The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

DISTINGUISHED SHAKESPEARIANS

Some distinguished Shakespearians who are neither elderly nor particularly stately are none the less moving into the ranks of elder states-persons with the appearance of collections of their essays.

Barbara Everett has reprinted some of her valuable essays in Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare's Tragedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Pieces on the four major tragedies are reprinted from the Times Higher Educational Supplement and the London Review of Books, and the original publishing context has allowed free play to Everett's distinctively lively and intimate tone as she constantly draws the reader into sharing delicately glimpsed moments which unobtrusively lead to firm pictures of the plays as totalities. The other essays have been published before in academic journals, but they retain the qualities of wit and quiet wisdom: Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello - and a ring-in comedy, Twelfth Night. I hope the inclusion of the last does not mean that we cannot look forward to a volume of Everett on the Comedies.

Ernst Honigmann has published Myriad- Minded Shakespeare: Essays, Chiefly on the Tragedies and Problem Comedies (London: Macmillan, Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare, 1989). Most of the essays are either reprinted, or interestingly conflate several different pieces. Formerly unpublished pieces include an essay on Julius Caesar, and one on All's Well (is it a 'feminist play'?). Most of the essays show Honigmann as critic rather than textual scholar, although there is his classic article on stage-directions and a lively amalgam 'Shakespeare at work: preparing, writing, rewriting'.