The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

Becoming a contributor to this section of Shakespeare Survey after years of being an appreciative user of it has only increased my admiration passing admiration for the fair-minded comprehensiveness and steady Sitzfleisch of my predecessors. Like them, no doubt, I have remarked - as the books piled higher - which presses are most efficient at ensuring attention for their books, and how much more alert are North American and British publishers (than publishers elsewhere) to the utility of a notice in these pages, because so much of the world conversation in Shakespeare studies is tacitly a function of those books and periodicals, those conferences, lecture-circuits, and concerns. Let me continue with some observations on the material conditions of publication.

Increasing numbers of university presses are now reluctant to publish first books based on doctoral dissertations, or monographs which do not address central (read 'popular with university teachers for their courses') subjects. The pressure which this puts on scholars to write about Shakespeare or to attach whatever they are writing to Shakespeare, need not be emphasized; there is a self-fulfilling prophecy here, in which 'hegemonic Shakespeare' becomes indirectly a product of refusal - above all the reluctance of individual readers, and then libraries, to buy books, so that publishers then decline to print and booksellers to stock them any more.