ARTHUR F. KINNEY (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare

Abstract

IF I search Amazon.com for the words ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘handbook’ on 1 December 2013 I get 512 results. Of course a number of these are the recycling of very old material with the intention of making money off the unsuspecting reader, but several are very good indeed, and so the book under review here has some stiff competition. It is certainly one of the larger entries in the field with 845 pages of text of various kinds produced by 42 scholarly experts in various fields. And the idea of a companion or handbook to Shakespeare comprised of such essays is a venerable tradition dating back at least to the Companion to Shakespeare Studies first published by Cambridge University Press in 1934 and edited by Harley Granville-Barker and G. B. Harrison. The Handbook is divided into five ‘parts’, the first called ‘Texts’, the second ‘Conditions’, third ‘Works’, fourth ‘Performances’, and the fifth the curiously titled ‘Speculations’. Each one of these parts contain a series of essays generally linked to the title of the part, but there appears to have been no editorial control or programme to cover all the expected areas of a subject; rather, there is an assemblage of a series of essays touching, sometimes from afar, the subject as it could be most generally conceived. For instance, ‘Texts’, no matter what one might have expected to find here, begins with Hugh Craig’s essay called ‘Authorship’ (15–30) which discusses what authorship means and skirts the whole silly question of who wrote the plays; and this is followed by MacDonald P. Jackson’s ‘Collaboration’ (31–52) which concerns itself largely with the matter of the collaborative authorship for Cardenio and The Two Noble Kinsmen, as well as the findings of Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney in their Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge, 2009); and then there is Ann Thompson’s ‘Quarto and Folio’ (71–84) which covers very lightly the handling of Shakespeare’s texts since the 1980s. I will not extend this list but would observe that anyone coming to this handbook looking for a systematic survey and explanation of Shakespeare’s texts and how they have been handled from the 1590s to the present will be either disappointed or confused.