Shakespeare Reading Research Articles

JUSTICE AND SUBJECTIVITY IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE: BRIEF REFLECTIONS ON LAW AND LITERATURE

This article explores the complexities of justice, power, and subjectivity in Shakespeare’s work, focusing on Measure for Measure. The analysis connects Shakespearean themes to emerging philosophical and legal traditions in early modernity, particularly tensions over authority and social order. The play is intertwined with the views of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Sir Edward Coke, who debate the role of law and central authority. Seventeenth-century England, in transition from feudalism to absolutism, provides the backdrop for this reflection. Hobbes, in Leviathan, advocated a strong central government, while Coke argued for the primacy of the Common Law and judicial control over Parliament. This judicial contention is reflected in the moral and legal conflict of Measure for Measure, where the intersections between law and subjectivity emerge vividly. Shakespeare, although not presenting a partisan position, articulates dilemmas that echo modern concerns about the use of force and the flexibility of the law, opening up room for interpretations about the role of judges and the manipulation of laws in favor of private interests. These debates are deepened by Shakespeare's reading of themes such as honor, virtue, and the tension between freedom and order, linking the work to an ongoing dialogue between literature, law, and politics.

Shakespeare the Formalist: Reading and Rewriting John Marston in the Poets’ War

This essay argues that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Troilus and Cressida were strongly influenced by the early plays of John Marston, particularly Antonio and Mellida. Because Shakespeare’s debts in these plays are both ideological and formal, attention to his borrowings can help critics understand how Shakespeare positioned himself in the era’s theatrical marketplace even as they reveal the range of forms in which Shakespeare read, thought, and wrote, and that were constitutive elements of his drama.

“Thou shalt knowen of oure privetee / Moore than a maister of dyvynytee”: Devils and Damnation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

“Thou shalt knowen of oure privetee / Moore than a maister of dyvynytee”: Devils and Damnation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus Darragh Greene (bio) Now this Doctor Faustus had somewhat in it that was beyond itself and attached to Kit as it were a nimbus that was more than atheistic, being truly devilish or demonic.—Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford1 In Shakespeare and the Medieval World, Helen Cooper makes the case that “the world in which Shakespeare lived was a medieval one,” and “the culture [he] inherited was still grounded in the medieval, however conflicted that culture was becoming.”2 Naturally, the same is true of Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. One salient aspect of this culture was the tradition of late-medieval English narrative and poetry, including in particular the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer. While there is no doubt that Shakespeare read Chaucer, it has been less obvious whether Marlowe did. Yet it would be surprising indeed if he did not read the English author considered in his day to be the pre-eminent poet in the language.3 Moreover, it is possible that Marlowe’s mighty line, his mastery of iambic pentameter verse, owes something to the dramatic speeches Chaucer puts into the mouth of the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, and other loquacious pilgrim characters of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s works were in print throughout the sixteenth century, and the folio edition that Shakespeare likely first read, John Stow’s 1561 revised [End Page 166] version of William Thynne’s The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer, is equally likely to have been the same one Marlowe would have read, possibly as a schoolboy. Marlowe was enrolled in the King’s School, Canterbury, around Christmas 1578, and his first headmaster was John Gresshop. As Charles Nicholl writes: “An inventory of Gresshop’s library, drawn up on his death in 1580 . . . offers a glimpse of the intellectual world opening up to the cobbler’s son. Among its 350 volumes were editions of Ovid, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Boccaccio.”4 Chaucer’s enduring fascination with Ovid’s poetry as well as his persistent return to the tragedy of Dido seem to have resonated with Marlowe, who was also interested in these works, having translated Ovid’s Amores and written Dido, Queene of Carthage during his student years at Cambridge. Indeed, a recent article by Loren Cressler makes a detailed case for Marlowe’s knowledge of Chaucer by exploring the late-medieval English vernacular tradition as a probable source for his first play; he argues that Dido, Queene of Carthage “structurally” quotes Chaucer’s sympathetic treatment of Dido—at the expense of Aeneas’s reputation—as presented in both The House of Fame and The Legend of Good Women.5 This raises the question as to what else in Chaucer’s oeuvre might have caught Marlowe’s attention. This article will demonstrate that Chaucer’s treatment of devils, damnation, and hell in The Canterbury Tales resonates in Doctor Faustus. Based on a medieval folktale, Doctor Faustus in some regards harkens back to the morality plays of the late Middle Ages. However, Marlowe’s representation of the devil Mephistopheles bears little resemblance to the devils of medieval drama; as Douglas Cole points out, Mephistopheles “has a seriousness and intensity which is unparalleled in any previous theatrical representation of the diabolic, and unmatched in the Faust-Book as well.”6 Yet, if one looks at English literary history beyond the domain of drama, such seriousness and intensity can be found in Chaucer’s representation of the yeoman-devil of The Friar’s Tale. This Chaucerian devil’s manner is friendly, yet just like Mephistopheles, he is an exploiter of words who takes a special interest in the force and binding implications of illocutionary acts—that is, speech that performs an action—for promises and curses. In addition, David Lawton has noted that Faustus’s resolute questioning of Mephistopheles resembles that of Chaucer’s fictive summoner, who insistently questions the devil in The Friar’s Tale.7 In both cases, heedless curiosity leads to perdition. [End Page 167] Aside from matters infernal, there are other possible echoes...

Reason as the Death of Fathers: Plato's Sophist and the Ghost's Command in Hamlet

Did Shakespeare read Plato? In Hamlet, Claudius proposes that reason's "common theme" is the "death of fathers." This allusion to Plato's Sophist casts the ghost as the dead "father" Parmenides, Claudius as the sophist who eludes capture in the Eleatic stranger's net of words, and Hamlet as the philosopher who can only catch him through an act of pure thought. After considering the literary scholarship on this line I show how Claudius's portrayal closely matches Plato's description of the tyrant, and I assess the implications of these references for both Plato's theory of representation and the play.

Shakespeare Reading Groups: Education Without the "Academy"?

This paper grows from a contention the authors developed independently of each other, but that they shared (and which is shared and informed by others); namely that the neo-liberal marketization of education, including higher education, is a disaster for students, scholars, and the communities they are part of and serve. In a world of crisis capitalism where we are told ‘there is no alternative’, we seek to critically evaluate whether one of the alternatives we were trying to build – Shakespeare reading groups beyond the academy – really was or could be alternative, or whether our efforts simply reproduced the corrosive contradictions of current hegemonic models. So this paper considers the ways our reading groups focussed on Shakespeare might or might not offer a way to find common ground, and break down distinctions, between always contingent, problematic and provisional categorisations of ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’, ‘educator’ and ‘educated’, ‘client’ and ‘provider’. In so doing, we hope our practice, and how we theorize it here, can present a way to reflect on a context of which higher education is, or should be, an integral part.

Troilus And Cressida in the Light of Day: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer

Shakespeare's changes to Chaucer's story of Troilus and Cressida are entailed by his placing it in the larger Troy story first created by Benoit de Ste. Maure. This not only compresses Chaucer's story; it turns it inside out. Chaucer's story is an indoor affair, with war and politics out of sight. On Shakespeare's stage, Chaucer's great love scene in Book Three is hidden. We only see the lovers emerging from it, exposed to common daylight. In another sort of exposure Chaucer disappears as a mediating (and defensively shading) narrator, and yet the vanished narrator's longing for and dread of the erotic returns to infect Shakespeare's Troilus, with his self-absorption and performance anxiety. Moreover, Chaucer's double image of Criseyde (beautifully vulnerable and yet troublingly in control) leads Shakespeare's Troilus to say that he has been betrayed by one who “is and is not Cressid! ” The ambivalence of Chaucer's narrator provided Shakespeare with a vehicle for expressing the erotic tensions analyzed in psychoanalytic terms by Janet Adelman. It also shadows the Troy story episodes not found in Chaucer by identifying Ulysses with the role of Chaucer's “olde bokes” that broke his heart by branding Criseyde as false.

The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch, and the Spectacle of Dismemberment by Farah Karim-Cooper

Reviewed by: The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch, and the Spectacle of Dismemberment by Farah Karim-Cooper Bailey Sincox The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch, and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. By Farah Karim-Cooper. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. xiii + 309. $112 (hardback), $35 (paper). Farah Karim-Cooper illustrates the legibility of the hand on the early modern stage and in present revivals by establishing a compendium of ideas of the hand from conduct manuals, anatomy textbooks, religious discourse, and philosophy. She explores Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical gesture, hands narrated in The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, the relationship between touch and desire in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, and the severed hands in Titus Andronicus. Augmented by observations from recent Shakespeare’s Globe productions, this highly interdisciplinary work is a useful tool for any scholar of performance. In the tradition of studies of anthropological and anthropomorphized “parts” such as Jonathan Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (1995), David Hillman and Carla Mazzio’s The Body in Parts (1997), William Slights’s The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (2008), and, of course, Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern’s Shakespeare in Parts (2007), Karim-Cooper elaborates on the hand as an emblem of identity and a tool of communication. She attends to the “gestural ambiguity” of Shakespeare’s characters, arguing that the playwright composes a careful sub-narrative using hands to “transmit meanings beyond those codified in medieval and Renaissance courtesy manuals and art” (2). The first two chapters, “The Idea of the Hand in Shakespeare’s World” and “Manners and Beauty: The Social Hand” survey depictions of hands from a wide range of disciplines in countries across Europe from antiquity to the mid-seventeenth century. Karim-Cooper links Galen and Aristotle’s anatomical “perfectly structured and ideal hand” (12–13) to Vesalius’s dissections, the courtly blazon (15), and the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci (18–20); Bulwer’s Chirologia, the notion of “hand” as handwriting, and Nashe’s commentary on palmistry are said to evidence “the very notion [End Page 749] that the hand could contain and conceal inner lives and that hidden truths might be unlocked through an attempt to read it, either in social discourse or as it gestured in performance” (27). She gives equal attention to visual art, elevating Dürer’s engravings and Wither’s emblems, monarchical healing rituals and readers’ manicules to the status of texts and, in so doing, putting her own theory into practice (27–39). Though the second chapter does not forward any groundbreaking arguments—indeed, at times bordering on banality, e.g. “Etymologically and pragmatically, the handkerchief was associated for early moderns first and foremost with the hand” (48)—the early modern value placed on white, delicate female hands in the period (55–61) and the condemnation of “choppy” hands and long nails associated with witches (61–7) receive new life in conjunction with Karim-Cooper’s emphasis on performance. What these chapters lack in cohesion they make up in breadth. Throughout this section it is to Karim-Cooper’s credit that she refrains from New Historical narrative construction; she does not speculate that Shakespeare read Vesalius or saw The Last Supper. She simply gathers early modern images and conceptions of the hand—some not so different from our current ones, such as the dexterous hand as humanity’s evolution above the animals, and others decidedly alien, such as the hand “as God’s instrument of creation” and source of female original sin (27)—into a scintillating mosaic, illuminating the close readings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries that follow. Chapter 3, “‘Lively Action’: Gesture in Early Modern Performance,” defies expectations. Rather than tread the hackneyed road of Chirologia or, indeed, any hard-and-fast cipher for early modern gestural practices, Karim-Cooper explores rhetorical training, staging conventions (light, space, costume, genre), and actor emotion as intertwined critical contexts within which to imagine early modern hands in movement. She argues that gestures are influenced by character, costume, and, interestingly, space; in this last criterion, Karim-Cooper speculates on adjustments made to performances in the original Blackfriars based on...

Coda

Research Article| September 01 2013 Coda Jeff Dolven Jeff Dolven Princeton University jdolven@princeton.edu Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance, at Princeton University. He is the author of Scenes of Instruction (Chicago 2007), a study of poetry's entanglement with school in the sixteenth century, and Speculative Music (Sarabande 2013), a book of poems. He has published essays on Renaissance metrics, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare's reading, Fairfield Porter, player pianos, and other subjects. He is also the director of Princeton's Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM), and an editor at large at the magazine Cabinet. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google English Language Notes (2013) 51 (2): 143–144. https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-51.2.143 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jeff Dolven; Coda. English Language Notes 1 September 2013; 51 (2): 143–144. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-51.2.143 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEnglish Language Notes Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2013 Regents of the University of Colorado2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Writing Woodstock: The Prehistory of Richard II and Shakespeare’s Dramatic Method

Writing Woodstock: The Prehistory of <i>Richard II</i> and Shakespeare’s Dramatic Method

The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare

Preface William Shakespeare: a partial chronology Shakespeare's works: a conjectural chronology 1. The traces of Shakespeare's life STEPHEN GREENBLATT 2. Shakespeare's reading JEFF DOLVEN and SEAN KEILEN 3. Shakespeare's writing H. R. WOUDHUYSEN 4. The theatre of Shakespeare's London TIFFANY STERN 5. Transmission of Shakespeare's texts ANDREW MURPHY 6. Shakespeare and language JONATHAN HOPE 7. Shakespeare the poet COLIN BURROW 8. Shakespeare's comedies STANLEY WELLS 9. Shakespeare's tragedies MICHAEL NEILL 10. Shakespeare's English history plays TON HOENSELAARS 11. Shakespeare's Classical plays HEATHER JAMES 12. Shakespeare's tragicomedies JANETTE DILLON 13. Shakespeare, religion and politics CLAIRE MCEACHERN 14. Shakespeare and race JONATHAN GIL HARRIS 15. Shakespeare, sex and gender STEPHEN ORGEL 16. Shakespeare's stage ANTHONY DAWSON 17. The critical reception of Shakespeare EMMA SMITH 18. Shakespeare and popular culture PAUL PRESCOTT 19. Shakespeare and globalization ANSTON BOSMAN 20. Shakespeare and media history KATHERINE ROWE 21. Shakespeare: reading on ANDREW DICKSON.

Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy: A Debt to Plato in Timon of Athens

Did Shakespeare read Plato? The evidence suggests that Shakespeare not only read Plato, but also consulted him as though he possessed wisdom of the highest sort. With a focus on comparing the Phaedo and Symposium to Timon of Athens , I show that Shakespeare’s genius is at least in part due to his uncanny ability to transform Platonic wisdom into fully realized dramatic action. Previous attempts at interpreting the play have overlooked the extent to which Timon of Athens mirrors Socratic warnings against flattery, sophistry, and uncivil philosophy.

A Reading of The Taming of the Shrew: Considering the Specialties of The Taming of the Shrew within the Fairy Tale Frame of “King Thrushbeard”

This essay examines The Taming of the Shrew from the fairy tale frame of Thrushbeard. It is well known that Shakespeare often used frame stories for writing his daramas. Before Shakespeare wrote The Taming of the Shrew quite a few shrew-taming stories existed and it is suggested that Shakespeare read some of them. Just as Tillyard finds similarities between and The Taming of the Shrew, I intend to read The Taming of the Shrew within a shrew-taming frame. However, keeping an eye on the similarities between the two stories, I focus on the differences between them, which were mainly caused by the shift from the medieval historical and economical system to the early modern one. As for the causes of the differences, firstly, the social, political, and religious circumstances are considered. The demand for the establishment of a powerful modern nation and the Reformation required a powerful patriarchal society and a solemn regious household, which led to justification for suppressing womens will and speech. Therefore, the focus of the two stories shifts from the suppression of womens pride as the cause of the original sin to the control of womans tongue and shrewishness as the necessity for the subjugation of women. Secondly, the transition from the medieval economic system to early capitalism changed the economics role of women. With the rise of capitalism, the economic value of women lay not in domestic production but in the consumption of market goods. Therefore the focus of the taming of women shifts from making women as good domestic producers to proper consumers of market goods. Whereas King Thrushbeard imposes the duty of production on the princess, Petruchio controls Kates consumption. Consideration of the specialties of The Taming of the Shrew within the frame of shrew-taming stories offers an effective way of understanding the play.

Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe

This collection of essays explores the diverse ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries experienced and imagined Europe. The book charts the aspects of European politics and culture which interested Renaissance travellers, thus mapping the context within which Shakespeare's plays with European settings would have been received. Chapters cover the politics of continental Europe, the representation of foreigners on the English stage, the experiences of English travellers abroad, Shakespeare's reading of modern European literature, the influence of Italian comedy, his presentation of Moors from Europe's southern frontier, and his translation of Europe into settings for his plays.

Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance: Rethinking 'Macbeth', 'Hamlet', 'Othello', 'King Lear' by Michael L. Hays (review)

226 Reviews tude without subjecting them to the same critical questioning applied to the work of Pollard, Greg, Chambers, and other 'conservative' scholars. Erne wants to assimilate the 'Bad' Quartos to his interpretative category of short plays (theatre), as against longer versions (print), and in so doing relies on recent diatribes by Paul Werstine, Steve Urkowitz, and Laurie Maguire against Pollard and Greg's conception of these works as performing texts partly reconstructed from memory. Unfortunately, these oppositional or 'revisionist' critics wrote polemically, and their accounts of their pre? decessors' work cannot be relied on. Anyone who wants to gain an accurate impression of the distortions produced by actors' memories must go back to G I. Duthie, The (Bad3 Quarto ofHamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941), and Alfred Hart, Stolne and Surreptitious Copies: A Comparative Study of Shakespeare's Bad Quartos (Melbourne and London: Melbourne University Press in association with Oxford University Press, 1941). I remain utterly unconvinced by the arguments adduced here for these texts as reliable theatrical versions (pp. 194, 204 ff.,212 ff.). Erne summarizes 'the new orthodoxy of the 1980s', according to which the Quarto text of King Lear (3,100 lines) and the Folio (2,900 lines) are two entirely different plays (pp. 184-87), and records some ofthe critiques it has received. But he has overlooked several important essays challenging this orthodoxy, by Robert Clare, W. C. Carroll , and Richard Knowles. In other respects Erne goes along with 'the new orthodoxy of the 1980s', rather damagingly in accepting Foucault's claim that the author 'was not born but made' (p. 33)?to which the only answer can be, 'Yes, but back in Greece and Rome, and uninterruptedly through the Middle Ages and Renais? sance!' Erne himself argues that the concept of an author would 'not have applied to the text of a public stage play in 1590' (p. 40), but no valid distinction can be drawn within printed playtexts as to the 'public' or 'private' nature of the theatre in which they were firstperformed, since these categories derive from modern theatre histori? ans, and several earlier sixteenth-century plays declare their authors. In a recent book (Shakespeare, Co-author (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)) I counted more than 150 named dramatists in the period 1576-1642, while Jeffrey Knapp ('What is a Co-AuthorV, Representations, 89 (Winter 2003), 1-29) has shown that at least twentyfour English plays printed before 1600 speak of their 'author', 'poet', or 'writer' in a prologue or epilogue. The book is beautifully produced, with a sumptuous full-colour dustjacket of Sir Anthony Van Dyck's Sir John Suckling, c. 1640 (now in the Frick Collection), holding a Shakespeare Folio open at Hamlet. Some printing errors need correcting, and in a few places an editor might have produced a clearer sense, or a more economical expression. But fora scholar whose mother tongue is not English the book is a highly creditable performance which ought to have a beneficial influence on Shakespeare scholarship and criticism. London University Brian Vickers Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance: Rethinking 'Macbeth', 'Hamlet'y 'Othello', 'KingLear'. By Michael L. Hays. (Studies in Renaissance Literature, 12) Cambridge: Brewer. 2003. ix + 225pp. ?45; $75. ISBN 0-85991-788-6. Writing in 1971 in the New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (ed. by Kenneth Muir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)) on 'Shakespeare's Reading', G K. Hunter?an eminent literary critic laying down the law in an authoritative critical Companion from a major university press?confidently declared that the Bard 'had no interest in medieval romance'. 'An idiosyncratic view', as Michael Hays comments in this new book, 'which unaccountably ignores his two plays indebted to Chaucer's MLR, ioi.i, 2006 227 Troilus and Criseyde and "The Knight's Tale"' (p. 11). As the title of Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance makes clear, Hays is pursuing a very different line of thinking, and one that goes far beyond a bare acknowledgement of Chaucerian borrowings. His argument is twofold. Firstly, he claims that romance was 'the preponderant genre in fictional literature' from the onset of printing to the end of the sixteenth century. Secondly, that it is therefore a significant and hitherto neglected...

Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe by Andrew Hadfield, Paul Hammond

520 Reviews earliest to have been lost to his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors-which such knowledge implied. UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN RICHARD TODD Shakespeare andRenaissanceEurope. Ed. by ANDREW HADFIELD and PAULHAMMOND. (Arden Shakespeare Companions) London: Thompson Learning. 2004. xxix + 3I4PP. ?i6.99. ISBN I-90427-I46-4. What was Shakespeare's attitude towards Europe? To what extent were Shakespeare and his contemporaries influenced by European politics and literature? The signifi cant number of Shakespeare's plays that have continental settings-Verona, Venice, Athens, and Vienna, for example-suggests something of the fascination and allure that Europe held for Shakespeare and his audiences. But should we regard these settings as accurate depictions of Renaissance Europe, or are they rather excursions into an imaginary geography, the product of awriter who conceived of the world in literary and metaphorical-rather than political-terms? These questions are the focus of the latest volume in the handsomely produced Arden Critical Companions series. Andrew Hadfield introduces the essays in the col lection as an 'attempt to illuminate our understanding of the impact of Europe on Shakespeare's life as awriter' (p. I7). The volume offers awide-ranging exploration of this issue, with contributions from both literary scholars and historians on such top ics as 'The Politics of Renaissance Europe', 'English Contact with Europe', 'Shake speare and Italian Comedy', and 'Europe's Mediterranean Frontier: The Moor'. The scholarship evidenced throughout is impressive, and the material often fascinating, although at times a tension emerges between the contributors' desire to yoke Shake speare to his European context and their acknowledgement that Shakespeare's texts invariably resist this sort of contextualizing reading. At the outset Hadfield observes that 'Shakespeare was concerned to employ what John Gillies has called a "poetic geography", amode of perception that envisaged theworld existing in terms of ideas, not areas' (p. 3). This observation complicates the volume's attempts to set Shake speare's works in relation to their European contexts inways that are not always fully resolved. For example, Susan Doran's opening chapter offers a detailed historical survey of the politics of Renaissance Europe, and convincingly argues that Shakespeare's audiences would have been well informed about political and military affairs on the Continent through pamphlets, newsletters, and other printed material. However, she concludes with the admission that Shakespeare 'did not draw on European current affairs for the plots of his plays' (p. 52). As Paulina Kewes points out later in the volume, this is in direct contrast to Shakespeare's fellow dramatists, who 'produced remarkably acute and accurate depictions of specific [European] figures and events' (p. 5 I). In this way, the Shakespeare that this collection describes turns out to be a relatively apolitical writer, one more interested in the idea of Europe- and the way in which other Renaissance writers conceived of it-than the actuality. Stuart Gillespie provides an illuminating chapter on Shakespeare's reading of European literature, and his indebtedness to novelistic storytellers such as Bandello, Belleforest, and Cinthio, although even here Gillespie has to acknowledge that Shakespeare would have been more likely 'to connect writers through generic links than nationality' (p. 99). Perhaps the essay thatmost directly engages with Shakespeare's works is Francois Laroque's rich and suggestive piece on 'Shakespeare's Imaginary Geography'. La roque notes that Shakespeare's plays 'repeatedly emphasize locality, seen both as real places and as dream-like backdrops' (p. 193), and argues that Shakespeare writes MLR, IOI.2, 2006 521 within a tradition of 'impossible locations and imaginary geography' (p. I96). The fact that 'real' locations in Shakespeare's plays are often, as Laroque points out, paired with an imaginary twin-such as Athens and the wood in the Dream, or the Court and the Forest of Arden in As You Like It-reminds us that we should not be too literal-minded in our attempts to pin down Shakespeare's geography. In this way, one could argue that the tensions at play in this volume stem from Shakespeare himself, and perhaps the book would have been yet more successful had this been acknowledged more fully. Nevertheless, this is an informative and scholarly study that is admirably open and exploratory in its...

"I of Old Contemptes Complayne": Margaret of Anjou and English Seneca

Commentaries concerning Margaret of Anjou in history and in Shakespeare's first tetralogy emphasize her threatening status as an androgynous figure who bare the whole swynge, as the strong oxe doth, and who epitomizes the movement of monstrous female agency from margin to center.1 Such criticism, occupied with the controversies regarding historiography, gender, and the body, ignores or de-emphasizes the influence of dramatic intertextual materials.2 Shakespeare's reading of Seneca's tragedies, their influence on him, and his subsequent internalization of them, all help him make Marga ret a vibrant and irresistible presence, in spite of the hostile chronicles that encouraged him to portray her as shrill virago and shallow harridan. Lycus s admonition to Megaera in Jasper Heywood's translation of Seneca's Hercules Furens (1561 / 1581) foretells these fierce and furious words, both critical and literary.3 Margaret may well exemplify what Naomi Conn Liebler labels the feminine heroic.4

Shakespeare's Reading

Shakespeare's Reading

Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, and: Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time, and: Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century, and: Shakespeare and Masculinity, and: Shakespeare's Reading (review)

Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, and: Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time, and: Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century, and: Shakespeare and Masculinity, and: Shakespeare's Reading (review)

:Shakespeare's Reading

List of Illustrations Note on Texts and Abbreviations Elizabethan Reading Poems Histories Comedies Tragedies Romances Shakespeare as Reader Notes Further Reading Index

Short Reviews

Short Reviews Get access Shakespeare's Reading. By Robert S. Miola. (Oxford Shakespeare Topics) Oxford University Press. £25.00 (hb), £12.99 (pb).Shakespeare's Language. By Frank Kermode. Penguin. £20.00.Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning and Recuperation. BY Heather Dubrow. (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture) Cambridge University Press. £40.00.Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters. By Geraldo U. De Sousa. Macmillan. £45.00.Shakespeare and Race. Edited By Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells. Cambridge University Press. £35.00 (hb), £12.95 (pb).Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances. BY Constance Jordan. Cornell University Press. £16.95 (pb).Hamlet. Edited By Robert Hapgood (Shakespeare in Production) Cambridge University Press. £37.50 (hb), £13.95 (pb). Andrew Hadfield Andrew Hadfield University of WalesAberystwyth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 50, Issue 198, Autumn 2001, Pages 263–268, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/50.198.263 Published: 01 October 2001