Product Description

This Companion to Shakespeare is an indispensable book for students and teachers of Shakespeare, indeed for anyone with an interest in his plays.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #343743 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 536 pages

Review
"This collection of 28 essays provides a historical overview of the conditions of Shakespeare′s world." Library Journal

"No playgoer, reader, teacher or scholar should be without this elegant and indispensable guide to Shakespeare. It brings together the best in recent scholarship on the social history, contemporary reading, and institutions and material practices of writing, playing and printing in early modern England. Kastan has assembled a collection of essays with his peers and presented them with his characteristic intelligence and grace. The definitive Companion to Shakespeare." Karen Newman, Brown University

"A worthy companion indeed – every serious student of Shakespeare should carry this adroitly compiled collection of specialist essays on essential background constantly with them. Kastan has brought together a star cast of experts to help us to hear Shakespeare′s distinctive voice, with all its historical and intellectual resonances, in a fresh and sharply clarified context." Lisa Jardine, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London

"Literally indispensable for anyone interested in Shakespeare." Patricia Parker, University of Stanford

"David Kastan has put together a dazzling collection of essays on Shakespeare. And one doesn′t expect to be dazzled by that rather sedate animal, a Companion. This Companion represents the very best in recent scholarship and is at the same time lively, accessible, and often surprising. It is indeed indispensible." Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania

"Between them these specialist writers have assembled a series of essays which represent, for the time being at least, the last word in Shakespearean scholarship and research. It is difficult to think of any aspect of the dramatist′s life, times and work which is not covered by this companion."

"This companion can be confidently recommended as a paragon of Shakespearean research." K.C.Harrison, Reference Reviews

"The publication [...] of the monumental Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan, is a major event and one that should be celebrated for the breadth and depth of scholarship the book makes available to students." Year′s Work In English Studies

From the Back Cover
This Companion to Shakespeare is an indispensable book for students and teachers of Shakespeare, indeed for anyone with an interest in his plays. It offers a remarkably innovative and comprehensive picture of the theatrical, literary, intellectual, and social worlds in which Shakespeare wrote and in which his plays were produced.

The newly commissioned essays, written by the most distinguished historians and literary scholars working today (including Ian Archer, David Bevington, Michael Bristol, David Daniell, Richard Dutton, Andrew Gurr, Jean Howard, Roslyn Knutson, and Peter Lake), represent the very best of modern scholarship. Each individual essay stands as an authoritative account of the state of knowledge in its field, and in their totality the essays provide a new and compelling portrait of the historical conditions, both imaginative and institutional, that enabled (and in some cases inhibited) Shakespeare′s great art. Including essays on the organization and regulation of Elizabethan playing, on the printing, publication, and circulation of the play–texts, on Shakespeare′s reading, on religion and political thought in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and on the linguistic and literary environment in which he wrote, the Companion to Shakespeare remarkably allows us to see Shakespeare anew by restoring his artistry to the rich interactions of the historical world in which he worked and flourished.

The lucid, engaging, and authoritative essays in this imaginatively conceived collection will definitively change the ways in which we read, see, and perform Shakespeare′s plays.

About the Author
David Scott Kastan is Professor of English at the Columbia University and a General Editor of the New Arden Shakespeare. His numerous publications include: Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (1982), Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Stuart Drama (1991), Critical Essays on Shakespeare′s Hamlet (1995), and Shakespeare After Theory (1999).

Customer Reviews

Companion Proves Untrustworthy
This book intended as a textbook or library resource for students reflects and advances the causes of the New Historicism, with its deplorable tendencies to omit, distort, or misrepresent evidence incompatible with its political and social predelictions. I take three articles in my field as representative of all. Hackel, who describes readers and reading during Shakespeare's times, insinuates a strong cleavage between court and common readers, cites literacy rates from Bennett's study for the period from 1475 to 1557, ending 30 years before Shakespeare began writing; she ignores his relevant studies for the periods 1558-1603 and 1603-1640 which show shared interests and widespread literacy throughout the population. Addressing vernacular reading, Henderson and Siemon, not only share her insinuation, but deplore the tendency for source study to make 'Shakespeare's writing appear more subtle or rich than these other kinds of writing,' namely, 'ballads, anatomies, and court proceedings,' and claim the differences are now seen as based on ideology rather than aesthetics. Of course, Shakespeare's works are superior to these other kinds as works to literature. The authors avoid the most obvious explanation of the late Elizabethan interest in romances, strong and widespread nationalism in the face of the threat from Catholic Spain and especially after the defeat of the Spanish Armada because romance suggests the heroism and idealism associated with aristocratic chivalry. In his (and their) insistence on seeing Shakespeare as an early modern as opposed to a late medieval writer, Woolf blinds himself to the fact that late Elizabethans still read history analogically and morally, not linearly and technically. The result is that these writers view Shakespeare, his society, and its culture as embryonic of the evils of the modern world, especially centralized government and oligarchic capitalism. The polemic biases serve the author's real purpose to persuade rather than the purported purpose to inform. Those to whom this book is addressed and who seek assistance outside edited texts should look elsewhere. They might consider the introductory material in the latest Riverside edition of Shakespeare's plays.

Very interesting and absorbing
This is a very interesting book. The essays cover a broad area to give the reader a good sense of the contexts of the Bard's works. You do not have to be studying Shakespeare to justify reading it, no scholarly knowledge of his works is assumed. Well put together and the essay format makes it easy to dip into at any point. Recommended.

Excellent resource for both classroom and library
A COMPANION TO SHAKESPEARE is an invaluable addition to the collection of anyone, student, scholar or layman with an interest in the conditions that made Shakespeare's art possible. The unbiased essays are not slanted to unfairly represent any of the current popular "isms" reflected in the critical analysis of the past twenty years. In fact, the individual essays are clear, informative, useful and even fun. In compiling the book, the editor of the COMPANION, David Scott Kastan, seems to have made a conscious effort to present material that would, "restore Shakespeare's artistry to the earliest conditions of its realization and intelligibility: to the collaborations of the theatre in which the plays were acted, to the practices of the book trade in which they were published, to the unstable political world of late Tudor and early Stuart England in which the plays were engaged by their various publics" (see Kastan, SHAKESPEARE AFTER THEORY)In addition to its enlightening and insightful content, the COMPANION is beautifully designed and the new paperback edition is an incredible bargain.