Review: Shakespeare and Scotland

Abstract

Any new volume of Shakespeare criticism enters an unusual segment of the academic market. Courses on Shakespeare are nigh-on mandatory in most English Literature departments at some point in an undergraduate's study. The BA (or, in Scotland, MA) student faces shelf after shelf of Shakespeare criticism; he or she also faces tutor after tutor demanding essays which show autonomy, originality, and mastery of secondary sources. Every new work of criticism offers some fresh aspect to student readers, while at the same time encouraging their perception that everything has been said already. Lecturers and researchers are hardly immune to similar feelings. As Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy, the editors of Shakespeare and Scotland recognise, the English Bard is 'an industry' (p. 15). To a potentially sceptical academic market, their volume must seem something more than an undergraduate essay resource.