Sarah Dustagheer. Shakespeare and London: A Dictionary.

Abstract

This is an interesting addition to the Arden Shakespeare Dictionary series, which like its predecessors in the series focuses on the plays rather than the life or the man. The series already includes Dictionaries on topics ranging from Domestic Life to Demonology, with a particular focus on aspects of Shakespeare’s language. London was perhaps a predictable addition to the series’ agenda, despite the fact that London plays a much less conspicuous part in the plays of Shakespeare than in those of many of his contemporaries. A number of plays have named real-world settings, but while some of his comedies are ‘comic city plays’, they are not comic London plays. Of course London features in the history plays, but even there, as Dustagheer points out in the Introduction, plays written by Shakespeare in collaboration with others ‘demonstrate a marked increase in attention to London topography, in contrast to his solo compositions’ (p. 4). Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More, the plays richest in London citations, may owe their metropolitan focus and knowledge to his collaborators, who included Anthony Munday and John Fletcher. Shakespeare’s London audience may well have read London into other plays with urban settings, such as Measure for Measure, with its references to suburban brothels, or the ‘Winchester geese’ in Troilus and Cressida, but appreciation of the great majority of the canon does not depend on this.