2 - Shakespeare in Performance

Summary

Not too many weeks ago, I received a large parcel containing Richard Dutton's The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Drama in pristine condition. It is a measure of the sheer size of the book and the demands it puts on its reader that my copy is now sadly dirtied and dog-eared: the book is a treasure I have learned to cherish as I have carried it from graduate student to colleague and back, finding information in it that was relevant to the research of so many. I have also been busy updating my reading lists for students, often supplementing and sometimes replacing references to Cox and Kastan's New History of Early English Drama (New York, 1997) with new references to the Oxford Handbook, which explicitly (and rightly) sets itself up as the successor to the Cox–Kastan History. The Oxford Handbook will have an impact on the field not only because this is a strikingly handsome and well-illustrated volume, but because it manages to square two circles. Firstly, it brings, thanks to a stunning opening chapter by William Ingram, an awareness of theoretical concerns to a field that has, in recent years, been fiercely empirical and openly resistant to theory, and it does so without in any way deflecting its contributors from their passionate attention to historical evidence and detail. Secondly, it succeeds in making narrative sense and can, despite its bulk, be read cover-to-cover. Each chapter tackles individual pieces of the larger puzzle in ways that highlight the moment where conflicting accounts can be constructed from the same evidence or where there simply is not sufficient evidence to compose a narrative. The result is a remarkably readable collection which brings together established scholars, some of the younger voices that have made theatre history such an exciting field of late and new scholars whose work is receiving its first major airing in this volume.