents a selection of contemporary poetry written by thirty Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature alongside the sonnets which these modern poems have been inspired by. Some of the best poets of our time, including Andrew Motion, Carol Ann Duffy, and Simon Armitage, have created responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets, engaging with one or more sonnets in their own voice, style, and form, appealing to modern audiences particularly with their up-to-date choice of subject matter. Current Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, in her offering, ‘CXVI’, responds to Sonnet 116 by reworking the first two lines—‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments’—to present the threat of the failure of a modern-day marriage. The speaker feels no pleasure in a kiss, illustrated by the image of a ‘dying bee grazing a rose’ and is haunted by a room of ‘dark shadows’. In a similar way to Shakespeare’s poem, she draws attention to minds and heads being at once physically close but mentally apart—‘Our two heads on one pillow; I awake / to hear impediments scratch in the room / Like rats’, and plays on the traditional ‘if anyone knows of any lawful impediment’ line that is asked during the wedding ceremony to suggest that maybe this marriage should never have happened. By contrast, ‘Magnetism’ by Gillian Clarke reworks Sonnet 116 as a love poem, describing two people attracted to each other who will remain with each other like birds having a mate for life. Whereas some contributors to this collection have produced sonnets in the traditional form, several deviate from it, including Andrew Motion, whose offering, ‘Rhapsodies’, is not a complete deviation, but a deviation all the same, presenting a fourteen-line poem in blank verse, which takes the lead from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12, and is concerned with the moment the clocks change in winter. Alan Jenkins’s ‘Salvage’ is a twenty-seven-line take on Sonnet 80, presenting two people from very different walks of life meeting by chance on a cruise ship, and uses similar nautical imagery to the kind employed by Shakespeare. Simon Armitage’s response to Sonnet 20, ‘Di-Di-Dah-Dah-Di-Dit’, is the most obscure of all. The whole thing is written in Morse Code. The poem’s title is code for a question mark, so the speaker is obviously asking a question in his response. When translating the main body of the poem from Morse Code, the utterances reveal that the poem in English is saying: H E L O V E S H I M H E L O V E S H I M N O T H E L O V E S H I M H E L O V E S H I M N O T The poem’s speaker ponders on a homosexual relationship, reflecting Sonnet 20’s deliberately vague description of sensual love between a male speaker and male subject. In Armitage’s translation, he presents a similar kind of relationship, and, by using Morse Code to deliberately generate a cryptic message, suggests that this is a relationship intended to be hidden. Also, with the lines ‘he loves him, he loves him not, he loves him, he loves him not’ ending in the negative, it indicates that the relationship being illustrated is certainly not a fulfilling and happy one. Matthew Zarnowiecki’s article, ‘Responses to Shakespeare’s Sonnets: More Sonnets’ (CS 28:ii[2016] 10–26), does much of the same as On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poet’s Celebration, presenting and discussing recent responses to the sonnets, this time not only by poets, but by dramatists, directors, and filmmakers, who at once stay true to the essence of Shakespeare’s work while interpreting it in their unique artistic styles. Zarnowiecki considers a theatrical performance staged in Paris in 2009, a book of translations similar to the one discussed above which was published in 2012, and a collection of short videos filmed in New York between 2013 and 2016, as well as providing his own interpretation of Sonnet 80 in an attempt to illustrate how these poems are currently viewed in modern society. The first of two articles by David K. Weiser on Shakespeare’s sonnets this year, ‘A Song of Loue: Psalm 45 and Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (N&Q 63[2016] 399–402), provides evidence to suggest that Shakespeare was heavily influenced by Psalm 45 when compiling these poems. He records the recurrent themes of procreation and immortality in both the psalm and the sonnets, and highlights similar phrases within the texts, including ‘thou art fairer’ and ‘I will make thy name remembered’, as well as pointing out the symbolism of marriage which is explored in the psalm and inherent to the sonnets. He also observes that when Shakespeare uses imagery referring to eyes, hearts, and tongues as a representation of human psychology, he again directly references the book of Psalms. Weiser again draws a similarity between the Bible and Shakespeare’s sonnets in his second article, ‘Rewriting/Rereading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146’ (ANQ 29[2016] 129–33), noting that Sonnet 146 sounds strikingly similar to Psalm 44:12, as well as drawing slight influences from Isaiah 52:3 and Corinthians 15:52–5, using phrases such as ‘terms divine’ and ‘hours of dross’. The bulk of the article, however, sees Weiser focusing his attention on the wording of the second line of Sonnet 146, especially the imagery of feeding. He explores a selection of different editions of the sonnets, in which each of the editors interprets this particular line and image in a slightly different way. Weiser documents each variation in his article, explaining how and why the meaning generated by the second line of the poem is ultimately changed when different words are used by different scholars. In her article ‘The Point of the Couplet: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie’ (ELH 83[2016] 1–41), Jessica Rosenberg notes a connection between the rhyming couplets used by Shakespeare at the end of each of his sonnets and Thomas Tusser’s popular instruction manual of husbandry, also composed in the form of rhyming couplets, arguing that embedded in Shakespeare’s couplets is an element of practical fragmentation which helps to explain why previous scholars have tended to be dissatisfied with the sonnets’ conclusions. She discusses both texts in terms of their allusions to husbandry, but also in terms of their presentation on the printed page, particularly the use of indentation, suggesting that looking at the texts alongside each other enables the reader to have new insights into our ability to detach rhyming couplets from the poem as a whole and memorize them easily. Cordelia Zukerman’s article, ‘A Multitude of Eyes, Tongues, and Mouths: Readerly Agency in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (HEI 42[2016] 629–39), begins with a discussion of the sonnet form in general, from its early perception as a poetry form associated mainly with the socially elite to a widely popular form enjoyed by everyone. Previous scholars have argued that a sense of anxiety rested in the inability to control the readership of sonnets and keep them away from readers of a lower status in society. However, Zukerman argues that this inability to police the readership, allowing common people to have access to these poems, is the thing that gives Shakespeare’s sonnets their cultural value. In her article, ‘ “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”: Shakespeare’s Sonnet for Lady Mary Wroth’ (ShS 69[2016] 292–301), Jane Kingsley-Smith takes a fresh look at Sonnet 116, arguing that although its popularity predominantly rested in its characterization of an idealized love match, it was written specifically for a distinct historical purpose—to honour the marriages of William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke, and his cousin (also his mistress) Mary Sidney (soon to be Wroth) in 1604. She documents historical evidence detailing the imperfections of both marriages which coincide with sections of the poem, and notes that it was not only Shakespeare who was influenced by Lady Mary; Lady Mary was also influenced by Shakespeare, developing the imagery used in Sonnet 116 in her own poetry fifteen years after Shakespeare’s sonnet was written, signifying, as Shakespeare puts it a ‘marriage of true minds’. Mats Malm, ‘Voluptuous Language and Ambivalence in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (ShS 69[2016] 302–12), investigates the specifics of Shakespeare’s language use in the sonnets, particularly the language of desire, and suggests that the traditional term ‘voluptuous language’ is key to providing a clearer contextual account of the ambivalence surrounding the description of this desire in his article. Malm also employs the earlier idea of ‘fiction’ and ‘friction’ put forward by Stephen Greenblatt (Shakespearean Negotiations [1988]) to argue that ‘friction’, as in sexual desire, is the thing that makes the language of Shakespeare’s sonnets voluptuous: the way in which the syllables are arranged and rub against each other creates a lustful effect. Following on from Malm’s theory of Shakespeare’s language creating a powerful and alluring human response, Katharine A. Craik explores a similar avenue, although she claims that the intense response lies within the reading of the text rather than the language itself. In her article ‘Sympathetic Sonnets’ (ShS 69[2016] 313–23), Craik considers Shakespeare’s sonnets alongside Longinus’s Greek rhetorical treatise Peri hypsous (or On the Sublime), in which Longinus expresses how an audience or reader can become passionately enthralled and inflamed by certain works of literature or rhetoric; using examples from a selection of sonnets, Craik argues that these sonnets ‘imagine a collaborative enthusiasm based on the energies of reading and writing’ which ‘transforms those who immerse themselves in it’ (p. 319). The two articles published on The Rape of Lucrece this year both employ earlier theoretical concepts which are then applied to Shakespeare’s poem. In ‘ “Lucrece, this night I must enjoy thee”: A Narcissistic Reading of The Rape of Lucrece’ (ShSA 28[2016] 73–9) Daniel Koketso challenges traditional feminist readings of the poem and explores the psychological theory of ‘narcissistic reactance’, which states that some rapists, dominated by arrogance and self-importance, commit rape to fulfil their own iniquitous desires. He argues that Tarquin’s sexual violence towards Lucrece can be explained using the narcissistic reactance theory, in that the more he is deprived of sex the more he wants it, his perception of his own sexual entitlement leading him to take it by force. Mary Janell Metzger explores ideas of agency and consent in her article ‘Epistemic Injustice and The Rape of Lucrece’ (Mosaic 49:ii[2016] 19–34), drawing on the concept of epistemic injustice, which she describes as ‘injustice insofar as any individual’s capacity as a knower or the subject of understanding is a priori discounted’ (p. 19). She notes that, by presenting the violent rape and eventual death of the poem’s title character, Shakespeare encourages his readers to shun epistemic injustice by making sure they respond to credible sources, are aware of judgement in a male-dominated and politically awkward society, and are well informed as to what is historical truth and what is not. (d) Histories As usual, a focus on the recent publications concerning Shakespeare’s history plays does not always produce the sense of a coherent field of study surrounding the genre. On one hand, we often find analysis of the histories forms part of a larger consideration of general issues in Shakespeare—in which context the status of the histories is the same as those of the tragedies, comedies, and so on. On the other hand, scholars may pursue an interest in one or two plays from the genre, conducting analyses that offer insights into individual plays, but not into how they interconnect as a genre. Put simply, analyses of the histories often find the genre harmonized with the overall canon, or fragmented into individual plays. However, if the scholarship is sifted carefully, one may find analyses that are directly concerned with identifying what is unique about the genre, and what it uniquely reveals about Shakespeare and early modern culture. For example, the histories continue to generate scholarship that sees the events of the late Middle Ages, the period covered in the plays, as an important background to Shakespeare’s own time. This is particularly relevant for how the plays construct a national and patriotic identity for the Elizabethan age, as well as for the way Christian themes of the plays provide a background for understanding the forces of English Protestantism. As many of this year’s analyses show, there is a particularly complex engagement between politics and theology in this period. One trap that lies in wait for these approaches is the temptation to use documentary evidence to infer facts regarding the historical Shakespeare, whether political, theological, or economic. Although such claims are generally accompanied by rigorous historical research, the claims themselves often represent nothing more than conjectures that are not directly contradicted by the evidence. In many of the discussions below it has been necessary to accept the value of historical and textual analysis on its own terms, while remaining sceptical about the interpretations that are applied to it. In my reviews, I have evaluated each individual analysis in terms of how it may be relevant to our understanding of the history plays as a coherent genre. In some cases, this requires that I overlook the central argument of the piece, which may not relate to these specific issues, and instead apply an objective criterion to determine what, if anything, the analyses tell us specifically about the histories. I review and evaluate those analyses that fall into the traditional discipline of literary-scholarly Shakespeare studies, which focuses primarily on a combination of textual analysis, historical background, and, in some cases, innovative methodology. Since these approaches are interdisciplinary in nature, they may also include analyses from the perspective of theology, politics, and so on. Graham Holderness is one of the foremost critics to express scepticism towards attempts to recover the ‘historical’ Shakespeare. His 2011 book The Nine Lives of Shakespeare offers a multiplicity of evidence that is not easily reconcilable to a single biographical paradigm, and offers the argument that to seek historical corroboration for the writing of the plays is a dead-end pathway for the discipline. Of course, the central biographical riddle of Shakespeare studies remains the question of whether the playwright was Catholic or Protestant—it can hardly be supposed that he was neither—and the purpose of a book like Nine Lives is to assert that seeking a definitive answer to this issue is also to chip away at the ambiguity and indeterminacy that makes Shakespeare so permanently relevant. Holderness’s new book, The Faith of William Shakespeare, takes what at first seems like a contrary approach to the issue of Shakespeare’s religion: it asserts that Shakespeare was indeed an active and faithful Protestant, and corroborates this claim through a process of mining the plays for evidence of the language of Reformation theology. By outlining the theological background of Shakespeare’s time, Holderness provides a means of understanding the forces that shape the religious sentiment in the plays. The presence of Catholic ideas in the plays is argued by Holderness to be the product of the character of early English Protestantism, which saw itself continuing the traditions of the Roman Church (p. 14). What seems problematic in Holderness’s approach is the tendency to view the text of the plays as providing reliable evidence on the nature of the individual who wrote them. Such an approach was identified as a fallacy by Raymond Williams in his Political Shakespeare [1985], a volume to which Holderness himself substantially contributed. In approaching The Faith of William Shakespeare, it may perhaps be better to accept its argument that Shakespeare was a ‘loyal and faithful servant of the Church of England’ (p. 215) as a biographical hypothesis that may provide new insights into the plays, but which does not definitively supplant any other—a ‘tenth’ life of Shakespeare, as it were. What may be more problematic in Holderness’s analysis is that, while it acknowledges the extent to which religious feeling suffused life in early modern Britain (p. 215), it treats theology as an ancillary aspect of Shakespeare’s plays, as if the plays were essentially secular products that betray the religion of their author at rare moments of exposure. The faith of William Shakespeare is not explored, for example, through the understanding that English drama had its roots in the sacred theatre of the Middle Ages, and that the Reformation’s proscription of sacred content prompted the move towards secular tragedy in dramatic writing. It is not explored, either, through the consequent use of allegory and typology in the plays, which allows for highly theological readings of their scenarios. Holderness admits that the ‘religious turn’ in Shakespeare studies is relatively new, and it appears that some revision of basic assumptions about Shakespearean drama may be needed if a fuller appreciation of the plays as expressing vital debates about theology is to be reached. In the context of the book’s central arguments, Holderness acknowledges the importance of the history plays in supporting expressions of Reformation theology. Henry VIII, the only play by Shakespeare that directly concerns the Reformation, is given special focus, but it is understood that the kings represented in King John and the tetralogies are primarily representations of Christian monarchs, whose behaviour, virtuous or villainous, provides the deep background for the English Reformation. Holderness argues that Shakespeare wanted to use the examples of the kings to show the presence or absence of Reformation sympathies in a ruler as a key to their efficacy. To support this reading, Holderness contrasts Richard II and Henry V: Richard is shown as the type of the Catholic sympathizer, a figure beholden to ceremony and ritual, and one convinced that his divine ordination justifies the subjugation of all subjects to his command. Henry, on the other hand, is depicted as a powerful national leader and the steward of both church and state in his own realm. Henry, therefore, stands as the paragon of the early modern Protestant. For Henry VIII, Holderness argues that the play appears to present an uncharacteristically one-sided view of the Reformation, with figures like Cranmer and Cromwell as ‘national saviours’ and Wolsey as a figure of residual corruption. Holderness suggests that this is uncharacteristic of Shakespeare and cites critics who see, for example, in Wolsey a more nuanced and tragic figure, one worthier of the Shakespeare canon. Holderness’s analysis suggests that the history plays offer a greater capacity to trace the influence of the English Reformation in early modern culture, since they circumvent allegory, and instead provide concrete instances of theology in practice, with only the faintest sense of anachronism. The other plays that are analysed in the volume (Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and King Lear) are treated as being dogmatic expressions of theology rather than dialectical, and therefore serve the view of the play as sermon rather than as debate. It is hoped that, as the religious turn in Shakespeare studies develops, the restless nature of England’s Reformation culture is further examined in the plays. John Kerrigan’s impressive book Shakespeare’s Binding Language offers a close study of Shakespeare’s plays, unpacking the significance of oath-making and legal decrees in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Kerrigan identifies the context of the Reformation as a fertile period in which various oaths of loyalty or recantation were frequently imposed; yet, this preponderance of oaths in early modern culture may be interpreted as a residual influence of the Middle Ages, since the performative forms they represent are more credibly the product of the tribal and ‘heroic’ cultures of early medievalism (p. 368). Kerrigan consequently proposes that the ‘binding’ nature or legality of an oath was subjected to general scepticism in the sixteenth century, and argues that this perception is reflected in various episodes of Shakespeare where oaths, often those made by monarchs, ultimately prove ineffectual (p. 237). As depictions of the high-medieval period in England, one might expect that the history plays would provide plentiful examples of where residual heroism collides with modern rationalism; however, the two chapters that Kerrigan devotes to the histories, addressing Henry V and King John respectively, do not approach the history plays as a unified body or cycle that might produce a collective response to these issues. Instead, they treat them as individual plays that provide isolated examples for analysis: in the case of the former, Kerrigan locates a range of ethnic approaches to oath-making in the British characters of MacMorris, Fluellen, et al., to contrast with those of the English; for the latter, Kerrigan further explores the Reformation context of the period, and finds in the play an allegory for a revised understanding of conventional loyalty to state or church. In this second instance, Kerrigan’s knowledge of history is extensive, and he also resists attempts to produce a reading that fixes Shakespeare to a clear ideological position, finding in the play both a critique of Tudor ideology and a general scepticism towards Rome (p. 385). Kerrigan’s analysis remains clear-minded throughout, and the breadth of the scholarship he draws on is impressive. Therefore, while the analysis does not contribute to a sense of cohesion among the history plays, it nonetheless identifies a basis for reading other plays in the cycle through a Reformation framework. A volume such as this, while it offers significant challenges to the reader in the sheer weight of material presented, provides some rewarding new perspectives on our readings of Shakespeare. Among the most sustained and cohesive analyses of Shakespeare’s history plays to emerge this year is Peter Lake’s How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays, which examines the origins and purpose of the history genre, analyses the sources of conflict from which it drew its materials, and looks at how it was broadly received on the stage. The work shows considerable knowledge of the political machinations of the English Reformation, and it outlines a dialectic of propaganda and counter-propaganda that accompanied the period. The central argument of the book is that the need to maintain the removal of the Yorkists from power mandated a manipulation of the religious divisions that had emerged in the reign of Henry VIII. Lake argues that, to this end, Catholic propagandists habitually accused Elizabeth’s Protestant advisers of neglecting religion altogether in their pursuit of political power (p. 4). According to Lake, the history plays are an outline of the dangers that awaited if the Protestants had achieved their end of restoring a Yorkist to the throne, and the history plays do not therefore merely support the origins Tudor orthodoxy, they also characterize perceived threats to the succession that circulated towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Propaganda and counter-propaganda feed social disorder by creating an epistemic confusion between opposing forces, allowing for a muddying of outcomes to action. The complex politics of the age are clearly understood by Lake, but what is lacking is a grasp of the theological questions of the Reformation in England, which were as much the subject of thematic interest to the early modern playwrights. In this sense, the analysis represents a secularist view of both history and Shakespeare, where religious affiliation does not reflect a range of metaphysical and ethical world-views that circulate in a given period, but rather is accepted as a convenient point of difference that may be exploited in the pursuit or maintenance of power. As Graham Holderness argues (see review above), the depth of religious feeling in Shakespeare’s age has only recently become an acknowledged premise for early modern scholarship. The knowledge of this mandates that a historical analysis of the conflicts of the Reformation should be informed by a grounding in the theologies of the period, as well as a sense of how much weight these issues received from those in power, and in the feelings of the general population. To do otherwise risks imposing a modern world picture onto the evidence of the past. A further shortcoming of such rigorous approaches to research is that, once they have established their body of materials, they do not apply it to their subject in anything but the most perfunctory way. Lake establishes at great length a complex set of political negotiations through documentary evidence, but is content to suggest nothing more than that Shakespeare’s history plays were ‘a function of the pervasive anxiety and concern prompted by the succession crisis’, and that, ‘it was anything but an accident that, after the accession of James I took the issue of the succession off the agenda, the genre of the history play lost a great deal of its popularity and allure’ (p. 60). In this respect, Lake little considers the importance of the Shakespearean theatre itself in early modern culture, and holds to a simplistic ideal that the theatre (in any age) functions merely as a passive, popular, response to current events. Lake does not suppose that the theatre was a performative agent in these struggles, one that had the power to influence public perceptions and sympathies, and certainly does not allow that the theatre was, in fact, a key forum for the debates of the Reformation, in which theology and politics were inseparable. It is a common risk of historical research to lose sight of the less concrete questions that ground the disciplines of the humanities. In an effective, well-researched, and well-written article, ‘ “An infant of the house of York”: Medea and Absyrtus in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy’ (CD 50[2016] 233–48), Katherine Heavey cites the reference to Medea and Absyrtus that occurs in 2 Henry VI (V.ii.60) to argue that the image remains a dominating presence through 3 Henry VI and Richard III. The scene itself is consistent with the Senecan style of early Shakespeare: Clifford, swearing his revenge on the York house, declares that, ‘Meet I an infant of the house of York, / Into as many gobbets will I cut it / As wild Medea young Absyrtis did’ (V.ii.58–60). Heavey identifies scenes within 3 Henry VI and Richard III, usually those concerning the murder of offspring, in which the Medea reference resonates. The article demonstrates a high level of familiarity with Shakespeare’s early influences, including the Medea myth and translations of Greek and Roman tragedy, and it offers a convincing account of how early modern dramaturgy developed through these influences. The chief value of the analysis to the study of Shakespeare’s histories is the way it counters the autonomy that is conventionally accorded to Richard III, the popularity of which has consistently eclipsed the plays that precede it in the sequence. The article makes a convincing case that the second and third plays of the tetralogy are consistent with the points of dramatic and historical interest that have made the fourth such a mainstay of performance and scholarship. Building somewhat on the themes covered by Heavey, Gemma Miller, in ‘ “Many a time and oft had I broken my Neck for their amusement”: The Corpse, the Child, and the Aestheticization of Death in Shakespeare’s Richard III and King John’ (CD 50[2016] 209–32), reflects on the death of children in Shakespeare and cites the examples of the doomed princes in Richard III and King John to explore the cultural impact given to such moments in art and performance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Miller argues that the weight given to such episodes in later eras tends to misread the emphasis on infanticide in the plays, which, if anything, appears to be understated. Miller takes a generally interdisciplinary approach to her subject, combining analyses of early modern rhetoric with studies of nineteenth-century art and modern performance practice. Although the brief excursions into psychoanalytic language (such as that concerning the cultural constructions of children) may be somewhat opaque, the overall effect of the article is one of internally consistent scholarship. Nonetheless, the article makes no special claims relevant to the status of the history plays, and the recurrence of the trope within two plays of the genre appears to be no more than coincidental. No reason is given why the analysis should focus on these two plays, rather than, say, the emphasis on infanticide in Macbeth. Therefore, while the article credibly supports the claims it makes, its focus on history plays does not reach beyond a fragmented approach to the genre, where individual plays are treated as separate aesthetic entities. Despite the canon-wide focus implied by its title, William Badger’s essay, ‘ “Crushed with a plot”: On the Uses of Witchcraft in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Structures’ (in Beyad and Salami, eds., pp. 39–48), focuses primarily on the presence of witchcraft in Richard III. This is somewhat apt, since the aspects of witchcraft the essay wishes to address are those concerned with legal structures and historical accountability. Badger cites the historical circumstance of Anne Boleyn (herself a Shakespearean character), against whom the charges of witchcraft were typically conflated with treason, and were sufficiently vague as to be resistant to defence in a legal context. This is particularly relevant to the discourses of witchcraft in Richard III, which, unlike those of Macbeth, are hypotheses of motive rather than a clear fact of the narrative. Badger argues that Richard III illustrates the ideological purpose of witchcraft as a device that may be used to slander a political enemy, usually a female, without fear of being disproven. Although the device of witchcraft does not feature as prominently in the other history plays, its use in Richard III at least exemplifies an overall approach to history that sees the plays of that category articulating the rhetorical strategies by which kings and queens may rally support. Witchcraft is a persistent theme in the play, but is often marginalized in performance; scholarship that attempts to harmonize this material with our understanding of the play is therefore most welcome. In light of Graham Holderness’s volume on Shakespeare’s faith (reviewed above), it is appropriate that 2016 should also see the appearance of interdisciplinary approaches to Shakespeare from the perspective of theology. Doubly appropriate is the fact that Anthony D. Baker, a seminarian, should see the question of religion as central to the history plays, which depict the Plantagenet kings in an explicitly Christian context. Much like Jan Kott, Baker, in ‘Divine Courtesy: Providence and Human Language in Shakespeare’s History Plays’ (HeyJ 57[2016] 753–69), sees the history plays as depicting an unending and unsatisfying cycle that may yield (albeit temporarily) to individuals who master a combination of rhetorical power and ruthless action. Yet while Kott adopted a cynically post-Marxist view on the futility of this cycle, Baker wonders whether there may be a providential purpose behind it. In earlier contexts, Baker argues, the ‘providential’ view of the history plays holds that villainous rulers usually come to ignoble ends, while the virtuous achieve glory. In between these extremes, there are the tragic types (such as Richard II and Henry VI) who are defeated by history, and the comic figures (Jack Cade, the Bastard and Falstaff, et al.) who stand outside history and comment on it ironically. Baker applies his theology to the latter two of these groups, and argues that the second tetralogy offers a more developed sense of providence in history than the first. In characterizing the tragic figures of history, Baker does not identify divine providence in the misfortunes that befall Richard II, but rather in the Stoic mindset that seeks the good in each misfortune (pp. 762–3). Baker sees this view duplicated in the comic world of Falstaff, whose subjects are similarly concerned with distancing themselves from the obsessions of history. Rounding out the cycle, Henry V is identified as being as much a Machiavellian as Richard III, but one who earns the favour of providence by applying his mastery of power to the common good (p. 764). The question of divine providence in history is a tantalizing one to apply to Shakespeare, but any proposed answer should consider the early modern theologies, particularly those of the English Reformation, under whose influence the plays were written. The singular flaw of Baker’s analysis, then, and one that is endemic to interdisciplinary analyses, is that it lacks fluency in foundational discourses that Shakespeare studies takes for granted. As a result, Baker ends up applying a distinctly modern, post-Reformation theology to the question, while largely ignoring the early modern contexts that have proven so useful in underpinning interpretations of Shakespeare elsewhere. The resulting analysis may be valuable for Baker’s own discipline, and may even be so to some extent for Shakespeare studies, to which it supplies a further premise for the generic unity of the history plays; however, Baker’s approach remains little more than a credible hypothesis that must be evaluated anew from the perspectives of early modern criticism. Another intriguing interdisciplinary approach to Shakespeare’s histories, one that moreover attributes an organic unity to the sequence, appears in The Review of Politics. In ‘Time and the Problem of Royal Succession in Shakespeare’s History Plays’ (RoP 78[2016] 609–24), John D. Cox seems to deliberately counter Baker’s theological approach (see review above) by emphasizing the secular nature of the history genre, and by arguing that the key to success in royal occupations, at least as Shakespeare sees it, has less to do with virtue, and more to do with clever timing. Cox’s analysis favours the Machiavellian manoeuvres of Richard III and the Bolingbrokes as reflecting clear models of success. Unlike Baker, Cox is an English scholar, and therefore has a firmer footing in Shakespeare studies. In addressing the origins of early modern drama, he cites its roots in the sacred genres of the Middle Ages, but he remains convinced that Shakespeare’s plays are characterized by their distance from these origins rather than their proximity. This is a valid viewpoint, and certainly one which the evidence does not explicitly disprove; however, if we are to believe Holderness’s claim that there is currently a religious turn in Shakespeare studies, then Cox’s approach, however well argued, can only be accepted as reflecting a residual approach in the discipline. Analyses that use the concept of ‘materiality’ occupy the more abstract end of the spectrum of Shakespearean scholarship, using an approach that takes the impulses of new historicism and cultural materialism and runs them through a deconstructionist mode of analysis. It can be difficult to review such approaches, as they seem to resist positivist techniques of scholarship altogether, and instead generate a type of productive mysticism for their discipline. In the context of Shakespeare studies, however, the general familiarity of the subject matter means that, despite some opacity of language, the uninitiated may still find purchase. H. Austin Whitver’s analysis of the second tetralogy, in ‘Materiality and Memory in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy’ (SEL 56[2016] 285–306), opens with some background in Elizabethan history, outlining the monarch’s interdiction against the destruction of memorial monuments on economic and political (as opposed to spiritual) grounds. Whitver cites Elizabeth’s dictum to conclude that the culture of early modern England was primarily rationalist and secular. From this ideological foundation, Whitver argues that monuments and their signification provide a recurring theme in the second tetralogy, and additionally constitute a historical reality for the period the plays depict. The idea that the dead speak through their remains is cited as a dramatic device featured primarily in Richard II and Henry V, and this discovery echoes the approaches applied to the first tetralogy by Phillip Schwyzer in last year’s Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III, which took a similarly material-critical approach. Whitver’s analysis serves to identify a common rhetorical strategy that is prominent in Shakespeare’s history genre, and therefore recognizes an element that gives some coherence to it. In this regard, the analysis is effective and credible, although it seems to lose momentum before it is willing to propose a purpose for such a device. Jaecheol Kim’s analysis, in ‘Reformation of the Duchy of Lancaster in Shakespeare’s Henriad’ (SEL 56[2016] 265–83), identifies itself as having stemmed from a recent trend in biographical Shakespeare scholarship that conjectures that Shakespeare’s so-called ‘lost years’ were spent in the Duchy of Lancashire. This engagement is purported to be both directly responsible for Shakespeare’s eminence as a London playwright (p. 266) and explaining the special focus given to Lancashire in the second tetralogy. Kim argues that in Richard II the House of Lancaster is represented as a northern power-base whose appeasement is necessary for the stability of the Plantagenet crown. Richard’s violation of Lancaster’s sovereignty results in the loss of his crown and the accession of his Lancastrian successor Henry IV. Kim goes on to argue that once Lancaster consolidated its holdings with the crown in the south, it no longer held the balance of power in the north; consequently, the civil opposition facing the crown in the Henry IV plays comes from a confederation of lesser northern earls who have filled the power vacuum. Kim additionally cites scholarship that identifies the Lancaster courts of the early fifteenth century as the template for the model of Tudor government in the sixteenth century (p. 267). Historical scholarship of this nature enriches our background understanding of the history plays and offers scope for better interpreting their meaning for early modern audiences. For example, Kim argues that the displacement of opposition to the crown from a powerful duchy (in Richard II) to a collection of earls (in Henry IV) indicates in Shakespeare an adherence to a Tudor agenda of a ‘central nation conquering the national fringes’ through the stratagem of eliminating the duchies and supressing the rebellious earls (p. 268). Such insights are useful in analysis, but we should be wary of the biographical claims that are used to support them, such as the arguments that place Shakespeare in Lancashire to situate the playwright at the ‘epicenter of the English Counter-reformation’ (p. 265). Such claims represent an extreme extrapolation of the evidence, and appear to be motivated by a need to place Shakespeare the author in a stable historical framework. Such conjectures do not devalue the evidence that has been gathered in support of them, but they do speak of general tendency in scholarship to privilege the gathering of evidence over the ethical and scientific interpretation of it. No doubt, any hypothesis, even the most fanciful, is valuable for the questions it raises, but we should take care to ensure that evidence is applied in order to draw a clear distinction between historical hypotheses and mere wishful thinking. In ‘ “Thou livest and breathest, yet art thou slain in him”: The Absence of Power in Richard II’ (CD 50[2016] 195–207), Imke Lichterfeld analyses Shakespeare’s history plays by investigating the historical record behind them and identifying Shakespeare’s redactional strategies: what facts has the playwright included, what has been omitted, and, perhaps more importantly, what has been omitted but remains by implication? Lichterfeld identifies that Richard II begins in medias res, at the height of a controversy surrounding the fate of Woodstock, the sixth son of Edward III; since no Shakespeare play on the events preceding Richard II is extant, we lack a dramatic account to orient us to this state of affairs. Lichterfeld posits that the lack of information or resolution of the matter of Woodstock’s murder in the opening act of the play warrants some close attention for its dramatic significance. The historical record, while inconclusive, suggests that Woodstock was indeed murdered by Mowbray, and likely on the king’s instructions. If this matter was known or believed by the early modern theatre-goer, then its absence makes more sense, for it is presented to the audience as assumed knowledge. Last year’s YWES entry posited that the history plays often feature prominently in performance studies scholarship of both stage and film. It suggested that the need to bring these unfamiliar narratives alive for modern audiences often results in innovative approaches to the redaction and presentation of the texts. The relative popularity of the genre in its time was something of a short-lived anomaly, and while the history plays have consistently interested scholars, performance practice has often struggled to reconnect them to modern audiences. In this entry, I have considered a range of analyses and reviews that address performances of the history plays to locate staging approaches that make them more effective or more palatable in performance. Nadine Holdsworth, in ‘Performing Place, Heritage, and Henry V in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard’ (ConTR 26[2016] 196–210), analyses an amateur production of Henry V performed by a military theatre troupe, the Royal Navy Theatre Association (RTNA, subsidized by the RSC), in an ‘open air’ space in a military precinct. Holdsworth argues that performances that employ suggestive spaces such as this gain a degree of authenticity, as well as political depth, through a synthesis with the subject matter of the play. In this instance, the military locale of the performance space invests the narrative with a sense of immediacy and excitement that it might lack in the relatively inauthentic space of the indoor theatre stage. As a strategy for improving performances of Henry V, the use of a military context for performance would seem to be a successful one, and the staging of the RTNA would seem to be an extension of Olivier’s strategy of making Henry V a hit by staging it in the context of a modern war. This approach, however, seems to be more suited to the militaristic tone of Henry V, and would possibly produce less interest if it was attempted with other history plays. Yet that is not to suggest that other authentic locales might not suit such performance. Of all the strategies that are used to promote performances of Shakespeare’s histories, the practice of redacting, abridging, and combining materials, even when it results in performances of inordinate length, is among the most hallowed and most popular, especially since it may promote the less familiar plays by combining them with those that have a higher profile in performance. In more recent times, a favoured strategy may also be found in presenting the plays’ succession of medieval monarchs as akin to the fad for medieval-themed dramas in film and television. In an interview with Ivo van Hove, ‘This Year’s Must-See Shakespeare? Four Hours of History in Dutch’ (Spectator 33[2 Apr. 2016] 40–1), James Woodall infers this populist gambit by suggesting that van Hove’s mode of adaptation is both novel and iconoclastic (p. 40). Woodall additionally recognizes the potential of presenting Shakespeare in translation as a means of shaking up the standards of tradition; he cites several non-English productions of Shakespeare as producing theatre experiences that are more immediate and visceral than what ‘polite’ British practitioners offer. Therefore, another potential key to improving the profile of the history plays in performance is to free them from the constraints of Shakespeare’s language, whether this is through translation or simply by avoiding long speeches and allowing action and plot to speak for themselves. Gemma Miller’s review of a 2015 performance of Richard III, ‘Review of Shakespeare’s Richard III (directed by Thomas Ostermeier for the Festival d’Avignon) at the Opera Grand, Avignon, recorded 11 and 12 July and broadcast at 10:40 pm 13 July on Arte Concert’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 217–19), confirms the view that translation and redaction are viable strategies for staging the histories. According to Miller, Ostermeier’s version dispenses with ‘60%’ of the play and rejects Shakespeare’s language in favour of a translation in modern German prose (p. 217). The focus of the production is on a cinematic conception of character and action; however, the apparent shortcoming of this tighter approach is that it retains only what is familiar about this already over-familiar play. The chief points of contrast for Miller are with other famous performances of Richard, all of which tread depressingly familiar dramatic ground. The focus on Richard’s psychology, tracing an arc from the ‘top of the staircase to the bottom’ culminating in Richard’s defeat, not by Richmond but by his conscience, offers nothing much new in terms of what it tells us about Shakespeare’s histories, nor in terms of the politics that have shaped them. Radical abridgements of this type could be a great asset in making the less well-known histories more accessible to audiences, but when they are applied to Richard III they serve only to act as a crutch to egotistical actors and unimaginative critics. (e) Tragedies Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Antony and Cleopatra: Language and Writing is aimed specifically at undergraduate students starting courses in Shakespeare studies. It is a book that acts as an introduction to the play and guides students in writing about it. It is constructed in four chapters, each comprising a self-contained subsection. An introduction covers broad details of the play, offering ideas about the binaries on which it is structured; the context of the play and how it relates to other Roman plays and tragedies; background about the ‘legend’ of the story and other texts in which it appears; issues related to staging the play; issues of genre; and problems that students might encounter. Chapter 1 looks at the play as a text for performance, addressing the Folio and quarto editions, early modern theatres, and how we might take the play from page to stage. Chapter 2 looks at Shakespeare’s use of, and his interest in, language. Among other elements, Vaughan covers verse and metre, uses of prose, and wordplay. In chapter 3, Vaughan gives an overview of critical responses to the play since Shakespeare, addressing, among other areas, characterization, postcolonial theory, approaches to gender, and history and politics. Each chapter ends with exercises for students to practise writing about Shakespeare. Chapter 4 is titled ‘Writing Checklist’ and offers guidelines for structuring an essay. Julia Reinhard Lupton’s edited collection Romeo and Juliet: A Critical Reader is part of the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. As with other volumes in the series, the book contains a timeline of the text, the critical back-story, a performance history, a chapter on the ‘State of the Art’ (which covers current research and thinking about the play), a chapter detailing resources for the classroom and four essays under the heading of ‘New Directions’. In the first of these essays, ‘Why No One Hears Lord Capulet’s Line’, Robert N. Watson addresses the attribution of III.i.184–8 to Lord Montague in all but one modern edition, despite early folios and Q2 and 3 attributing the lines to Lord Capulet. Watson poses the question of why editors and directors are so quick to assume that Shakespeare and/or his printers got the attribution wrong. Watson argues that, as a result of the family feud, Lord Capulet’s defence of Romeo is missed by modern editors. Watson argues that the play’s focus on the binary family feud makes it easier for editors to suggest Lord Capulet’s line is a printers’ mistake. From this point, Watson goes on to explore the binary themes of the play. Watson argues that Shakespeare creates such binaries in order to knock them down, and that by overlooking the blending of these themes we miss the potential for redemption in the play. This chapter also appeared as an article: ‘Lord Capulet’s Lost Compromise: A Tragic Emendation and the Binary Dynamics of Romeo and Juliet’ (RenD 43[2015] 53–84). In the second ‘New Directions’ essay of the book, William W. West discusses ‘Romeo and Juliet’s Understudies’. West discusses the ‘everything else’ (p. 135) of the play beside the eponymous characters and the love story. In so doing, West views characters such as Mercutio as understudies, for example stating: ‘Consider Paris. He is not really Romeo’s rival for Juliet’s affections … but he and Romeo share the same role in the plot … and are characterised in the same metaphors’ (p. 141). West argues that these understudies help to suggest what might have happened if we don’t take the story of love and death as inevitable. In the third essay, ‘Dancing Will: The Case of Romeo and Juliet’, Joseph Campana addresses what of Shakespeare exists in productions of his work, such as ballet and paintings, that don't include words. Campana argues that ‘should we attend only to language and plot, character and emotive force, we might not hear what Shakespeare has to say to us’ (p. 156). Campana uses ballet and opera versions of the play to address these points. In the final essay, ‘The Names of the Rose: Romeo and Juliet in Italy’, Shaul Bassi looks at the play in relation to Italy and shows how so doing raises ‘a set of questions that illuminate the larger issue of how Shakespeare travels in space and time, across languages, cultures and different media’ (p. 177). Bassi looks at the Italy of the Middle Ages and the play’s sources, through to how modern Verona deals with its famous myth. The collection Shakespeare and Consciousness, edited by Paul Budra and Clifford Werier, offers a number of essays on the tragedies: In ‘Hamlet in the Bat Cave’, Paul Budra takes Thomas Nagel’s 1974 theory of consciousness as his starting point. Nagel’s theory seeks to establish whether consciousness exists or not and applies his questions to the bat. Budra applies Nagel’s theory to the character of Hamlet. In so doing he details a number of different ontological approaches to fictional characters before asserting that ‘in the case of the bat consciousness exists but I cannot imagine it; in the case of Hamlet it does not exist [because Hamlet is a fictional concept], but I can imagine it’ (p. 83). Budra asks how this is possible and answers that it is ‘because Hamlet’s consciousness exists only in the truth of propositions expressible in human language and not outside of language’ (p. 83). Budra goes on to ask what the play Hamlet has to say about the consciousness of the character and makes reference to various points where characters in the play also seek to know Hamlet’s mind. As the essay progresses, Budra offers various examples of early modern engagements with consciousness, and suggests that Hamlet is self-conscious not least because ‘he is worried about his appearance, how the world sees him’ (p. 91). Ultimately Budra concludes by asking ‘Does Hamlet have consciousness?’ and responds by stating ‘always and only as much as I do’ (p. 94). In ‘The Distributed Consciousness of Shakespeare’s Theatre’, Laurie Johnson challenges Harold Bloom’s assertion that Shakespeare imbues Hamlet with consciousness of consciousness. Johnson focuses on the ‘piece of work’ speech (looking at differences between the Q2 and F1 versions) and argues that ‘what we now view as artefact was at the time every bit the “piece of work” that was actor and stage’ (p. 120). Johnson argues that the ‘theatrical practices we now know to have been widely used in early modern staging, such as cue scripts and plots, were not simply the products of a contingent economy of the emerging theater—they are practical expressions of consciousness manifesting through the recombination of always fragmentary, distributed materials’ (p. 120). Johnson extrapolates from this that, in the same way that theatrical practices were patchy, so were Shakespeare’s (and generally early modern) concepts of consciousness. Thus when Shakespeare’s characters talk about consciousness they fall into metatheatricality. In ‘Minds at Work: Writing, Acting, Watching, Reading Hamlet’ Ros King highlights etymological issues that mean that when Shakespeare is talking about consciousness he uses the word ‘conscience’, but that the multiple meanings of this word create ambiguities when Hamlet says ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’ (III.i.83). King argues that ‘Shakespeare employs a range of techniques for creating irreconcilable, alternating differences in meaning, from the simple pun to the multiple points of view engendered by the throughlines of different characters … and that the conscious and unconscious effects of this invitation to discursiveness constitute part of the fascination and the value in Shakespeare’ (p. 141). King uses three different approaches to the text—of the writer, the actor/reader, and the spectator/reader—to highlight these differences in meaning. In ‘ “Being Unseminared”: Pleasure, Instruction, and Playing the Queen in Antony and Cleopatra’ Andrew Brown suggests that ‘Antony and Cleopatra continually displays the influence of the contemporary belief … in a vast network of liquid humors that flowed within and across the boundaries of the embodied self’ (p. 66). Brown begins with reference to Philo’s speech introducing Antony that breaks the character into the many different parts of his body—his heart, his eyes. Brown goes on to discuss the theatricality of the scene in the way that Philo’s description of Antony fanning Cleopatra’s lust is reflected in the literal fanning of the eunuchs. Brown argues that the ‘effect of these devices is to create a dense layering of poetic imagery and onstage action that immediately establishes the defining elements of Antony’s character not through his own utterances nor through those of the perceptive Philo, but through a carefully coordinated set of rhetorical and dramaturgical techniques’ (p. 166). Brown’s essay ‘contends that Antony and Cleopatra engages with the conceptual vocabulary of humoral psychophysiology in order to develop characters defined not by individualized subjectivity but by radically expansive, fluid and generative forms of conscious experience’ (p. 167). From this Brown offers insights into the training of early modern boy actors and the capabilities of such child performers, particularly looking at the performance of the eunuch, Mardian, and the Egyptian queen herself. In ‘Forgetting Cleopatra’ Elizabeth Hodgson begins by asserting the importance of remembering in the early modern era and links understanding of this in Shakespeare’s England to social, collective memory and the relationship between individual and social consciousness. Hodgson reads this as particularly significant in Antony and Cleopatra because of the emphasis on fame, and posthumous fame especially, in the play. Hodgson suggests that ‘being forgotten is almost a proof of life because it demonstrates the necessary interdependence of [Cleopatra’s] own and others’ consciousnesses’ (p. 269). Finally, in ‘Hamlet and Time-Consciousness: A Neurophenomenological Reading’, Matthew Kibbee examines ‘a specific methodological impasse that … has generated two points of friction, one form within and one form without new historicism, both of which demonstrate an uneasy awareness of its deficiencies in regard to conscious experience’ (p. 215). In noting the problems of new historicism in relation to studies of consciousness, Kibbee suggests a neurophenomenological approach. Kibbee details this method before going on to offer a neurophenomenological reading of Hamlet. Kibbee argues that Hamlet ‘unsettles by targeting its audience’s time-consciousness, and the play is unsettled from its historical moment in its anticipation and exploitation of the very effect it produces’ (p. 237). In the opening pages of Shakespeare the Renaissance Humanist: Moral Philosophy and His Plays, Anthony Raspa suggests that the title for the book may equally well have been ‘Shakespeare the Moral Philosopher’ as, Raspa asserts, ‘moral philosophy … was the practical everyday expression of humanism at work in every field of endeavor’ (p. 1). Thus in this book Raspa found ‘the best way of examining the presence of this humanism in Shakespeare’s writing seemed to [him] to show different aspects of its moral philosophy at work individually in a variety of his plays’. The book includes chapters detailing ‘Shakespeare, the Critics, and Humanism’, with individual chapters on King John and Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest. The first chapter offers an introduction to Shakespeare and Renaissance humanism, and concludes with a brief discussion of Titus Andronicus. Raspa asserts that to understand myths such as that of angels ‘there are three ways of believing … firstly an inherited faith, secondly a new belief, and, lastly, a combination of the two’ (p. 23). Raspa then addresses two scenes in Titus Andronicus that show all three of these forms of faith: IV.iii (the arrow scene) and the opening of Act V where Lucius catches Aaron. In the second chapter, ‘Metaphysics as the Way Things Are: King John and Hamlet’, Raspa addresses a number of notions that were important to moral philosophy. Taking the description of moral philosophy by Thomas Bowes as its starting point, the chapter focuses on ‘the significance that these terms [form and soul] had in active life in a dramatic setting’ (p. 29). In the context of this chapter, Raspa takes three common meanings of the word form: ‘the first is general and referred to all being, the second to humanity as a species, and the third to the individual person in the species of humanity’ (p. 33). In relation to Hamlet, Raspa states that ‘How the soul in the background thinking of Hamlet fulfils its role of thematic counterpoint to dust is intelligible in terms of life’ and that ‘There is moreover more than one kind of life in question’ (p. 44). Raspa discusses Hamlet in relation to the idea of life and mortality through the lens of moral philosophy, asserting, for example, that ‘the thematic recurrence of the word soul as a way of identifying both oneself and others suggests how the real world was perceived’ (p. 46). Towards the end of the chapter, Raspa discusses how the themes of soul and form cast light on the political state as much as on the individual. In ‘The Wisdom of King Lear’ Raspa states that the ‘notions of moral philosophy related to Renaissance humanism that we find in King Lear are on the whole concerned with wisdom, the eye, and nature’ (p. 53). Raspa begins by illustrating what these terms meant in the early modern period with reference to early modern treatises on moral philosophy. These ideas are then applied to the various characters in the text concerned with existence and knowing, highlighting moments such as the Fool’s criticisms of Lear, and Gloucester’s continual apologies for Edmund’s existence. In relation to Edmund in the light of Renaissance humanism, Raspa asserts that ‘although he deliberately once chose evil, nature nevertheless originally programmed him to do good’ (p. 75) and it is this that, ultimately, Edmund returns to. In ‘Macbeth’s Imagination as Fatal Flaw’ Raspa asserts that Macbeth is misunderstood and that it is his allowing himself to be led by his imagination and not his reason that is his fatal flaw. Finally, in ‘Beauty and Misfortune in Romeo and Juliet’, Raspa asks ‘what Shakespeare thought of emotions in the play’ (p. 95) and asserts that the approach to feelings in the moral philosophers of Shakespeare’s time sheds light on this. This is related to beauty in the play—‘Nobody is in love who is not admittedly young and good-looking’ (p. 96)—which is explored in terms of both physical and spiritual beauty. Raspa goes on to address the influence of fate on love and the implications of this in the play, as well as relating this to writings of moral philosophy. Raspa concludes that, ‘on the Prince’s paradoxical note of the death of one happy affection at the hands of another, and on the destruction of both of them by hate, the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy concludes the counterpoint of the good and bad affections, of love and hate, joy and grief, hope and despair, and confidence and fear with which it began’ (p. 119). Shakespeare Survey 69 focused on Shakespeare and Rome, with a number of essays about the Roman plays. Robert S. Miola contributed the opening essay, ‘Past the Size of Dreaming? Shakespeare’s Rome’ (ShS 69[2016] 1–16), giving an introduction to Shakespeare’s Roman texts which offers a critical back story and touches on performance. In ‘Shakespeare and the Other Virgil: Pity and Imperium in Titus Andronicus’ (ShS 69[2016] 46–57), Patrick Gray discusses the ‘ambiguous’ reading by the ‘Harvard School’ of Virgil’s Aeneid, which emphasizes sympathy for human suffering. Gray applies this approach to Titus Andronicus, arguing that, ‘As apparent from his allusions to Virgil in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s reading of the Aeneid is in keeping with this vision’ and ‘is the touchstone and the model for his own critique of Romanitas’ (p. 46). Gray details how past criticism has viewed Shakespeare as more of an Ovidian before showing how we more appropriately find Virgil in Titus Andronicus. In ‘ “Lend me your ears”: Listening Rhetoric and Political Ideology in Julius Caesar’ (ShS 69[2016] 123–33), Esther B. Schupak seeks to ‘stand outside the traditional argument culture of academia to practise listening rhetoric with regard to the text that Shakespeare has left us, rather than choosing a stance and then picking and choosing evidence’ (p. 123) in relation to arguments surrounding the political ideology of the play—its republicanism or otherwise. Schupak uses Wayne Booth’s mode of listening rhetoric, supported by the work of Gesa E. Kirsch and Jacqueline J. Royster, and Krista Ratcliffe, in which opponents in an argument listen to each other in order to find common ground. Schupak states that she will ‘attempt to listen to those aspects of the texts that [she] do[es] not wish to hear, that contradict the tenor of [her] discussion, without moulding or manipulating those aspects so that they conform to [her] argument’ (p. 124). Schupak concludes that her commitment to listening prevents her from drawing conclusions about the play’s politics, adding that ‘the republicanism of Julius Caesar is so different from twenty-first-century political republicanism as to constitute something else entirely’, and that ‘Shakespeare’s dance with censorship further complicates any attempt to come to grips with his political point of view’ (p. 133). In ‘Plutarch’s Porcia and Shakespeare’s Portia: Two of a Kind?’ (ShS 69[2016] 134–40), George Mandel takes as his starting point the notion that Shakespeare took the interaction between Brutus and Portia in Julius Caesar II.i ‘word for word’ from Plutarch (p. 134). Mandel argues that to regard the characters as essentially the same with some minor developments ‘is to overlook some significant and far-reaching ways in which Shakespeare altered what he found in his source, and hence to underestimate greatly the difference between the two characters’ (p. 135). Mandel conducts a close study of this scene, pointing out moments of comparison with Plutarch, before concluding that ‘it is well known that Shakespeare more or less reversed some of the things he found in Plutarch’. Mandel suggests that the ‘portrayal of Brutus’s wife should be added to the list’ because ‘he presents her as almost the opposite of the character depicted in his main source’ (p. 140). In ‘ “A lean and hungry look”: Sight, Ekphrasis, Irony in Julius Caesar and Henry V’ (ShS 69[2016] 153–65), an essay that treats Julius Caesar as a history play, Ros King addresses the phrase ‘lean and hungry look’ in order to argue that ‘the ambiguity of noun-ness and verb-ness in this line exploits contemporary uncertainty concerning the physiology of sight’ (p. 153) in order to raise questions about the nature of seeing and point of view. In ‘Coriolanus and the “Common Part” ’ (ShS 69[2016] 181–97) Robert N. Watson seeks to explore ‘some roots of The Tragedy of Coriolanus: historical, philosophical, psychological, sociological, theological, even etymological’. Watson suggests that the play is underpinned by certain tragic questions, such as ‘how can a person who aspires to embody a cultural ideal … survive his entanglement in the life within and around him that compromises or contradicts that ideal?’ (p. 181). Watson conducts a close reading of the play and its historical contexts, and undertakes a statistical study of the quantity and frequency of co-/com-/col-/cor- words in Coriolanus and Shakespeare’s other plays. These words suggest community, for example, and, in the references to corn, shared (or unshared) bread. In ‘Coriolanus and the Poetics of Disgust’ (ShS 69[2016] 198–215), Bradley J. Irish observes that Shakespeare never uses the term ‘disgust’, but that ‘in Coriolanus, disgust is a key component of the relationship between Rome’s citizens and Rome’s protector’ (p. 198). Irish seeks to contribute to the body of work on early modern emotions, but rather than looking at phenomenology, he looks to theoretical and empirical research on disgust. The article has three aims: ‘to demonstrate how tending to the dynamics of disgust can elucidate Coriolanus’; ‘to provide a model of disgust’; ‘to provide an example of how literary studies of emotion might benefit from a more direct engagement with current work in the sciences’ (p. 199). Irish offers a history of disgust beginning with Darwin, and explores how disgust is linked to food. Irish then goes on to explore this in the play, looking at the fable of the belly and the ideas contained in Menenius’s speech there, before moving on to the allegory of disgust and how Coriolanus is disgusted by the people. In the final essay of the collection pertinent to this section, ‘The Household of Heroism: Metaphor, Economy and Coriolanus’, Verena Olejniczak Lobsien (ShS 69[2016] 216–27) looks at economic structures in Coriolanus. Lobsien argues that ‘economics and heroism need to be considered together’ as they are ‘linked in an interesting manner on the play’s metaphorical and allegorical plane’. In so doing, Lobsien refers to classical antiquity and the ‘classical resonance of the concept of “economy”—literally, the household’, arguing that Coriolanus ‘can only be understood if we take into account the nuanced significance oikonomía had acquired in the writings of the classical authors’ (p. 216). This is also related to Elizabethan romanitas and ‘dubious’ notions of heroism founded on it. Two chapters in Graham Holderness’s The Faith of William Shakespeare addressed tragedies. In chapter 8, ‘A Special Providence: Hamlet’, Holderness highlights the very Protestant nature of the Prince, the very Catholic nature of his father’s ghost, and the pagan nature of his quest to revenge the dead. Holderness provides a degree of contextual information from contemporary texts to suggest the environment in which Shakespeare was writing, including detail about Shakespeare’s own family background, and extracts from the Book of Common Prayer. In chapter 9, ‘ “Incomprehensible Justice”: King Lear’, Holderness argues that the play ‘seems to resonate particularly with our world’ (p. 181). Holderness offers a brief critical background, from G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire [1930] to Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary [1964], marking the contrast between Wilson Knight’s reading of Christian redemption and Kott’s reading of atheism. Holderness then details how both approaches can be found in the play. Holderness draws attention to issues of the play’s setting in a pre-Christian world (which potentially presents problems for a religious reading), and of the play’s genre (through which he also highlights the contrasts in the quarto and Folio versions). Holderness concludes the chapter by asserting ‘another interpretation altogether: that the play could be seen as reflecting the form of Christianity to which Shakespeare was in later life becoming increasingly drawn—Calvinism’ (p. 200). Moving on to journal articles, in ‘Juliet, I Prosume? or, Shakespeare and the Social Network’ (B&L 10:i[2016]), Kirk Hendershott-Kraetzer addresses the popularity of Juliet on Facebook, looking at what is being said about her and how she is represented. Hendershott-Kraetzer asks if there are patterns in these representations and engagements with the character, and what this might say about whether and how scholarly understandings of the character are shared in the broader public. For example, Hendershott-Kraetzer discusses a number of different Facebook accounts under the name of Juli* Capulet or Montague, and in addressing how Juliet’s sexuality is presented finds that ‘Juliet appears to be almost entirely heterosexual’ and that ‘this heteronormative representation is at odds with academic culture, where the queer or queer-influenced analysis of Shakespeare is well established, and with popular culture as well’ where lesbian Juliets are found in a number of different outlets. Hendershott-Kraetzer also points out that this is in contrast to presentations of Juliet’s race and nationality, which is being ‘remade’ on Facebook. Hendershott-Kraetzer aligns this kind of re-production of Juliet with fan culture and fan fiction, which is read as a way of the fan community conceiving or remaking the character, rather than the individual producing it: ‘Pack production is an effect of the process called prosumption’, where the distinction between production and consumption collapses. Gerard Passannante’s article ‘Making “Anything of Anything” in the Age of Shakespeare’ (ELH 83[2016] 989–1008) takes the famous line from King Lear ‘Nothing will come of nothing’ as its starting point. Passannante argues that Lear’s idea of nothing from nothing is rooted in the ‘common saying’ quidlibet ex quolibet (‘anything you like out of anything you like’). Passannante follows this saying from Aristotle’s Physics through various lives, into the Renaissance. Passannante, through discussion of Michel de Montaigne’s work, shows how, although this phrase became an everyday saying, it retained the original connection to philosophical debates about substance. Although Shakespeare does not use this phrase exactly, Passannante explores the confusion of anything, something, and nothing in Shakespeare’s work, especially in King Lear and The Winter’s Tale, with brief reference to Othello also. In particular Passannante discusses King Lear I.ii, where Gloucester makes something out of the letter he finds Edmund reading, and Edmund makes matter out of his own illegitimacy, ‘laying bare the dubious etymology that derives “bastardy” from “base” ’ (p. 995). In ‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Livy’s Legendary Rome’ (RES 67[2016] 250–74), John-Mark Philo reads Livy’s History of Rome as an intertext for Macbeth, seeing Macbeth as having ‘some thoroughly Roman touches’ (p. 250), particularly relating the rise and fall of the Tarquins to the story of the Macbeths. Philo details how three major sources (Hector Boece, John Bellenden, and Raphael Holinshed) for Shakespeare’s play were already imbued with Livy. Taking each source in turn, he traces the transmission of the Livian elements of Macbeth and his tyranny from Boece to Bellenden and Holinshed, and ultimately to Shakespeare. Philo goes on to draw parallels between William Painter’s Two Roman Queenes and Macbeth, arguing that ‘Painter alerted Shakespeare to the dramatically satisfying prospect of a queen who actively engages in the crimes she would have her husband commit’ (p. 261). In ‘Vanishing on Shakespeare’s Stage’ (EIC 66[2016] 405–30) Jennifer Formichelli posits that, rather than being imaginary or metaphorical, Shakespeare’s stage directions for vanishing probably did ‘in fact happen on the stage’ (p. 405). Formichelli addresses sections of text from Hamlet and Macbeth in which it is either stated directly or suggested that a person or thing vanishes: the Ghost in Hamlet I.i and the Witches in Macbeth I.iii. In response to the Ghost’s disappearance, Formichelli asks ‘why would Shakespeare introduce two serious complications around three lines of text that do nothing to advance the scene, or the plot of the play, unless he were trying out a new and unusual stage trick?’ (p. 410). Using reference to the plays, Formichelli argues that the texts suggest actual stage action, as opposed to simple walking through doors or jumping through traps, and with contextual reference to stage improvements during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Formichelli argues some kind of spectacular stage business was not just possible but actively demanded by audiences. Formichelli concludes by stating that ‘how Shakespeare accomplished it we may never know’ (p. 424) but ‘we can assume that when the Globe was constructed, some special means for creating such illusions were installed’ (p. 425). In the article ‘ “Bid the players make haste”: Speed-Making and Motion Sickness in Hamlet’ (ShakS 44[2016] 263–90), Kara Northway builds on previous studies of Shakespeare’s interest in speed to argue that ‘Hamlet showcases and problematizes acceleration, or what early moderns referred to as “speed-making” ’ (p. 264). Northway discusses early modern understandings of speed, not just as motion but also as success, and looks at early definitions of speed-making and haste, before moving on to address how speed was made in practice. Northway argues that ‘Hamlet exploits and heightens [the] potential of speed in the theater by juxtaposing a language of haste with representations of irregular physical speed levels that are punctuated by sudden accelerations of actors on stage. Consequently, scenes in the play that mismatch speedy discourse heard and action seen disorient the senses of the characters … resulting in a type of theatrical motion sickness’ (p. 264). Northway concludes by asserting that Shakespeare uses this disorientation to express doubts ‘about the possibility of individual agency over the application of speed with decorum or precision’ (p. 284). In ‘ “Remember me”: The Ghost and Its Spectators in Hamlet’ (ShakB 34[2016] 253–75), Sarah Outterson-Murphy offers a close analysis of the Ghost in Hamlet, the characters’ responses to its human physicality, the instability of such responses, and the metatheatricality resulting from this. Outterson-Murphy addresses early drama’s problems of staging the supernatural difference of ghosts, and details how Shakespeare dealt with this problem by conversely emphasizing the physicality of the Ghost as embodied on stage by a physical actor. In drawing attention to the use of the term ‘shadow’ to refer both to ghosts and actors, Outterson-Murphy seeks to ‘attend particularly to how Hamlet uses that link … to shape the interactive physical experience of playgoing’ (p. 253). There are brief references to the anonymous True Tragedy of Richard the Third and to Shakespeare’s Richard III before a close discussion of the Ghost and responses to him in Hamlet. Outterson-Murphy argues that ‘by representing an intensely physical mimetic relationship between the Ghost and its spectators, Hamlet extends those effects to playgoers’, going on to state that ‘the play’s pervasive metatheatricality thus gives its depiction of ghostliness a large significance’ (p. 255). Outterson-Murphy concludes that, because of this distinct overlap between ghosts and actors, ‘Hamlet develops the paradoxical embodiment of its stage ghost into a defense of theatrical embodiment more generally’ (p. 270). From the theoretical perspectives of race studies and queer studies, Urvashi Chakravarty addresses the presumption that race is about the distant rather than the familiar in ‘More than Kin, Less than Kind: Similitude, Strangeness, and Early Modern English Homonationalisms’ (SQ 67[2016] 14–29). Suggesting that this is an underexplored area in early modern studies, Chakravarty looks at ‘the same and the strange in early modern England’ and argues that ‘the most seemingly intimate kinship community—the family—articulates early modern England’s most apparently alien constituents’ (p. 16). Chakravarty does this through study of Hamlet—where the kin relationships are at once too close but not close enough, and Othello, where ‘the service family of Desdemona’s youth … precedes and collapses into the blood family she contracts with Othello’ (p. 26). Chakravarty also makes reference to John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. In ‘Jewel, Purse, Trash: Reckoning and Reputation in Othello’ (ShakS 44[2016] 230–62), Laura Kolb begins by invoking Thomas Rymer’s ‘mocking list of moral lessons’ in Othello. By citing instances in which language and concept suggest otherwise, Kolb asks ‘what might it mean to push back against Rymer’s critique—to claim that reckoning in Othello is, in a very real sense, mathematical?’ (p. 230). Kolb builds on ideas of Iago giving Othello new ways in which to see, but argues that ‘the mechanism Iago makes available to Othello is primarily evaluative’, going on to state that Iago encourages Othello to calculate worth. This argument draws on two areas of criticism: Kolb cites Emily Bartels’s and Daniel Vitkus’s historicist work on Venice and trade, and also Patricia Parker’s work showing that Othello is in dialogue with sixteenth-century mathematics. Kolb addresses ‘Othello’s turn to jealousy and its corollary, his altered sense of self, in light of a little-remarked aspect of the play: the strain of economically charged language that runs from Iago’s sneering epithets for Cassio and plot against Desdemona’s “credit” to Othello’s comparison of his murdered wife to a discarded “pearl” ’ (p. 231). In ‘Blushing on Cue: The Forensics of the Blush in Early Modern Drama’ (ShakB 34[2016] 233–52), Derek Dunne addresses the staging of blushes in The Rape of Lucrece, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, Antonio’s Revenge, and The White Devil, with a very brief discussion of Hamlet. Dunne begins by exploring how blushes were seen by early modern medical science and what they were considered to signify. Dunne draws on early modern texts such as Anatomy of Melancholy, George Sandy’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and The Passions of the Mind in General to establish the confusion as to the causes of the blush and the various reasons for the blush that were propounded by early modern scholars, arguing that ‘such a lack of clarity surrounding the early modern blush is ubiquitous, and as we shall see, this can all too often lead to its manipulation by those skilled in the art of interpretation’ (p. 234) and, thus, to miscarriages of justice. Specifically in relation to Othello, Dunne argues that ‘the legibility of the face is at once obvious and inscrutable, as Othello reads his wife’s features as a book on which her unchastity is writ large in invisible letters’, which ‘ties in with the larger question of how Shakespeare expects his audience to interpret the blackness of Othello himself’ (p. 240). Dunne puts forward the idea that the blush is a sign of guilt, highlighting how ‘as the only bloodless murder in the play, Desdemona’s death equates paleness with female chastity, leaving blood and the blushes it engenders as the source of corruption and sinfulness’ (p. 242). In ‘We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies’ (SQ 67[2016] 104–24), Ian Smith draws on recent events in America that have impacted on the dialogue surrounding race. Smith seeks to ‘initiate a dialogue about Shakespeare and race that sustains the vital connections among the “world, the text, and the critic” … making Shakespeare not just relevant but accessible for our time and to use Shakespeare’s own work to generate the terms of the investigation’ (p. 105). Smith begins by discussing the proliferation of literary criticism on Hamlet through the years, and reasons that it is our identification with Hamlet that underlies this. However, Smith goes on to cite Michael Neill’s argument that Othello has now taken the place of Hamlet ‘because of global political shifts that have overtaken contemporary life’. Smith links the two plays through their protagonists’ desire to have their stories told, and seeks to define who the ‘we’ is in Hazlitt’s assertion that ‘it is we who are Hamlet’. Smith asserts that critics’ failure to remark on the whiteness of Hamlet ‘is a form of protectionism, precluding scrutiny of racialized whiteness, refusing to make it visible and subject to critique, and foreclosing self-inquiry into the nature and purpose of critics’ own identification with Hamlet’. In the light of this, Smith then goes on to ask ‘where are the voices proclaiming, “It is we who are Othello”?’ (p. 107). Smith offers a close reading of the ‘race war’ in Othello which ‘educates us primarily about the correlation of race and violence, indeed, about racism as a form of violent interaction that leaves the targeted individual sensing an assault on his or her humanity’ (p. 110). Smith goes on to argue that ‘Shakespeare’s metaphor of race as “war” captures the inherent violence of unresolved racial interaction and the social division that ensues’ (p. 113), relating this directly to contemporary America. Ultimately, Smith discusses how this discussion of race, post-racialism, white privilege, and Shakespeare is expressed in the academic world of literary studies, detailing his experience in a conference seminar where it was asserted that ‘Othello is not about race’ (p. 120). Smith concludes by asserting that ‘speaking and writing about race within the discipline requires unpacking one’s white positioning to reach toward new forms of racial knowledge. Speaking of Othello is an invitation to see and engage from a conscious, racialized perspective … in order to better understand race, its dependence on contested categories of difference, and the contractual complicity exercised by the dominant culture in sustaining white innocence and a strategically requisite ignorance of oppression’ (p. 122). In ‘Othello, Colin Powell, and Post-Racial Anachronisms’ (SQ 67[2016] 68–83), Kyle Grady asserts that ‘In writing Othello, Shakespeare profoundly complicates its ostensible source, Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi’ (p. 68). Grady highlights some of the changes Shakespeare makes which create this complexity in his play, highlighting the complexity in relation to race and ethnic difference. Grady details the critical notion that, among other things, Othello’s social status and the good job ‘contravene’ the play’s racialism and seeks in this article to refute this. Grady argues that, ‘whereas in the contemporary moment this notion takes the form of post-racialism, this trend in early modern scholarship could be said to employ a pre-racial orientation’ (p. 69). Grady uses the contemporary example of the former US Secretary of State Colin Powell to show how the pre-racial orientation works in relation to Othello, arguing that Powell provides ‘an apt contemporary comparison’ (p. 72). Turning to the Roman plays, in ‘Caesar in Elsinore and Elsewhere: Topicality and Roman History’ (EMLS Special Issue [2016], ‘Rome and Home’), Laurie Johnson writes that the ‘coincidence of [the name Julius Caesar] enabled Shakespeare’s company to make a series of thinly-veiled references to the prominent lawyer and eventual Chancellor of the Exchequer who also bore this name’ (p. 1). Johnson speculates over which references to the Roman leader may also be read as topical references to the lawyer. A biography of Sir Julius is offered, detailing the various roles he held and how he was viewed by others. Johnson argues that the coincidence of the name ‘gave itself to moments of occasional topical mirth’ (p. 8) and, in relation to Julius Caesar, argues that ‘it is difficult to imagine that audience members would be deaf to the potential for any of the numerous barbs directed at Caesar to also sound as jibes at the judge who presided over their “Poor Man’s Court” ’ (p. 10). Johnson finds potential references to Sir Julius in 1 Henry IV (attributed to Thomas Heywood), and in all three parts of the Henry VI trilogy, Richard II and Richard III, Hamlet, in Julius Caesar itself, and finally in Cymbeline. Miranda Fay Thomas’s article, ‘Political Acts and Political Acting: Roman Gesture and Julius Caesar’ (EMLS Special Issue [2016]), connects ‘Shakespeare’s self-conscious theatricality of action with concerns about the increasingly performative nature of politics, both in Caesar’s Rome and in Elizabethan England’. Thomas focuses in particular on hands, addressing the manipulative and ephemeral nature of gestures such as hand-shaking. Thomas argues that Julius Caesar ‘reveals not only how hands can alter the course of history, but how such theatrical practices themselves aid and abet such a diversion’ (p. 1). Fay discusses three examples of handshakes in I.iii, II.i, and III.i; the use of hands in the assassination of Caesar; and off-stage examples of gesture that are important to the play’s plot. Thomas relates use of gesture to the play’s source material, referencing Plutarch and Suetonius. Thomas concludes by stating that ‘Brutus’ suicide is his final gesture, although it surpasses ephemeral gesture itself, becoming action and the ultimate sign of Roman constancy and allegiance to duty. Yet, the crux of the matter is this: for the character, suicide is an action; but for the actor, it is a gesture … As soon as the audience witnesses a unambiguously sincere act in a play that consistently toys with ambivalent actions, the play ends, and the ultimate illusion of constancy is revealed’ (p. 24). In ‘ “Of higher state / Than monarch, king or world’s great potentate’: The Name of Caesar in Early Modern Drama’ (EMLS Special Issue [2016]), Domenico Lovascio offers ‘a comprehensive and comparative view of Caesar’s self-naming in early modern English drama’ (p. 1). First addressing Caesar’s use of his name in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Lovascio then moves on to look at the significance attached to the name more broadly in medieval and early modern English drama in terms of late Elizabethan and Jacobean political anxiety. Lovascio acknowledges theatrical practicalities of self-naming but argues that the significance of Caesar’s self-naming in ‘Caesar’ plays ‘is not so much … third-person self-referencing in general as the specific insistence with which he and other characters repeat his name’ (p. 3). With close reference to Shakespeare’s play, Lovascio argues that the frequent references to Caesar’s name ‘must be interpreted as aimed at the creation of a larger-than-life identity and an immortal legacy’ (p. 4). However, Lovascio finds that ‘Caesar-the-man seems to end being overwhelmed by the greatness of Caesar-the-myth’ (p. 8) and links this discrepancy between portrayal and reality of a leader to the image and reality of Elizabeth I which would have been familiar to the Elizabethan audience. In the second half of the article Lovascio refers to other medieval and early modern texts that also show this self-referencing of Caesar’s name with similar results, and Lovascio finally concludes that such texts and Shakespeare’s own Julius Caesar present Caesar ‘by no means as the positive model for monarchs proposed elsewhere by early modern English literature and culture’ (pp. 24–5). In ‘Caesar as Comic Antichrist: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the Medieval English Stage Tyrant’ (CompD 50[2016] 1–31), Patrick Gray aligns Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with the character of Augustus Caesar in medieval English mystery plays: Gray argues that ‘as a type of Antichrist, he is a foil for the future Christ. His failure sets the stage for a different and paradoxically more powerful Messiah’ (p. 2). Gray details conflicting responses to the historical Caesar and Shakespeare’s representation, citing nineteenth-century critics such as Hazlitt and George Bernard Shaw, as well as looking in detail at the differences between Shakespeare’s character and the character in the source material, Plutarch’s Lives. In addressing the idea of the ‘two Caesars’, Gray looks at Seneca’s Hercules, building on and challenging the arguments of Harry Morgan Ayres. Gray asserts that ‘the analogy to be drawn, however, is not between Caesar and Hercules himself but between Shakespeare’s Caesar and Shakespeare’s comic actors, Moth and Bottom’ (p. 10). Turning then to the Gospels, Gray reads Shakespeare’s Caesar against the story of Christ, arguing that ‘the story of Caesar’s rise and fall lends itself by nature to an intertextual typology of Christ and Antichrist’ (p. 11) and that ‘Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar maps the story of Caesar’s assassination onto the familiar framework of Christ’s Passion in order to emphasize telling points of incongruity’ (p. 18). Gray concludes that the ‘most likely source for the distinctive strain of foolhardy, comic braggadocio in Shakespeare’s characterization of Julius Caesar … is neither Seneca’s Hercules, nor the Caesar of the Gospels, but instead the stage tyrants of medieval cycle plays’ (p. 19). In ‘The Compassionate Stoic: Brutus as Accidental Hero’ (ShJE 152[2016] 30–44), Patrick Gray argues that ‘Shakespeare depicts Brutus as torn between two opposed visions of heroism: Stoic and proto-Christian’, that Brutus’s ideal self is ‘the quasi-mythical figure of the Stoic sapiens’ (p. 30) but he finds himself undermined by his compassion. This is most starkly revealed in his response to the death of his wife, Portia. In ‘The Changing Faces of Virtue: Plutarch, Machiavelli and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’ (EMLS Special Issue [2016]) Patrick Ashby discusses The Prince, The Discourses, and The Art of War to show how ‘radical linguistic and conceptual uncertainties’ in Coriolanus are ‘generated by political pragmatism of the kind promoted by Machiavelli’ (p. 2). Ashby argues that Shakespeare’s interest in Machiavelli actually led him to misrepresent his Plutarchan source material. In ‘Re-humanising Coriolanus: Community and the Ethical Self’ (Sederi 26[2016] 85–107), María Luisa Pascual Garrido focuses on the ‘problematic interpretation of subjectivity as self-sovereignty’ in the play and in criticism of the play. Garrido details the tradition of conflicting humanist and historicist readings of the play and character, before attempting to ‘bridge the gap’ (p. 87) between them. Building on Andy Mousley’s Re-Humanising Shakespeare [2007], and using new theories of community, Garrido argues that ‘a less self-assured humanist reading of Coriolanus is possible, one which includes a new definition of the human on the basis of lack and vulnerability’ (p. 88). (f) Late Plays Study of the late plays is always decidedly focused on The Tempest, closely followed by The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, with Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and Two Noble Kinsmen receiving far less attention. That trend continues this year, and The Tempest has received by far the most attention. Works studying Shakespeare’s romances as a whole have also been lacking; moreover, no decided theme can be discerned, with works covering a wide range of mostly well-trodden areas of research and discussion such as postcolonialism and The Tempest, and the role of faith in The Winter’s Tale. Surprising recurring points of research this year are dreams/visions, time, and music. Maryam Beyad and Ali Salami’s collection on Shakespeare and culture, Culture-Blind Shakespeare, aims at examining the play’s cross-cultural and regional boundaries. The book includes two chapters on The Tempest, and one which engages more broadly with the late romances, specifically examining Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. Narges Bayat’s chapter on the late romances, ‘Temptation and Love in Shakespeare’s Romances’, argues that the late romances embrace aspects of both the tragedies and the comedies. Bayat builds on John Vyvyan’s work Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty [1961], which argued that Christian philosophy encompassing Platonic conceptions of love and beauty was Shakespeare’s central and overriding theme. For Bayat, the primary driving force in both Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale is the hero’s ‘lack of faith in the power of love, which allegorically stands for a quality within their soul’ (p. 82). Bayat argues that the tragedy of these stories reflects the tragedies of Macbeth or Othello, but in the late plays the heroes are redeemed by their eventual capitulation to love and to their own better instincts (mediated through good advice), which sets the stage for their final reunions with their wives and friends. Beyad and Salami’s collection also contains two chapters on The Tempest. The first, ‘Language Functions in The Tempest’, by Hossein Pirnajmuddin and Omid Amani, discusses Roman Jakobson’s analysis of language and Prospero’s deft use of language to self-fashion his identity, as well as determining other characters’ identities for the audience. A second chapter on The Tempest, ‘Ambivalence and Mimicry in The Tempest’, by Ali Salami and Amir Riahi, discusses the role of mimicry in the play, specifically in relation to Caliban and colonialism. For Salami and Riahi, while postcolonial discourses may suggest that Caliban’s ‘mimicry might be evocative of his disempowerment and immobility’, conversely it is also possible for mimicry to ‘function as a powerful tool that allows him to disclose the ambivalence that colonial ideology seeks to conceal’ (p. 104). Continuing debate about Caliban and the island, specifically relating to the ongoing use and critique of postcolonial theory, dominates discussion of The Tempest. Locating the island that is at the centre of The Tempest, and understanding its geographical and cultural context, also continues to be a source of discussion. A recurring point of research on The Tempest has been the island, and its meaning has been questioned. Is it literal and/or metaphorical? Is it Mediterranean or Atlantic, real or imagined? Indeed, as Jennifer Linhart Wood points out in her article ‘Sounding Spaces: The Tempest’s Uncanny Near-East Echoes’ (ShakS 44[2016] 173–9), the ‘geographical challenge’ is compounded by the often ‘confusing—if not downright contradictory—clues about the location of the island’ within the play’s text and music (p.173). By examining the first two of Caliban’s scored musical pieces ‘Come unto these yellow sands’ and ‘Full fathom five’, Wood argues that the audience would have been able to hear echoes of other works set not in either the world or the western Mediterranean, but in the Near East—specifically at the border between West and East (pp. 173–4). For Wood the description of this location is influenced by Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’, and like that poem is an ‘intermediary space’, between East and West. This location is strange, foreign, and exotic, yet familiar to some in the audience because it echoes earlier descriptions of foreign lands on the border between East and West. The music in The Tempest thus reflects the island itself, a borderland between East and West that is both familiar and strange, but which is also familiar in its strangeness. Listeners who recognized ‘Marlowe’s poem through Shakespeare’s “yellow sands,” “corrall,” and “pearle” would have heard in these words sung by Ariel yet another reverberating echo of Marlowe’s poem’ due to the presence of ‘Ariel’s water-nymph consort of “spirits” [that] enacts Marlowe’s “Sweet singing Meremaids” when they vocalize the bell-refrain to conclude “Full Fathom Five” ’ (p. 176). Postcolonial critiques of The Tempest and their discussion of Caliban’s ancestry, ethnicity, and the appropriation of ‘his’ land are turned on their head by Kelsey Ridge in her new work examining ownership of the island, ‘ “This island’s mine”: Ownership of the Island in The Tempest’ (SEN 16[2016] 231–45). Ridge suggests a new character as the true ‘postcolonial claimant’ of the island: Ariel (p. 231). In doing so, Ridge follows the argument of Robin H. Wells (Shakespeare on Masculinity [2001]), who showed that taking the view that white colonizers had taken from the ‘native’ Caliban in effect favours an earlier colonizer over the claims of the actual original inhabitants, who were in fact tortured and enslaved by Caliban’s mother Sycorax (p. 232). Ridge argues that Prospero avidly uses the history of tyranny and oppression of Sycorax to keep the original inhabitants, the spirits represented by Ariel, in line, while using actual pain to maintain his control over Caliban. As Ridge puts it, ‘Prospero can coast on a history of repression to oppress the local inhabitants without as much effort, though it does not mean he oppresses them less’ than Sycorax (p. 235). Ridge also builds upon the pertinent critiques of the postcolonial theories made by Ania Loomba (Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism [2002]). For example, the text never states the ethnic identity of Caliban, and yet contemporary productions and studies almost universally describe him as a man of colour, usually of African appearance in spite of the notable blue eyes of his mother. Although Ridge points out that ‘her blue eyes’ do not ‘disprove her North African lineage, and indeed they may serve to call attention to the similarity of her to the other colonizers’, it stands as the only real suggestion as to the colouring of either character (p. 237). Ridge suggests that the noting of the foreign origin of Sycorax and Caliban is a powerful counterpoint to those who have positioned Caliban as a symbol of oppressed and colonized people, when under ‘the theory of first occupancy, the true owners of the island’ would be the spirits of the island, primarily represented in the text by Ariel. Ariel is the origin of the ‘most powerful magic in the play—creating the titular tempest’, and yet these characters are almost ‘entirely ignored by the characters of the play and by the post-colonial thinkers’ (p. 238). Indeed Ariel is instead usually positioned as Prospero’s accomplice, implicitly or explicitly complicit in the seeming crime of colonialism against Caliban, with most comfortably ignoring the foreignness of Sycorax, which complicates the colonial picture. Ridge strongly contends that ‘that there is more than one colonising force in the text, that the layers of power include even those who are abused abusing others’ (p. 242). The Tempest also recently made an appearance in a discussion of witchcraft and the Little Ice Age in an examination of climate change, and human reactions to it, by Gerald Stanhill, ‘Shakespeare’s Tempest, Witchcraft and the Little Ice Age’ (Weather 71[2016] 100–2). Ecology, understanding of storms and weather, and their discussion in The Tempest, has continued with this brief work, though instead turning to cultural comprehension of climate change during the Renaissance. A trio of articles in Notes and Queries this year briefly explored textual moments from The Tempest. First, Tom Clayton examines ‘Two Textual Cruxes in The Tempest’ (N&Q 63[2016] 436–41). Second, Walter Evans and Blaire Zeiders, in ‘The Fowle Witch Sycorax as “Hoope” in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’ (N&Q 63[2016] 441–6), comment on the avian references in the play as ‘context for considering the possible meanings of Sycorax’s ultimate fate’, given the description by Prospero that ‘The fowle Witch Sycorax, who with Age and Envy / Was growne into a hoope’ (p. 446). For Evans and Zeiders these references link and emphasize the connections between ‘sorcery, hierarchy, and family with avian-inspired language’ (p. 446). Finally, Daniel Kaczyński, in ‘A Commentary on The Tempest, II.i.154: “No use of … corn, or wine or oil” ’ (N&Q 63[2016] 446–8), discusses the use of biblical allusions in Gonzalo’s description of an imaginary commonwealth, and Shakespeare’s critique within the text of his description by Antonio and Sebastian. The topics of plantation, commonwealth, and sovereignty in this passage have often drawn discussion in postcolonial interpretations of the play. Kaczyński notes that within the text Shakespeare seems to be contrasting ideas of legitimate (God-given) sovereignty with those who lack the signs of God’s bounty in the Bible. Katharine Steele Brokaw’s discussion of music on the early modern stage, Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, considers two of Shakespeare’s late plays, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, in relation to sacred and profane music. Brokaw’s discussion foregrounds how Shakespeare’s works are here interconnected with contemporaneous concerns about music, performance, and spirituality—particularly as represented by the ideas of harmony and discord in music, plot, and contemporary society. Brokaw examines the contemporaneous appearance in 1611 of religious and musical texts, the performances of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, the printing of the King James Bible, and William Byrd’s publication of his final songbook, Psalms, Songs, and Sonnets, which ‘may be mere coincidence, but they were shaped by similar forces’ (p. 188). Brokaw is seeking to use music to explore Shakespeare’s faith, and rather than arguing about his exact denomination, she seeks to suggest that his ‘religious ambiguity’, a popular topic in recent years, can be heard in the songs in his late plays (p. 189). Brokaw argues that ‘the religious diversity—even inclusiveness—that many see as characteristic of these plays is most perfectly rendered musically, where the metaphorical power of social concord and the persistent idea of universal harmony lend extra charge to performed songs’ (p. 189). For Brokaw, the music of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale reflects ‘ongoing attempts by the clergy and laity to compromise regarding the use of music in the early Jacobean church’, and that therefore these works resonate ‘with the urgency of religious and social cooperation’ (p. 189). Music is also central to Rafele Cutolo’s chapter, ‘Motionless Bodies: Shakespeare’s Songs for Sleep and Death’ (in Fiorato and Drakakis, eds., Performing the Renaissance Body: Essays on Drama, Law, and Representation, pp. 212–26). While Cutolo is more focused on other works, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he does discuss Imogen’s false death and the response of her brothers and their adoptive father—specifically the dirge ‘Fear no more’ (p. 220). Tom Lindsay’s article, ‘ “Which first was mine own king”: Caliban and the Politics of Service and Education in The Tempest’ (SP 113[2016] 397–423), discusses the role of Caliban’s experiences prior to the arrival of Prospero, and his later education by Prospero, in his actions, which are sometimes seemingly driven by contradictory motives and beliefs. For Lindsay, it is Caliban’s education and experience that accounts for his ability to assume different postures during The Tempest. According to Lindsay, ‘Caliban entered [Prospero’s schoolroom] as an apolitical subject committed to a non-hierarchical and egalitarian worldview, and he changed profoundly as a result of his experiences there.’ According to this reading, Caliban has developed and changed as result of being exposed to Prospero’s education, which is like England’s ‘early modern aristocratic household and humanist schoolroom’, which were ‘designed to inculcate in their subjects a hierarchal worldview and a flexible set of capacities for political action—submissiveness and assertiveness’ (p. 400). Lindsay’s reading emphasizes the inherent ‘conflicting expectations that governed the careers of young servants’, who were groomed and trained for independent action and upward mobility, ‘curiosity and intellectual assertiveness’, while simultaneously remaining obedient within the strict hierarchy of the schoolroom and household (p. 406). This ‘interplay between empowerment and subordination’ which Caliban displays was shared by both schoolroom materials and broader manuals and beliefs about how young men should be educated in early modern England (p.407). In the case of Caliban, however, these ideas are complicated by the different education Prospero gives his daughter, Miranda, whom he trained ‘for political Rule’, while they ‘educated Caliban simply to make him articulate and well-behaved’ (p. 410). Intending to train him as merely a menial servant, neither Prospero nor Miranda takes into account Caliban’s desires or predilections, which as Lindsay points out tend towards the ‘active and outdoorsy’ rather than the domestic and menial (p. 411). Miranda and Prospero fail to account for Caliban’s experience and education in their household, his disillusionment, or his political ambitions, because they ‘only ever supposed’ that Caliban would ‘be a well-behaved student and servant’ (p. 423). Leontes’ fall into jealous rage, loss of his family, and the restoration of his family and faith through humility and submission to Paulina’s dictates is always a popular theme for those examining The Winter’s Tale, as seen above in the chapter on The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline by Narges Bayat. For Lauren Robertson, in ‘ “Ne’er was dream so like a waking”: The Temporality of Dreaming and the Depiction of Doubt in The Winter’s Tale’ (ShakS 44[2016] 291–315), this examination turns to the concepts of dreaming and doubt in the play, with a focus on how seventeenth-century audiences would have experienced and interpreted dreams and scepticism in the play. Robertson seeks to engage with different levels of society, particularly both those educated audience members familiar with Pyrrhonism and with ‘the less erudite uncertainties that early modern English theatregoers would have brought with them into the playhouse’, and then in turn ‘how Shakespeare engages, displays, and questions those associations in this play’ (p. 293). Robertson claims that, ‘In his reaction to the statue and the questionably miraculous and ultimately unresolved return of his wife, Leontes embraces not the faith to which Paulina urges him, but skepticism itself as an ethical code’ (p. 293). For Robertson, Leontes’ ‘ability to resist making certain judgements about the statue of Hermione offers an education for the play’s spectators in the process of living with, and resting in, uncertainty’ (p.293). Questions of reality versus dreams come up again and again in relation to Leontes and Hermione. For Robertson, Leontes reduces Hermione to a dream figure, one which he perfectly and instantaneously comprehends, and then, ‘His error in judgment about Hermione’s infidelity’ having happened in ‘a kind of dream state’, he does not allow enough time to pass to ‘recognize the essential uncertainty surrounding the question he asks about his wife’ (p. 303). Robertson contrasts this with Antigonus’s ‘recognition of doubt’, which ‘is concomitant with the process of waking’ (p. 302). Time, dreaming, waking, reality, and uncertainty form the primary motivators of Leontes’ narrative, resolved and dramatized by the final scene in the play, which ‘dramatizes Leontes’s recognition of his own uncertainty about Hermione in the form of his selfconscious statements of doubt regarding the nature of the statue’ (p. 308). This uncertainty contrasts strongly with the dreamlike and instantaneous beliefs which Leontes displayed earlier in the play. Leontes seems more comfortable with uncertainty, or as Robertson states, ‘This possibility of belief within the confines of skepticism, as dramatically represented in The Winter’s Tale, is the recognition and collection of doubt throughout one’s waking existence’ (p. 309). J.K. Barret’s Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England examines both Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. Barret argues that in Cymbeline ‘the future is embedded in the play’s aesthetic, narrative, and grammatical dimensions’, which she argues means that ‘the question of temporality obtains powerfully on the level of artistic production’ (p. 152). Barret suggests that ‘Cymbeline generates a unique perspective’—what she calls ‘anticipatory nostalgia—that privileges the role that grammatical and imaginative constructions can play in accessing possible futures’ (p. 152). In particular Barret focuses on the role of the concept of future in the play, comparing it to the concepts of first and second future in early modern England. According to Barret, ‘Cymbeline illuminates a complex temporal perspective whereby the usual triad of time—past, present, and future—becomes characterized not by discrete, linear difference, but rather, by the overlap of the three’ (p. 151). Second future or future perfect ‘registers as fact a past that has not happened yet as seen from the perspective of the future—it is, then, the past tense of another time frame’ (p. 164). Future and its ties to the past and present, the removal of possibilities, are themes that recur throughout the play, from the very name Posthumous, to the kidnapping of Cymbeline’s sons, to their restoration at the conclusion of the play. For Barret, ‘The second future displaces the potential for present pleasure. Anticipatory nostalgia disregards pleasure in the moment of experience, favoring the potential for retrospective enjoyment’ (p. 170). Barret also touches on the question of temporal ages and pastoralism in the depiction of Wales in Act III, and its contrast with both Cymbeline’s court and the Italian scenes at Philario’s house. A notable point of discussion here is the dirge for Imogen when she is disguised as Fidele (another name with notable meaning for its character), ‘Fear no more’. In this scene the brothers, perhaps aping or echoing their adopted father Belisarius, focus on the role of tyranny in the outside world, a tyranny that impinges on their pastoral home, and seems as constant a threat from their perspective as natural threats such as the heat of the sun (p. 157). Barret also notes that for Belisarius the boys are indelibly marked by their own lineage, that their ‘valor is somehow innate’ (p. 170). Once more the name of a character is tied to the character’s origin and role within the story. Barret’s argument succeeds best in discussing how Belisarius is using narratives about his own past to transmit to his adopted sons the need to have a future which may one day become their own narrative past. As Barret establishes, the boys are ‘not content simply to spend those dark Decembers spinning Belarius’s old yarns’, but neither are they consumed with their own present (p. 171). They are instead obsessed with how in their distant future they will themselves reminisce about their past. In order to establish this future nostalgia, the brothers ‘insist that their stories must be their own, and that they must derive from experience’ (p. 171). At its heart this obsession with experience and the anticipation of future nostalgia seems, as Barret argues, ‘at odds with their disinterest in the present—they are … more focused on anticipating the present moment from the future than they are on the present itself’ (p. 171). This ‘future retrospection and anticipatory nostalgia’ is not alone within the canon of Shakespearean histories of Britain. For Barret, it seems ‘akin to something like the logic of the Saint Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, in which Henry motivates his troops by claiming that their present action will grant them a place in the nation’s collective future memory’ (p. 171). At the conclusion of the fourth chapter, Barret argues that ‘artistic production—most conspicuous … as narrative—is a central force in the play’ (p. 175), and that this narrative force, far from being a cause of shame, instead ‘works actively for all categories of the future, but is most interesting, perhaps, for its claims to an awareness of the flexibility of temporal boundaries’ (p. 176). This flexibility in understanding allows for the chapter’s claim of anticipatory nostalgia, a concept which by its nature transgresses temporal boundaries. Maurice Hunt’s article on ‘Jonson vs. Shakespeare: The Roman Plays’ (BJJ 23[2016] 75–100) all too briefly addresses Cymbeline, focusing instead on the more famous Roman plays: Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. However, he briefly points to the use of terms associated with miracle in a play which, like Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar, contains ‘anachronistic Christian allusions’ (p. 76). Sophie Duncan’s article ‘Shakespeare and Vampires at the Fin de Siècle’ (FemT 17[2016] 63–82) draws a connection between a famous production of Cymbeline in Victorian London, the staging of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and fantasies about, and eroticization of, the sleeping woman as a figure of vulnerability. Duncan’s argument is that the portrayal of Imogen by the famous Victorian actress Ellen Terry ‘would be defined as much by its multiple literary resonances as its popularity, as her “perfect” princess became a catalyst for the most famous piece of fin de siècle Gothic fiction’ (p. 65). Duncan points to the staging and its enthusiastic reception, and the resonances of that scene in the writing and staging of Dracula. According to Duncan, ‘there was clearly a substantial relationship between Irving and Terry’s and Stoker’s “stagings” of the bedchamber scene’; and Duncan noted that the success of both works and their pivotal scenes ‘reflects the intensity of contemporary interest in liminal states and transgressive sexuality’ (p. 71). Connections between modern literary genres, such as fin-de-siècle Gothic or magical realism, and Shakespeare’s late plays, and/or their staging, have seemingly disappeared in recent years from the discussion of Shakespeare’s romances. Also missing this year are notable works on Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Two Noble Kinsmen. Always the least studied and written about of the late plays, these works are often dismissed it seems in part because of their problematic nature, with authors focusing on the more thoughtfully conceived plays, such as The Tempest, The Winter’s Take, and Cymbeline. (g) Comedies Only one monograph focused solely on Shakespeare’s comedies in 2016. Bart van Es’s Shakespeare’s Comedies: A Very Short Introduction is an engaging, accessible work that promises to prove invaluable to undergraduates or scholars whose ‘home’ discipline lies in another field. The monograph is split into seven sections: two function as the introduction and conclusion, while five numbered chapters address a particular theme. In the introduction, van Es emphasizes that the categorization of Shakespeare’s comedies is neither simple nor stable—an argument which is demonstrated by the fact that he often discusses four plays that are not included in this section of YWES: The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well. Various influences on Shakespearean comedies are also outlined, in addition to a section on performance. The first chapter, ‘World’, explores the similarities between forest and city settings in Shakespearean comedy, arguing that ‘Shakespeare’s forests are like courts and his cities are like forests’ (p. 26). Chapter 2, ‘Wit’, meanwhile defines this quality as clever wordplay which causes amusement, but can also shape the plot or emotion of some of Shakespeare’s comedies. There is a consideration as to why certain types of comic wit remain amusing while others do not, as well as a discussion of the influence that Robert Armin’s replacement of Will Kemp might have had upon the type of wit that Shakespeare employed in his comedies from 1600 onwards. Chapter 3 is entitled ‘Love’; it outlines the influence of classical and contemporary comedies upon Shakespeare’s portrayals of love, but also suggests that the playwright is unique in his introduction of ‘relationship trouble’ (p. 54) in his comic works. The fourth chapter, ‘Time’, highlights how The Comedy of Errors is the only one of Shakespeare’s comedies to fully fit the idea of comic unity, while Twelfth Night and As You Like It present a much less realistic view of time. Van Es suggests that time is the key factor which helps to distinguish between what constitutes a Shakespearean ‘comedy’ and what does not, as the later plays resolve issues over a greater period of time than the earlier comic ones. Chapter 5, ‘Character’, argues that Shakespeare’s characters are relatively simplistic in his early comedies, but become much more complex in his later ones. Some comic characters, such as Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, are also suggested to switch seamlessly between simplistic and complex characterization. The final section of the monograph then reiterates the notion that comedy is not a stable genre in Shakespeare, and highlights how particular tragedies also contain elements of comedy. Shakespeare’s Comedies: A Very Short Introduction is not designed to contain detailed critical discussions of plays, but it admirably achieves the difficult feat of providing an overview of its topic while piquing the interest of the reader through the short discussions of the comedies which it does offer. Written with an engaging style and clarity, this monograph promises to be of assistance to a vast number of students and scholars who wish to get a firm grounding in Shakespearean comedy. Other monographs devote a number of chapters to plays which are relevant to this section. John Kerrigan’s Shakespeare’s Binding Language features four chapters which examine Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, and The Merchant of Venice with varying degrees of focus. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the use of oaths in Love’s Labour’s Lost, with the first of these, ‘Swearing in Jest: Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (pp. 67–96), drawing upon contemporary concerns as to whether an oath could be kept if the swearer did not comprehend its full extent. Kerrigan links the oaths sworn at the beginning of the play to matriculation oaths, and argues that ‘Whether they will fast, go without sleep, and avoid the company of women is already less the question than whether they will keep their word to do so’ (p. 79). Chapter 4, ‘A World-Without-End Bargain: Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (pp. 97–124), offers a close reading of how the female characters within the aforementioned comedy swear with varying degrees of seriousness, which creates ‘an apprehensive scepticism about the likeliness of [love vows] being kept’ (p. 124). Chapter 6, ‘Time and Money: The Comedy of Errors and The Merchant of Venice’ (pp. 146–73), examines how debt and time are interlinked in these two works. It argues that the date by which debt is due to be paid is of extreme importance in both dramas, but particularly in the latter play, where it functions as a vital sticking-point: ‘What catches Antonio is the due date’ (p. 156). Chapter 7, ‘Shylock and Wedlock: Carnal Bonds’ (pp. 174–208), continues to examine The Merchant of Venice, with a focus upon how Shylock’s oaths become increasingly more serious and problematic for him to break on account of his religion. A fascinating exploration of the early modern societal awareness of specifically Jewish vows supports chapter 7’s argument very convincingly. Kerrigan combines close textual analysis with contextual information in a manner which creates four complex, compelling arguments surrounding the comedies he discusses. Six monographs devote one of their chapters to Shakespeare’s comedies. The broadest overview of comedy is offered by the third chapter of Simon Palfrey and Emma Smith’s monograph Shakespeare’s Dead, which offers an engaging and accessible discussion that will appeal to the general public and first-year undergraduates alike. ‘Death in Comedy’ (pp. 43–71) argues that death is omnipresent in Shakespearean comedy, and supplements its argument with multiple illustrations of early modern source texts concerning death. Smith and Palfrey’s work is especially useful for those who are developing an interest in Shakespearean comedy, for it offers readings of passages which are helpful to the reader without being overwhelming. Four monographs feature one chapter which analyses The Merchant of Venice. Chapter 7 of Graham Holderness’s monograph The Faith of William Shakespeare is an admirable piece of scholarship, with its lucid prose and illuminating close readings. Entitled ‘ “The Quality of Mercy”: The Merchant of Venice’ (pp. 137–59), Holderness’s chapter offers the argument that Shylock’s behaviour at the beginning of the play occurs in response to Bassanio’s and Antonio’s dismissive attitude towards him. Even more compellingly, Holderness asserts that Portia offers Shylock ‘the Jewish concept of rachamim, compassion … as much as the Christian concept of mercy’ (p. 134) in the trial scene, which gives him the opportunity to demonstrate the interconnected nature of Judaism and Christianity. Shylock, however, decides ‘to assimilate to the atavistic demonic identity rather than assume that of the liberal modern citizen’ (p. 135), which causes his subsequent punishment. The second chapter of Donovan Sherman’s monograph Second Death: Theatricalities of the Soul in Shakespeare’s Drama is entitled ‘Governing the Wolf: Soul and Space in The Merchant of Venice’ (pp. 43–78). It begins with a fascinating consideration of how early modern society understood metempsychosis, or the movement of the soul to a new body just before death, then moves on to the comedy. Sherman argues that while Portia suggests that the soul is transferrable, Shylock implies otherwise. The latter character is also suggested to ‘fulfil … two seemingly paradoxical purposes: he reveals the soul’s impossibility by expressing himself as a soul’ (p. 68, italics in original). ‘Faith, Morality, and Contractual Politics: The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure’ (pp. 101–24) is the title of chapter 4 of Andrew Moore’s monograph Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes. Moore asserts that the former of these plays problematizes the way in which politics and religion relate to each other. After outlining Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’s viewpoints on the destabilizing threat that religion can pose to politics, Moore argues that Shylock’s real fault is not his lack of forgiveness, but his unwillingness to accept money in exchange for Antonio’s flesh. As the Venetian court prizes materialism, it is unsure how to react to Shylock’s desire for something that cannot be purchased, so it responds through violence. Moore contends that as Shylock leaves the stage, ‘Venice is not victorious: Shylock has exposed a gap in its account of justice’ (p. 112). Around half of chapter 3 of Brian Walsh’s monograph Unsettled Toleration is of interest to this section. ‘ “O just but severe law!”: Weighing Puritanism in Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure’ (pp. 86–128) offers a compelling examination of Malvolio’s apparent Puritanism. Walsh argues that while Malvolio is not necessarily a Puritan, ‘what is important is that he cannot be separated from the charge of Puritanism’ (p. 105, italics in original). Through examinations of how the identity of Puritanism is pushed time and again upon Malvolio, Walsh deftly demonstrates that Shakespeare ‘explores the ways that heightened attention to religious difference … warps communities and imperils social harmony’ (p. 126). Many edited collections also feature multiple chapters which focus upon Shakespeare’s comedies. One substantial example is The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, an edited collection by Valerie Traub that contains nine chapters which focus on several of Shakespeare’s comedies. There are two articles apiece on The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and more general discussions of marriage in Shakespeare’s comedies; one further article is devoted to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bernadette Andrea’s chapter, ‘Amazons, Turks and Tartars in the Gesta Grayorum and The Comedy of Errors’ (pp. 77–92), offers a postcolonial reading of the latter play. Andrea detects three references to the East within this comedy, but is most interested in how the character of Nell ‘elaborates an ingenious mapping of the emerging global discourse of empire onto a woman’s body’ (p. 86). Patricia Akhimie’s chapter, ‘Bruised with Adversity: Reading Race in The Comedy of Errors’ (pp. 186–96), highlights how the bruises wielded by the Dromio twins can be conceptualized in terms of race, for they function as markers of a stigmatized, oppressed body. M. Lindsay Kaplan’s article, ‘Constructing the Inferior Body: Medieval Theology in The Merchant of Venice’ (pp. 155–68), meanwhile offers the compelling argument that Shylock’s body is marked as inferior throughout the play. Kaplan posits that all of Shylock’s attempts to exert power over the Christian characters ultimately fail because the Venetian law states his somatic subjection to them. Another approach to this play is taken by Ian Smith in his fascinating article ‘The Textile Black Body: Race and “Shadowed Livery” in The Merchant of Venice’ (pp. 170–85). In the character of Morocco, Smith identifies references to the early modern performative practice of wearing black cloth or leather to represent black skin. Smith also compares Morocco to Lancelot, arguing that while the latter assimilates into society on account of his whiteness, Morocco’s race prevents him from doing the same. Carol Thomas Neely’s chapter, ‘ “Strange things in hand”: Perverse Pleasures and Erotic Triangles in The Merry Wives of Windsor’ (pp. 318–32), asserts that ‘marriage in the play is not represented as fixed or monolithic but as an institution that promotes and circulates an array of desires, perverse pleasures, and power dynamics’ (p. 330). Neely’s discussions of multiple erotic triangles within the play, which bring humiliation and pleasure to such characters as Falstaff, offer ample evidence of this argument. Kathleen E. McLuskie’s article, ‘A Time for The Merry Wives of Windsor’ (pp. 593–610), is a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion of how this play is performatively, critically, and textually embodied. Julie Crawford offers a lucid history of criticism on early modern gay studies and marriage in her chapter ‘Shakespeare. Same Sex. Marriage.’ (pp. 251–68), which will prove invaluable to any scholar who wishes to acquaint themselves with this area of research. Kathryn Schwarz’s article ‘Comedies End in Marriage’ (pp. 269–86) argues that ‘Shakespearean comedies use marriage to show that both inclusion and exclusion can produce social death’ (p. 282)—a viewpoint which is supported by short readings of marriage in several of Shakespeare’s comedies. The final article to be discussed from The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment in this section is Amanda Bailey’s chapter, ‘Personification and the Political Imagination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (pp. 400–18), which examines how Bottom raises a number of issues surrounding consent. As well as ‘foreground[ing] the illusory nature of consent’ (p. 401), Bottom is suggested to indicate that ‘consent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is external and intersubjective; it is made perceivable by social practices and meaningful through affective affiliations’ (p. 402). David B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner’s edited collection Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England contains three chapters which have an exclusive focus on Shakespeare’s comedies. Barbara Sebek’s ‘ “Wine and sugar of the best and the fairest”: Canary, the Canaries, and the Global in Windsor’ (pp. 41–56) highlights how the presence of wine and sack in The Merry Wives of Windsor is an acknowledgement of Anglo-Saxon trading of such commodities. Sebek argues with conviction that, while the play has a critical tradition of being attributed as Shakespeare’s most domestic work, its references to wine and sack mean that it is actually infused with international trade. Peter Kanelos’s ‘So Many Strange Dishes: Food, Love, and Politics in Much Ado About Nothing’ (pp. 57–72) focuses upon the many references to food and feasting within this comedy. It argues that love and the consumption of food are heavily linked, for events can only be resolved when the male characters realize the problems which their immoderate appetites have created. Tobias Döring’s chapter, ‘Feasting and Forgetting: Sir Toby’s Pickle Herring and the Lure of Lethe’ (pp. 157–77), argues that Sir Toby’s excessive eating and drinking functions in two ways within Twelfth Night: to remind the audience to remember old Catholic feast-days and practices, but also to forget them. Chapters 5 and 11 of Paul Budra and Clifford Werier’s edited collection Shakespeare and Consciousness examine A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice respectively. The first of these, Amy Cook’s ‘King of Shadows: Early Modern Characters and Actors’ (pp. 99–118), uses the Mechanicals’ performance in order to support her assertion that when an audience watches a play, its members ‘separate character from actor, and that which sees the difference is what we come to think of as our consciousness’ (p. 100). Tiffany Hoffman’s article ‘Shylock’s Shy Consciousness and Conversion in The Merchant of Venice’ (pp. 249–66) meanwhile argues that shyness was viewed as a Christian virtue which helped one to avoid dishonour and thereby develop a conscience. Hoffman asserts that Antonio practises shyness as a means through which to draw Bassanio closer to him, and this sense of humility is then parodied by Shylock so as to gain power over Antonio. In the courtroom scene, Hoffman maintains that the Christian characters force Shylock into genuinely feeling shyness at his actions, so that he becomes aware of the dishonour which they have brought him. David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton’s edited collection Shakespeare and Hospitality contains two chapters which are of relevance to this section. James Kuzner’s exceptionally engaging article ‘As You Like It and the Theater of Hospitality’ (pp. 157–78) initially argues that the hospitality of the Duke and Adam is more theatrical and less genuine than it seems. Kuzner asserts that this somewhat cynical reading of these characters’ hospitality can, however, be reformulated by Orlando’s willingness to accept what Rosalind tells him, an attitude which suggests that ‘hospitality can be finite—indeed, paradoxically, can be put on—and yet be genuine’ (p. 168). Joan Pong Linton’s chapter, ‘Hospitality in Twelfth Night: Playing at (the Limits of) Home’ (pp. 222–41), meanwhile suggests that while hospitality within Illyria is neither welcoming nor secure, the play echoes the exchange which takes place between actors and audience within the theatre. Two biblical subtexts are also identified: the story of Susanna, which is associated with Olivia, and St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, which is echoed in Feste’s song. The Merchant of Venice is again a popular choice of analysis for edited collections which feature one chapter on the comedies. One important article can be found in Mark Zunac’s edited collection Literature and the Conservative Ideal. Todd H. Pettigrew’s chapter, ‘ “My deeds on my head”: Reading Shakespeare’s Shylock (1960–2000)’ (pp. 91–105), identifies five key patterns to scholarship on the play: the ‘comic’, ‘Elizabethan’, ‘ambiguous’, ‘radical’, and ‘ugly’ readings. The ‘comic’ and ‘Elizabethan’ readings are located in 1960s and 1970s criticism, with the former ‘reading’ wilfully ignoring the anti-Semitism of the play, and the latter ‘reading’ suggesting that this feature is a product of Elizabethan society’s views on Judaism. Pettigrew denotes criticism which refuses to ignore the play’s anti-Semitism and searches for redeeming qualities in Shylock as ‘ambiguous’ readings, locating them from the 1970s onwards. The remaining two ‘readings’ identified by Pettigrew circulate around Shakespeare’s inclusion of anti-Semitic content, and are presented as hallmarks of more recent criticism. The ‘radical’ reading, which became especially popular in the late 1990s, suggests that Shakespeare only incorporated anti-Semitism into The Merchant of Venice in order to portray Shylock as a wholly sympathetic victim of prejudice. The ‘ugly’ reading responds to its ‘radical’ predecessor by arguing that the play’s anti-Semitism has to be acknowledged fully, rather than shaped into a narrative which suits the idealistic way in which critics want to view Shakespeare. Pettigrew asserts that the ‘moral complexity’ (p. 101) of Shylock cannot be explained through recourse to ‘ambiguity’ (p. 101), but must instead be confronted. Towards the end of his article, Pettigrew poses what he terms a ‘crucial question’ (p. 102), but what actually looks like a challenge to future scholars of The Merchant of Venice: ‘is it possible to see Shylock as vicious and humane and not see a contradiction?’ (p. 102). Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, and Karen Newman’s edited collection This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature contains Lara Bovilsky’s excellent article ‘ “Racked … to the Uttermost”: The Verges of Love and Subjecthood in The Merchant of Venice’ (pp. 121–41). The chapter reads against the traditional critical view of Antonio as an exemplar of types of cultural identity. Bovilsky focuses upon Antonio’s queer subjectivity, and interrogates his relationships with Bassanio and Shylock. She asserts, most convincingly, that Antonio’s desire to be ruined by Bassanio is so strong that he employs Shylock to ensure that it happens. Bovilsky also argues that Antonio behaves negatively towards Shylock because he longs to be treated in such an unpleasant way by Bassanio. Edward W. Younkins’s edited collection Capitalism and Commerce in Imaginative Literature: Perspectives on Business from Novels and Plays contains one chapter on The Merchant of Venice. Allen Mendenhall’s ‘A Time for Bonding: Commerce, Love, and Law in The Merchant of Venice’ (pp. 79–94) argues that the role of bonds in this play is more positive than is generally assumed, for they unite figures who would not usually come together, and help to deepen friendships. The turning-point of the comedy, Mendenhall suggests, is Jessica’s elopement with Lorenzo, which is aided by the Christian characters, as Shylock only begins to fixate upon the financial aspect of the bond after that event. Mendenhall also argues that Shylock’s punishment of conversion is more lenient than it originally seems, as it permits the possibility that Shylock can still secretly practise his Jewish faith. Heidi Brayman, Jesse M. Lander, and Zachary Lesser’s edited collection The Book in History, the Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text features Mario DiGangi’s ‘Shakespeare after Queer Theory’ (pp. 65–85), which successfully fulfils its aim of demonstrating the relevance of historicism to early modern literary studies. DiGangi highlights how Antonio’s mysterious melancholy at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice contrasts with contemporary representations of a merchant as a figure whose emotions are only connected to his cargo. Antonio’s friendship with Bassanio, DiGangi contends, offers him a mysterious emotional life until Portia announces the safe return of three of his ships, when he is reduced to the figure of the merchant whose happiness relies upon his trade that would have been much more familiar to Shakespeare’s audience. David Jasper, Youzhuang Geng, and Wang Hai’s edited collection A Poetics of Translation: Between Chinese and English Literature contains Yang Huilin’s interesting chapter, ‘What Is Lost in the Chinese Translations of The Merchant of Venice? A Comparative Reading of the Texts’ (pp. 205–14). Huilin explains that while the flesh bond is fundamental to Chinese translations of the play, the conflict between Christianity and Judaism is omitted by early twentieth-century translators, who were Christian missionaries and preferred to focus upon broader morals rather than more detailed scriptural issues. Kevin Curran’s edited collection, Shakespeare and Judgment, contains Sanford Budick’s ‘Bracketed Judgment, “Un-humanizing,” and Conversion in The Merchant of Venice’ (pp. 195–214). The chapter offers a theoretical discussion of how the notion of ‘reflection’ works within this play. In a reading heavily informed by Husserl’s notion of ‘reflection’, Budick asserts that ‘acts of self-reflection … disclose the actuality of the onlooker—Shakespeare and/or the spectator’ (p. 210). Budick’s article will be most appreciated by scholars who have a keen interest in critical theory. There were, however, some edited collections which contained one chapter that focused upon other examples of Shakespeare’s comedies. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett’s edited collection Shakespeare in Our Time features one chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mary Floyd Williams’s ‘Potions, Passion, and Fairy Knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (pp. 184–88) is a fascinating discussion of early modern beliefs surrounding love magic and fairies. The chapter does not really answer its question as to ‘How it might affect our reading of the play if we resist translating the love potion into a symbol’ (p. 185), but the contextual information and discussions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which do feature in this chapter indicate that this short piece has great potential to be worked up into a longer treatment of the topics it discusses. There is also one chapter on Twelfth Night in Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, and Anna Klosowska’s edited collection Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism. Craig Dionne’s ‘The Trick of Singularity: Twelfth Night, Stewards of the Posthuman, and the Problem of Aesthetics’ (pp. 223–43) offers an unusual, parabolic reading of the comedy. Dionne understands the play to be ‘presenting a fable about the dangers of aesthetic delight’ (p. 226) which is highly relevant to those who work within the humanities at present. He likens Orsino to a ‘literary humanist’ (p. 231), Viola to deconstructionist approaches, and Malvolio to posthuman ones. There is also a reading of Feste as an ‘itinerant subject … free but trapped in the destitute existence outside the manor house’ (p. 243). Dionne’s chapter is a useful reminder that readings of Shakespeare’s comedies can be employed in other ways than traditional literary analysis, but it is best suited to scholars who have a zest for critical theory. Sebastian Knospe, Alexander Onysko, and Maik Goth’s edited collection Crossing Languages to Play with Words: Multidisciplinary Perspectives contains Angelika Zirker’s excellent chapter, ‘Language Play in Translation: Character and Idiom in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor’ (pp. 283–304). Zirker outlines how the wordplay of Nim, Mistress Quickly, and Sir Hugh Evans is negatively affected in German translations of the play due to the alteration or removal of particular words, or the difficulty of reproducing the Welsh dialect. She concludes that ‘while the translatability of wordplay in general is certainly not an impossibility … it does become one when character idiom is involved and the adequate rendering of the character in connection with his or her discrete use of language play is not realized’ (p. 302). The article is particularly admirable for its presentation, with six different German translations of The Merry Wives of Windsor organized in a lucid fashion which makes Zirker’s argument a pleasure to follow. The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing proved to be the two most popular plays of analysis among journal articles on Shakespeare’s comedies. The articles published on The Merchant of Venice were particularly admirable because they achieved the difficult feat of putting new perspectives upon a play with an extremely congested critical background. Todd A. Borlik’s article, ‘Unheard Harmonies: The Merchant of Venice and the Lost Play of Pythagoras’ (MRDE 29:i[2016] 191–221), convincingly argues that Shakespeare’s comedy was influenced by a play entitled Pythagoras which was performed by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose Theatre around 1596, but is now lost. Borlik explains that there are at least four occasions in The Merchant of Venice when Shakespeare appears to have been influenced by the lost play, an argument which is also supported by assured readings of early modern texts which make reference to Pythagoras. The article is also notable for its compellingly logical assertion that Shakespeare’s drama must have been as influenced by the plays that are now lost as they were by the ones which still survive. Stephen Schillinger’s excellent article, ‘Conversations with Shylock: The Merchant of Venice, Authorship Trouble, and Interpretive Instability in the Period of Early Print’ (TSLL 58:i[2016] 84–107), sees Shylock as ‘a kind of doppelgänger’ (p. 94) for Elizabethan writers who tried to control the meaning of their text. Of particular note is Schillinger’s reading of Shylock’s initial interpretation of the bond; while Shylock believes that he is in control of its meaning, Antonio is actually ‘manipulating the meaning of this conversation to his own ends’ (p. 94). Schillinger also suggests that the relationship between Shylock and Jessica can be read as a stand-in for the lack of control which an author could have over their textual ‘child’. Ken Colston’s engaging article, ‘Sacramental Usury in The Merchant of Venice’ (Logos 19:i[2016] 98–129), detects a number of Catholic mindsets within the play, including Antonio’s negative attitude towards capitalism and his generosity to Bassanio among others. Colston concludes with the idea of ‘sacramental usury’ (p. 126) in the play, which functions as a contrast to Shylock’s financial usury as it is predicated on the growth of love through constant sacrifice, rather than the increase of money by misery. Allison P. Hobgood’s article, ‘Prosthetic Encounter and Queer Intersubjectivity’ (TPr 30[2016] 1291–308), meanwhile considers how rings function as prostheses within the play. Hobgood asserts that the giving, wearing, or exchanging of rings allows for the development of a queer intersubjectivity between such heterosexual characters as Portia and Bassanio, as well as enabling the cognitive process of memory. The four journal articles on Much Ado About Nothing also provided insightful new analyses of the play. Jordan Windholz’s article, ‘Ballads, Journeymen, and Bachelor Community in Shakespeare’s London’ (ELR 46[2016] 253–77), argues that the notion of early modern bachelorhood has previously been understood as a purely non-marital state, when it was also actually a type of identity attributed to the single journeymen of London’s livery companies. When Benedick makes his declaration about being a bachelor, he is envisioning a community of men who can spend freely, as is commonly discussed in ballads. Yet, as Windholz points out, Benedick does not stay in this imagined community long, leaving Don Pedro without a community of fellow bachelors. Roderick Hugh McKeown’s article, ‘ “I will stop your mouth”: The Regulation of Jesting in Much Ado About Nothing’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 33–54), takes a fascinating approach to the conversations of Beatrice, Margaret, and Hero through linguistic pragmatics. Beatrice, it is argued, continually tries to keep conversations going through her use of paradiastole (the switching of an insult into a compliment or vice versa). She is also shown to be a more decorous speaker than she may initially seem, as evidenced by her awareness of the influence her words may have on other participants in the conversation. Margaret and Hero are asserted to be more aggressive speakers than Beatrice, with the former trying to take Beatrice’s place as the witty woman of the household, and the latter managing to alter her cousin’s behaviour through criticism. Brett Nelson’s article, ‘Faith and Sheep’s Guts in Much Ado About Nothing’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 161–74), argues that there is a pun on the use of sheep’s guts for musical strings and the notion of fidelity in Act II, scene iii of the play. Along with Balthasar’s song, the pun is suggested to be of structural importance, as it is the point around which the comedy’s action and themes revolve: ‘its movement from war to love, the introduction of the discordant threat to faithful love and social harmony presented by Don John, and the intervention of Benedick, the converted champion of truth, love and harmony’ (p. 167). Patricia Wareh’s article, ‘Honorable Action Upstaged by Theatrical Wordplay in The Faerie Queene 2.4 and Much Ado About Nothing’ (MP 114[2016] 264–85), argues that Shakespeare’s Claudio parallels Spenser’s Phedon ‘in his hapless personality and in his difficulty taking responsibility for his actions’ (p. 275). Wareh asserts that the comedy echoes ‘contemporary concerns about the authenticity of a masculine courtly honor based on verbal self-presentation’ (p. 285). Three journal articles and one note examined A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but used strikingly different approaches in order to do so. Lisa Walters’s ‘Monstrous Births and Imaginations: Authorship and Folklore in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (REN&R 39:i[2016] 115–46) is a lucid and utterly fascinating examination of the role of the fairies in this play. Walters points out that the blessing which Shakespeare’s fairies offer at the end of the comedy contrasts greatly to their usual role in folklore, which is much more threatening. She suggests that their presence in the play reveals imagination’s—and hence the theatre’s—potential to subvert patrilineal succession. Walters’s readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are supplemented with copious amounts of contextual information in what is an admirably informative and engaging work of scholarship. Sarah Carter’s ‘Early Modern Intertextuality: Post-Structuralism, Narrative Systems, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (LitComp 13[2016] 47–57) uses the titular comedy as a case study for the relevance of theories of intertextuality to early modern literature. By highlighting the many and varied references to other texts which are evoked by the names ‘Titania’, ‘Bottom’, and ‘Theseus’, Carter argues that ‘intertextuality is demonstrably more than textual allusion … intertexts establish significance reaching far beyond the surface of the text’ (p. 55). Anna Kurian’s thought-provoking article, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Stolen Generation’ (ANQ 29:i[2016] 6–13), focuses upon the Indian Boy. Kurian argues that the play ‘foreshadowed the trajectories and futures of “native” children in settler colonies’ (p. 10) in its representation of a child who is taken from his parents and put into service with the colonizers, an act which will erase his heritage. Perry McPartland’s note, ‘Transgendering Thisne’ (ANQ 29[2016] 127–8), also focuses on this play, but argues that when Bottom calls Thisbe ‘Thisne’, it is part of a performance which ‘muddles the genders of Pyramus and Thisbe’ (p. 127). Twelfth Night and As You Like It were the plays of interest to two journal articles apiece. Adam Zucker’s article, ‘Twelfth Night and the Philology of Nonsense’ (RS 30:i[2016] 88–101), offers an illuminating consideration of scholarly attitudes towards nonsense within the play. Zucker argues that attempts to establish the meanings of nonsensical phrases such as ‘Castiliano Vulgo’ and the M.A.O.I anagram can backfire on the critic, making them look as ignorant as the characters within Twelfth Night. This article is admirable not only for its clear and engaging style, but also for its frank—and reassuring—reminder that some early modern phrases may never be glossed. R.S. White’s fascinating article, ‘Smiles That Reveal, Smiles That Conceal’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 134–47), argues that the smile functions as a structural marker within Twelfth Night, as it highlights the most intense moment of grief in the play, then indicates a shift to a more cheerful tone. White also offers a compelling discussion of the multiple ways in which Malvolio’s smiles can be interpreted: they can be signs of his disdain, class, or mental state. Paul Joseph Zajac’s article, ‘The Politics of Contentment: Passions, Pastoral, and Community in Shakespeare’s As You Like It’ (SP 113[2016] 306–36), offers a substantial treatment of the various manifestations of ‘content’ which feature within this comedy. Zajac argues that the notion of collective contentment is evident in the attitudes of such characters as Orlando and Rosalind, among others. Contentment can be used as a personal strategy to overcome suffering, or a political one which can threaten or maintain stability. Vin Nardizzi’s article, ‘Shakespeare’s Queer Pastoral Ecology: Alienation around Arden’ (Isle 23[2016] 564–82), will be of interest to researchers in ecocriticism and queer studies alike. Nardizzi argues that Celia is the character who unites the three recent concerns of scholarship within these two fields: irony, homoeroticism, and the environment. She achieves this synthesis through her co-purchase and co-habitation of a cottage on a piece of former royal land with Rosalind. The Comedy of Errors was also of exclusive interest to one journal article. Larry Weiss argues strongly for a new reading of the ‘Jewel best enamelled’ crux spoken by Adriana in his article ‘A Solution to the Stubborn Crux in The Comedy of Errors’ (Shakespeare 12[2016] 148–60). Weiss asserts that ‘the enamelled jewel is Adriana’s metaphor for her husband’s honour, which cannot withstand the taint of falsehood, no matter how hard he tries to conceal it with fair outward shows’ (p. 150), and supports his reading with a thorough explanation of the perceived merits and faults of various interpretations supplied by a number of scholars. Scholarship on Shakespeare’s comedies which was published in 2016 therefore offers evidence that the exceptional critical popularity of The Merchant of Venice shows no signs of abating. Continued interest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It is also evident, but there are also suggestions that other plays are less in vogue. Works focusing only on The Taming of the Shrew and Two Gentlemen of Verona were notably absent from the scholarship of 2016; whether their omission can be explained as a mere coincidence or as an indicator of a more general lack of scholarly interest in these plays remains to be seen. Books Reviewed Anderson Thomas P. Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics . EdinUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 296 . £70 ISBN 9 7807 4869 7342. Barret J.K. Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England . CornUP . [ 2016 ] pp. xiv + 249 . £38.50 ISBN 9 7815 0170 6424. Bassi Shaul. Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare: Place, ‘Race’, Politics . Palgrave . [ 2016 ] pp. x + 231 . £58 ISBN 9 7811 3750 2858. Bearman Robert. Shakespeare’s Money: How Much Did He Make and What Did This Mean ? OUP . [ 2016 ] pp. xi + 196 . £30 ISBN 9 7801 9875 9249. Beyad Maryam , Salami Ali , eds. Culture-Blind Shakespeare: Multiculturalism and Diversity . CambridgeSP . [ 2016 ] pp. vi + 155 . £46.99 ISBN 9 7814 4388 5324. Booth Stephen. Close Reading without Readings: Essays on Shakespeare and Others . FDUP . [ 2016 ] pp. xi + 187 . pb £29.95 ISBN 9 7816 1147 8921. Brayman Heidi , Lander Jesse M. , Lesser Zachary , eds. The Book in History, the Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text. Essays in Honor of David Scott Kastan . YaleUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 420 . £16.99 ISBN 9 7803 0022 3163. Brokaw K.S. Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama . CornUP . [ 2016 ] pp. xvi + 274 . £45.50 ISBN 9 7815 0170 3140. Budra Paul , Werier Clifford , eds. Shakespeare and Consciousness . Palgrave . [ 2016 ] pp. xiv + 307 . £58 ISBN 9 7811 3759 5416. Bulman James C. , ed. King Henry IV Part 2 . ArdenS . [ 2016 ] pp. xxii + 552 . £9.99 ISBN 9 7819 0427 1376. Callaghan Dympna , ed. A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare 2 nd edn. Wiley . [ 2016 ] pp. 584 . £120 ISBN 9 7811 1850 1269. Callaghan Dympna , Gossett Suzanne , eds. Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection . ArdenS . [ 2016 ] pp. xvii + 352 . £70 ISBN 9 7814 7252 0418. Calvo Clara , Kahn Coppélia , eds. Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory . CUP . [ 2015 ] pp. xiv + 389 . hb £79.99 ISBN 9 7811 0704 2773, pb £22.99 ISBN 9 7811 0764 3130. Crawforth Hannah , Scott-Baumann Elizabeth , eds. On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration . ArdenS . [ 2016 ] pp. xviii + 94 £15 ISBN 9 7814 7422 1580. Crystal David. The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation . OUP . [ 2016 ] pp. li + 648 . £25 ISBN 9 7801 9966 8427. Curran Kevin , ed. Shakespeare and Judgment . EdinUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 256 . £70 ISBN 9 7814 7441 3152. De Carles Nathalie Rivère , ed. Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power: The Making of Peace . Palgrave . [ 2016 ] pp. xv + 239 . £84.99 ISBN 9 7811 3743 6924. Dutton Richard. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist . OUP . [ 2016 ] pp. x + 321 . £35 ISBN 9 7801 9877 7748. Edmondson Paul , Holbrook Peter , eds. Shakespeare’s Creative Legacies: Artists, Writers, Performers, Readers . Bloomsbury . [ 2016 ] pp. xviii + 178 . £80 ISBN 9 7814 7423 4498. Fiorato Sidia , Drakakis John , eds. Performing the Renaissance Body: Essays on Drama, Law, and Representation . Gruyter . [ 2016 ] pp. x + 300 . £74.99 ISBN 9 7831 1046 2593. Frank Marcie , Goldberg Jonathan , Newman Karen , eds. This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature . FordUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 256 . £25.99 ISBN 9 7808 2327 0286. Goldstein David B. , Reinhard Lupton Julia , eds. Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Exchange . Routledge . [ 2016 ] pp. 272 . hb £110 ISBN 9 7811 3879 7161, ebook £39.99 ISBN 9 7813 1575 7346. Goldstein David B. , Tigner Amy L. , eds. Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England . Duquesne . [ 2016 ] pp. 291 . £42.95 ISBN 9 7808 2070 4951. Gollancz Israel , ed. A Book of Homage to Shakespeare: To Commemorate the Three Hundredth Anniversary of Shakespeare’s Death MCMXVI. Reissued with a new introduction by Gordon McMullan to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death . OUP . [ 2016 ] pp. lx + 557 . £125 ISBN 9 7801 9876 9699. Greenblatt Stephen , Cohen Walter , Gossett Suzanne , Howard Jean E. , Eisaman Maus Katharine , McMullan Gordon , eds. The Norton Shakespeare . Norton . [ 2016 ] pp. xxxiv + 3438 + A53. £68 ISBN 9 7803 9393 4991. Holderness Graham. The Faith of William Shakespeare . Lion . [ 2016 ] pp. 238 . £9.99 ISBN 9 7807 4596 8919. Holland Peter ed. Shakespeare Survey 69: Shakespeare and Rome . CUP . [ 2016 ] pp. 450 . £79.99 ISBN 9 7811 0715 9068. Honigmann E.A.J. , ed., and Thompson Ayanna , introd. Othello. Rev. edn . 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TI - VIIShakespeare
JF - The Year's Work in English Studies
DO - 10.1093/ywes/may005
DA - 2018-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/viishakespeare-tDT9Db0tDV
SP - 353
VL - 97
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -