Further reading Which edition if Shakespeare should I buy? This is not usually a problem as most often you will be told which par­ ticular edition of an individual play you should use. If you are free to choose your edition, you will obviously want to ensure that it is both reliable and as helpful as possible. The following series all have good notes, sound critical introductions, and are fully annotated: the Arden Shakespeare (a new, revised series will start appearing in 1995), the New Cambridge Shakespeare, the New O'fford Shakespeare (being published in paperback by World's Classics), and the New Penguin Shakespeare. In addition, you will find it useful to have a copy of Shakespeare's com­ plete works both for further reading and for reference. The standard Complete Works is that edited by Peter Alexander for Collins (we have taken our quotations from this); the Oxford edition of the Complete Works edited by Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells has many non-standard features; the Riverside Shakespeare (edited by G.B. Evans) has useful intro­ ductions to the plays. What critical books should I read? If you have read the play you have been set to study, but cannot see what it is about, what you need is a book that gives you an idea of the significance of the play. An introductory volume in this respect is Mar­ guerite Alexander's An Introduction to Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1979). Similarly Philip Edwards's Shakespeare: A Writer's Progress (1986) will provide some starting-points, as will Richard Dutton's William Sha­ kespeare: A Literary Lifo (1989). More advanced but still very approachable is Leah Scragg's Discovering Shakespeare's Meaning (1988), which provides a sound general introduction to many aspects of Shakespeare. A lively 243 244 HOW TO STUDY A SHAKESPEARE PLAY book that offers both clear analyses and a way into more recent criti­ cism is Kiernan Ryan's Shakespeare (1989). The most directly useful books are obviously those which offer a close reading of the particular play you are interested in. The volumes published by Penguin in their Penguin Critical Studies series provide sensible and clear analyses of individual plays. A single view of a play, however, can appear to be the only view, and this is why it is helpful to look at a collection of essays on different aspects of a play by critics with different approaches. Two series of this kind are Twentieth Century Interpretations published by Prentice Hall and Macmil­ lan Casebooks (General Editor: A.E. Dyson), which include collections of essays on most of Shakespeare's plays. The Casebooks offer a broad selection of critical views from the first appearance of a text through to the early 1970s. By contrast, the New Casebook series, also pub­ lished by Macmillan (General Editors: John Peck and Martin Coyle), focus on current criticism and new approaches to Shakespeare. Each volume contains about ten essays together with an Introduction that explains the kind of critical thinking that lies behind the essays. The New Casebooks complement rather than replace the original Casebooks, and together they provide a very good source of critical material. A similar series but focusing on topics rather than individual plays is Longman Critical Readers (General Editors: Raman Selden and Stan Smith). Three volumes are particularly helpful: Shakspearean Tragedy edited by John Drakakis; Shakspeare's Comedies, edited by Gary Waller; and New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, edited by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton. The emphasis of the volumes is on new approaches to Shakespeare; some of the material, though, is very dif­ ficult. Use critical books in a sensible way. Many students waste a great deal of time making huge piles of notes from critical books, even copying out whole sections. If you have read and thought about the play you are studying you should be able to rnak£ use of criticism rather than relying on it: you should be able to read a chapter, or an essay, or even a few pages, see what the critic is saying, and then go back to the text to test the ideas against your own reading of a speech or scene. At school there is no need to read vast amounts of criticism: read just enough to discover what literary criticism is and to stimulate your own thinking. At college or university you will be encouraged to read more, but always as a complement to your own thinking. Don't fall into the trap of relying on other people's ideas and discussions. Criticism is FURTHER READING 245 there to help you extend your ideas and explore your responses, not as a substitute for reading and thinking about the text. J1!hat general books about Shakespeare should I read? At the end of this section we provide the sort of list of books on Shake­ speare that you are likely to be given at college or university. It mixes some classic works on Shakespeare with more recent volumes. Con­ fronted by such a list, the best tactic is to start with the most recent book. This is likely to offer a sense of the current ways of looking at Shakespeare and also provide a view of earlier criticism. All criticism works by discussing previous discussions of the text, but this is an espe­ cially important aspect of recent Shakespeare studies which in various ways are a reaction against earlier criticism. Very often recent critics will refer to traditional criticism in order to clarifY by contrast their own critical position, and, indeed, there is very often an expectation that the reader already knows their way round the critical map. What follows here, therefore, is a very brief survey of the century's most influential traditional critics and books, and then some equally brief notes about recent critics and books. Any account of twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism has to start with A.C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, still probably the most famous book on the tragedies. Bradley is often criticised for his 'char­ acter approach' to Shakespeare, in which he treats the characters as if they were real people (speculating, for example, on how many children Lady Macbeth had). His analysis of the action of the plays, however, and his comments on the structure of tragedy, are altogether more complex than is sometimes suggested. The next phase in Shakespeare criticism begins with G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel qf Fire (1930). Bradley focused on character and action in the tragedies, but Wilson Knight is interested in the imagina­ tive, symbolic impact of the tragedies. He concentrates on the vision of life they offer and the moral values they embrace. His way of getting at this is through the language, in particular through the broader, uni­ versal implications of the imagery. This shift from an interest in char­ acter to an interest in language is also evident in the work of L.C. Knights. Knights argues (in, for instance, ExploratWns, 1946) that Shake­ speare's plays should be regarded as 'dramatic poems', as essentially poetic explorations of themes and ideas. A similar interest in Shake- 246 HOW TO STUDY A SHAKESPEARE PlAY speare's language is also found in Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery (1935). Another strand in Shakespeare criticism is exemplified in the work of E.M.W. Tillyard. His best-known books are 7he Elizabethan World Picture (1943) and Shakespeare's History Plays (1944). Tillyard focuses on the religious, social and political ideas in the plays; in particular he is interested in the kind of moral investigations the plays offer of political Issues. The approaches listed so far could be said to centre on character, language and themes, the central concerns of traditional criticism. The next significant development came with critics such as Maynard Mack and Northrop Frye, who focus more on the form and structure of the plays. In 'King Lear' In Our 1ime (1965), Mack examines how the play achieves its larger significance, how the play draws on parable and myth. Frye is also interested in the structure of the plays, but his approach, as in his discussion of the comedies in A Natural PerspectWe (1965), focuses more on the underlying structure, the pattern behind the individual plays. With Frye we can say that criticism has moved beyond the con­ cerns of the traditional criticism into new ways of reading and thinking about the texts. Frye's approach is basically that of the structuralist: he is interested in the plays as cultural artefacts, and his theory of comedy is based on ideas drawn from anthropology. Similarly, C.L. Barber's theory of comedy put forward in his Shakespeare's FestWe Comedy (1959), and which draws on ideas to do with popular festivals, pushed Shake­ spearean criticism towards the new directions and approaches that became established in the 1980s. There are the approaches discussed in chapters 7-11 , that is structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminist criticism, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, as well as those approaches such as Marxist criticism and psychoanalytic criticism which many recent critics also draw upon. At first the new approaches were worked out in books on critical theory but using Shakespeare for illustration, books such as Catherine Belsey's Critical Practice (1980), probably still the best introduction to modern critical theory. Or they were worked out in books dealing with the Renaissance more broadly, as in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1982), which paved the way for the growing interest in cultural history as well as New Historicism. But for students the changes in critical approach started to become acces­ sible and influential with a stream of books in the mid-1980s.