The Year's Contribution to Shakespeare Studies 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

One of this year's finest monographs is Gail Marshall's far-ranging, erudite and engaging Shakespeare and Victorian Women. I will return to this excellent book in more detail later in the article, but Marshall commences her study by quoting a remarkable piece by Kathleen Knox, published in 1895, ‘in the guise of a letter to her young friend Dorothy’ (p. 1). This is where I, too, would like to begin. The premise is that Dorothy has begun to study Shakespeare in a school context and is very uncertain about the whole experience: ‘You have recently been moved up into the “Senior Cambridge” form’ the ‘letter’ observes, noting that this obliges Dorothy to undertake a systematic study of a Shakespeare play. It continues (and the Shakespeare scholar's heart sinks) ‘you have found the occupation dry, difficult, and uninteresting.’ As a result Dorothy wants answers to some pressing questions such as ‘why what was meant for a pleasure in one generation should be a pain and grief to another’ and ‘what there is in Shakespeare to make people rave about him as they do’. ‘In short,’ Dorothy wonders, ‘why should one “learn Shakespeare” at all?’ (p. 1). This seems a remarkably contemporary lament, one heard daily in schools and around many breakfast tables, and a large number of publications this year have in part been commissioned with the aim of helping those struggling with the effort to ‘learn Shakespeare’. A cluster of companions, handbooks, surveys and guides offer their words and contents to the undergraduate and sixth-form college reader with the aim of making Shakespeare seem accessible, interesting and anything but ‘dry’ and ‘difficult’. It is with this cluster of texts – many of them authored, it should be noted, by the most eminent of Shakespeare scholars, an indication in itself of how seriously the task of engagement is taken both by the academic world and the major publishing houses – that I will commence.