Product Description

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare is the most comprehensive reference work yet produced about Shakespeare's works, times, life, and afterlives. From the conjectured identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets to the misprints in the First Folio, from Shakespeare's favourite figures of speech to the staging of Othello in South Africa, a team of internationally renowned scholars provides a lucid, stimulating, and authoritative guide to the plays, the poems, and their interpretation around the world over the last four centuries. Bringing its readers up to date not only with the latest in Shakespearian scholarship and controversy but with the plays' recent incarnations on stage, on film, and in international popular culture, this is the perfect companion to Shakespeare's works, covering everything from Aaron and act divisions to Zeffirelli and Zuccaro, from Shakespeare in schools to Shakespeare in Love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82516 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
From Ariel and anti-theatrical polemic to Willow Song, Yorrick and Zeffirelli, The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare is a remarkably eclectic reference book. "Setobos is a deity or demon worshipped by Sycorax in The Tempest," runs one entry; "Lighting--Open air playhouses used available daylight supplemented by cresset-lights (oil-soaked rope burning in a metal basket) in the early evening," begins another. The writing style is commendably unpretentious.

Most of the 540 pages are given over to alphabetic listing of characters and locations in the plays, actors, directors, theatre managers and critics from the late 16th century until the present. Then there are, among other things, technical terms to do with the theatre or with language and names such as Wagner, Zoffany, Arnold, Marlowe, whose work connects in any way with Shakespeare. There is no index but the book opens with a detailed account of the plays' dramatis personae, themes and associated names; and it ends with maps, a Royal family tree to help you pick your way through the history plays and a timeline giving a chronology of Shakespeare's life and works (and their reception). There are also suggestions for further reading. Each play gets several pages at the appropriate point in the alphabetical arrangement. The commentary includes a synopsis, textual information and some facts on the play's sources, along with an account of its stage and critical history and artistic features. The section about published editions and criticism of each play is useful too. Apocryphal plays such as The Merry Devil of Edmonton are mentioned more briefly.

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare is an attractive book--with its A4 format, shiny paper and plenty of pictures--to browse through as well as use as a reference. --Susan Elkin

Wave Magazine, May 2005
The most authoritative guide to the literary and theatrical canon that it defined.

Review
The most authoritative guide to the literary and theatrical canon that it defined. (The Times )

Customer Reviews

At last, a Shakespeare reference book for real people
Beautifully designed and laid out, with hundreds of really good relevant and unusual pictures, this is a fabulous reference book -- jammed with information and ideas. It isn't just a bunch of academics prosing on as if for each other -- there's no jargon, and all the thousands of entries (which range from nicely set-out in-depth ones on individual plays to tiny little gems of fascinating trivia) are written to share a real enjoyment of the plays and the poems. Describes the world that made Shakespeare and the world that Shakespeare has made -- the pictures range from Elizabethan documents to modern adverts -- and there's amazing stuff about what Shakespeare's works have become in ballet and music and opera and film and in fiction. So it's much broader and more lively than its stuffy title suggests -- judge it by the brilliant colours of the jacket, not the imprint! A must for every bookshelf, but it won't stay still on a bookshelf for long -- the only encyclopaedia I own that would be a pleasure to read from A straight through to Z. You learn something you didn't expect to every time you open a page...it('s)... worth..(it) just for the full-page pin-up of a young Dorothy Tutin as Cressida. My Christmas present list is solved for this year -- and they'll be grateful, too. Fantastic for anyone even remotely interested in Shakespeare, whether as a student or a theatregoer or anything.

Good in Parts
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford Companions)A strange mixture. The entries in this handbook range from the elementary to the world-historical, with the purely fatuous in between. So there is an entry on elision; one on Marxism; and one on lords that lists the appearances of lords as characters from the Taming of the Shrew to Cymbeline. Unfortunately, the entries also tend to be highly judgmental in an old-fashioned kind of way, and judgmental from a position of social and critical conservatism. The transformation of English studies by poststructuralist, feminist, and Marxist discourses as long ago as the 1980s is simply bypassed by the book which looks back to the late Victorian critic, A. C. Bradley, for its values. Nevertheless, there is useful information in it. The entries on the acting companies and on printing and publishing are exemplary; and the entry on Shakespeare's audience is helpful, though it dodges the question of the social composition of the audience and its class identity with the acting companies, something which explains the extraordinary popularity of Shakespeare in his own time but his location within elite culture today. Most people would probably find A Dictionary of Shakespeare by Stanley Wells (Oxford, 2005) more useful. It is handy to use, whereas the Companion is unwieldy. Its entries are brief, concise, factual, and contain practically all that is known about Shakespeare - which is actually not very much. It's the volume I usually find myself referring to.

just what we need
Just what we need, another companion to Shakespeare.
This one is so big and cumbersome it needs a companion
to carry it around.