HEATHER DUBROW is John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in Poetic Imagination at Fordham University; among the institutions where she taught previously are Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her publications include seven single-authored volumes of literary criticism, a coedited collection of essays, an edition of As You Like It, and essays on higher education and teaching. Two full-length

Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics. By BoeckelerErika Mary. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. Illus. Pp. xiv + 286.

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. By AkhimiePatricia. New York: Routledge, 2018. Illus. Pp. xii + 220.

Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy. By HalpernRichard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. viii + 214.

Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life. By LuptonJulia Reinhard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. iv + 284.

Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613. By DustagheerSarah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Illus. Pp. x + 236.

Shakespearean Arrivals: The Birth of Character. By LukeNicholas. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. vi + 254. Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons. By CurtrightTravis. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 186.

In a mostly faithful redux of the Ciceronian categories “who, what, where, with what help, why, how, when,” Edward Coke’s Institutes advise a plaintiff on how to make a credible complaint in a court of law.11 “[T]he count of the appellant,” he declares, “must comprehend these seven things: 1. The fact, 2. the yeer, 3. the day, 4. the hour, 5. the time of the king, 6. the Town where the fact was done

In 1635 threeactors, RobertBenfield, EyllaerdtSwanston, andThomasPollard, petitioned the Lord Chamberlain to be allowed to purchase shares in the leases of the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses and, thereby, to take a larger cut of the profits.11 An answer to the petition was composed by a group of relatives of the Blackfriars playhouse’s former owner, Richard Burbage: his brother, Cuthbert; his widow

GABRIEL BLOOMFIELD is Assistant Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. His writing on early modern literature and the history of interpretation has appeared recently in English Literary History, Studies in Philology, and Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900.

“Ecce signum!”—behold the proof!—Falstaff proclaims in Act 2 of 1 Henry IV, presenting his “sword hacked like a handsaw” as incontrovertible evidence of the veracity of his account of the Gadshill robbery (2.4.162).11 His subsequent claim to have been ambushed by dozens of well-armed men explains the dents in his weapon as effects of a series of events in the past. The meaning of the damaged sword

Though this be madness yet there is method in’t. —Hamlet, 2.2.202–311

Shakespeare, Love and Language. By SchalkwykDavid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 252.

Shakespeare’s Double Plays: Dramatic Economy on the Early Modern Stage. By GamboaBrett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Illus. Pp. x + 292.

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History. Edited by FitterChris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Illus. Pp. xiv + 264.

Shakespeare and Conceptual Blending: Cognition, Creativity, Criticism. By BoothMichael. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Illus. Pp. xxii + 258.

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness. By LewisRhodri. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Illus. Pp. xxii + 368.

Shakespeare and Domestic Life: A Dictionary. By ClarkSandra. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. Illus. Pp. xvi + 440.

tational field to fill in details that the theater did not itself reproduce. Astington wonders, for example, if early moderns would have recalled pictorial versions of battles to imagine the full-scale combat that could not be staged. Likewise, he returns repeatedly to the question of theatrical lighting. The torch, he points out, was “a conventional sign of night scenes on a daylit stage” (185), whereas

WH E N T H E C A T H O L I C D O U A Y -R H E I M S T R A N S L A T I O N O F T H E N E W T E S T A M E N T was published in 1582, it included a novel translation into English of the Greek σκάνδαλον (skandalon) or the Vulgate’s scandalum, replacing traditional English equivalents such as “offend” and “stumbling block” with “scandalize” or “scandal.”2 Pertaining to passages such as Matthew 18:6 (“whosoeuer

IN T H E C L I M A C T I C M O M E N T S O F T H E D E P O S I T I O N S C E N E I N A C T 4 O F R I C H A R D II, Northumberland presses Richard to sign articles declaring himself guilty of “grievous crimes . . . against the state” (4.1.223, 225).2 In response, Richard initiates a pause in the transactional business of the scene to stage an interlude of self-reflection. He declines to turn his tearful

the new British Asian productions of Much Ado about Nothing (2012), The Merchant of Venice (2005), and even A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1997). Buckley’s essay takes up this problem of staging Indian (and, by extension, subcontinental) Shakespeares in the United Kingdom from a different perspective by questioning the extent to which performances at the World Shakespeare Festival (2012) were able to open

Abstract:This essay argues that the relationship between Celia and Rosalind at the center of As You Like It exemplifies the public countenancing, ethical utility, and social primacy of oath-based friendship between women—particularly women cousins. “Cousin” was not only a kinship term, but also one particularly endowed with affective, and even erotic, meanings—an enhancement of intimacy beyond the

The very first article of the so-called “Nashville Statement,” a recent evangelical Christian manifesto drafted by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, states, “We deny that God has designed marriage to be a homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous relationship.”1 Although wisely declining to speak for God, Will Stockton argues precisely the opposite in his new book: insofar as “biblical marriage

CH AU C E R’ S K n I G H T, T H E I n AU G U R A L C O n T E S TA n T in The Canterbury Tales, tells the story of the captured kinsmen Arcite and Palamon, the latter of whom escapes “by helpyng of a freend.”1 The Knight keeps the account of Palamon’s prison break relatively simple: though “olde bookes” tell this story “moore pleyn” (ll. 1463–64), he says nothing else about the accomplice, only elaborating

of Shakespeare. As these essays show, though born of individual, immediate interests, such publications were nevertheless remarkably enduring and influential: Benson’s Poems and the 1655 Lucrece were standard reading and critical editions for the next fifty years, while the Fourth Folio was the basis for Rowe’s Works and subsequent eighteenth-century editions. And it was nothing less than exasperation

Abstract:The gift and the denial of charity can sometimes occur simultaneously. I once read a review of a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest (1993); the critic found many virtues in the show, but also a few poor performances “which charity forbids me to name.” That kind of alleged generosity diminishes the recipient and giver at once. In Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens

produced by the revisionists to support their theory. To other scholars and critics, cutting a whole scene (4.3) and severely reducing the fantastic mad trial scene (3.6) have seemed like extraordinarily bad theatrical judgments from a misguided desire to speed up the action. A repeated criticism of the revisionists’ explanations of F’s changes is that they seemed to be post-facto rationalizations

Sara Coodin’s Is Shylock Jewish? Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeare’s Jews contests historicist interpretations of Shylock as a “product of the Elizabethan anti-Semitic imagination” (9). Instead, she argues, Shakespeare’s audience would have valued Shylock as a Jew with privileged access to the moral content of Hebrew scripture. In The Merchant of Venice, the Genesis narratives to

As the Third Series of the Arden Shakespeare nears completion, James C. Bulman’s King Henry IV, Part 2 rounds out the second tetralogy after over twenty years—T. W. Craik’s Henry V, the first edition of the new series to appear, was published in 1995. For a play that offers no clear, or easily argued, authoritative version (with all the problematic connotations attached to such an adjective), Bulman

nants in their foreignness. Yet it was also more complicated than this: sack could be used to initiate romance, to warm a humorally cold body, or simply to enjoin others in conviviality. In other words, sack was already thoroughly imbued in domestic culture. The material about sherry is so rich in essays by Sebek, Karen Raber, and Rebecca Lemon that it could have comprised another book. Other chapters

Siebers writes against the grain of disability scholarship that discusses early modern representations of disability primarily in terms of stigma. In the sixth part (“Textual Production and Reproduction”), essays by Laurie Maguire, Valerie Wayne, and Jeffrey Masten explore the textual ramifications of feminist reading strategies, surveying what Traub identifies as the “present theoretical challenges

While much has been done in the past hundred years to add to our stock of knowledge on the existence of the theatre at Newington Butts, questions relating to names persist: there is no agreement over the origin of the name of the location itself—whence the 'Butts' in Newington Butts—and studies of the theater invariably concede that we have no way of knowing the name of the playhouse itself. Answers

Abstract:The exchange between Antony, Lepidus, and Octavius on the nature of the Nile crocodile is one of the most striking passages of Antony and Cleopatra: on Antony's account, this curious reptile is like unto itself alone. In this essay, I look afresh at the sources and analogs on which Shakespeare may have drawn in scripting Antony's crocodile, and use them as a tool with which to reconsider the

Abstract:Modern biographical studies of Shakespeare owe much to John Aubrey's decision in 1681 to interview the retired theater manager William Beeston. Preserved in the notes that arose from their discussions is an anecdote that has proven especially tantalizing to scholars: on the verso side of MS Aubrey 8, fol. 45—a paper slip bound into one of the folios at the Bodleian Library containing Aubrey's

Writing commentary notes for an edition of Shakespeare (or indeed any other early modern author) is an art that has made considerable progress in recent years, as demonstrated brilliantly by the Folger Shakespeare Library editions edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine and by some other editions of recent note. Earlier practice, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries especially, tended

rary plays; early modern theological tracts; and classical, biblical, and medieval sources. For example, Kerrigan teases out the range of oaths in revenge drama beyond Shakespeare before turning to the key revenge plays noted above. Ultimately, then, the forms of binding language, rather than chronology, serve as the organizing principle, as the book moves from revenge to swearing, from oaths to slander

Abstract: That William Shakespeare and his fellow players were patented early in his reign as “these our servants” by James I is well known. Not so well understood is why this happened. Ready answers have been brought forward as self-evident: the new king favored plays and players and also understood that Shakespeare’s was the best company in London. We are thus to understand that ten days after having

almost every page. Yet even in the midst of these riches, a nagging doubt remains. Despite the claim in Kidnie and Massai’s introduction that “contributors illustrate the issues under discussion through reference to individual plays and/or poems” (2), few essays feature detailed discussion of Shakespeare’s nondramatic work (with the contributions of Helen Smith, Estill, Galey, and Murphy as honorable

Abstract: In recent years, the view that William Shakeshafte, the servant named in the will of Alexander Hoghton in 1581, and William Shakespeare of Stratford were the same person has gained support in some quarters. The schoolmaster John Cottom and his family are invariably cited as the essential link between Lancashire and Stratford, converting, in Ernst Honigmann’s words, “a possibility to a probability

SCHOLARSHIP ON TITUS ANDRONICUS, despite its special concentration on ethnographical approaches, has not yet given a satisfactory explanation of why Shakespeare’s villainous moor is named Aaron.1 many, following Leslie Fiedler, have explored the “Jewish” connotations of the name, and several have examined the moor in search of specific analogies to Aaron, the brother of moses.2 These biblical and Jewish

Abstract:This essay explores the way Angelo and Isabella appeal to rules in their attempts to justify the legality or ethics of their actions, and thus relieve themselves of the burden of responsibility. ("It is the law, not I, condemn your brother.") However, the play will confront them with the truth that all rules, even the most precise, require a human agent to use them in a particular context

mentally “unfree” (107). he proposes that the medieval tradition of courtly love started to open the door for the distinct world-historical achievement of free, reciprocal lovemaking between men and women, the dawning possibilities of which are subsequently explored and developed by Shakespeare. kottman excitingly affirms romeo and Juliet’s challenge to (1) mortality, and (2) family love and loyalty

of, particular words and phrases in his lectures; it’s a way for him to make audible Shakespeare’s “funny ear,” “funny mind,” and “funny tongue” (“funny” carrying senses of idiosyncratic, playful, uncanny, queer). And Leinwand speaks grippingly about Berryman’s work on his never-completed edition of King Lear, including his long, carefully penned lists of Shakespearean coinages, and his elaborately

remainder “I am here; this is mine; come and get me” (88). Such reductive presuppositions conform to author theory, prompting three clowns in search of an author function (chapters 3–5). In chapter 3, anonymous pamphlet writers “strategically converted” (110) the late Tarlton (d. 1588) into “a posthumous author function” (110) to assert the property of a solo dramatist, alienate performers from their

Abstract: In this essay, I examine Henry Norman Hudson, an understudied yet pivotal figure in the emergence of Shakespeare studies as a discrete and institutionalized academic discipline in the United States. Professionalizing Shakespeare studies in the late nineteenth century, I argue, entailed considerable conflict and negotiation between two methodological approaches—aesthetic humanism and scientific

Abstract: This essay contends that Reformation Biblical hermeneutics offer a vital way to understand the relationship between three of Titus Andronicus’s most infamous features: its insistent use of classical texts; its figurative-literal play; and its grotesque violence. In Titus, classical texts offer an oblique way to stage dangerous questions of Biblical interpretation and to dramatize the interpretive

Hamlet’s Moment is much more than a book about Hamlet, although it is also very much that. Anchored in the years before and after 1600, Kiséry’s analysis extends far beyond the “moment” of its title, tracking long-term historical developments that transformed the theater’s engagement with politics and political knowledge. From a preoccupation with “what it meant to be king, and what it took to be king

how socio-political-religious contexts affected not only what was written, but how it was written. And, conversely, literary historians are attuned to the reciprocal shaping of texts and culture: they consider the socio-political-religious consequences of what was written and the ways that the actual form of texts can effect change. They can do this through attending to genre, as Daniel Cadman does

perhaps Christofides’s most suggestive chapter—treats the much-discussed handkerchief as a decidedly Cypriot object. By contextualizing the handkerchief within Cyprus’s long history of silk production, Christofides gestures toward “specific political and cultural forces from across the Mediterranean . . . at work in the play” (65). The Act 4 chapter finds motivation in one of Othello’s more quizzical

Abstract: In All’s Well That Ends Well , Shakespeare imagines a common enough situation—someone you love, if ambivalently, will never love you—and in doing so suggests how unrequited love might become an art, a practice of sustaining relationship with those who prefer no relationship whatsoever and who might not merit our investment to begin with. How, Shakespeare asks, can you have a relationship

instances of the allusions mentioned, especially for those readers unfamiliar with the particular works of fiction. The same might be said too for the treatment of poetry here. While ranging widely across the century and offering fascinating readings of the influence of the Shakespearean iambic pentameter and the sonnet series, this section necessitates a relatively high level of knowledge about Victorian

In Shakespeare’s dramatic worlds, words are often treated with suspicion. Both Hamlet and Troilus, respectively, deride their potential emptiness and equivocation: “Words, words, words” (Hamlet, 2.2.210) and “Words, words, mere words” (Troilus and Cressida, 5.3.119). Falstaff punctures the lofty aspirations of “honor” by dismissing it as nothing but “A word . . . Air” (1 Henry IV, 5.1.131, 135–36)

Abstract:Barbara A. Mowat's essay "Prospero's Book," published in Shakespeare Quarterly in 2001, discusses an Elizabethan manuscript conjuring book, a grimoire, in the Folger Shakespeare Library's collection that has significant relevance to Shakespeare through its obvious relation not only to The Tempest but also to A Midsummer Night's Dream, since one of the spirits raised through its spells is Oberon

Howard, examines concerns about securing succession through judicious marriages. While this masque later influenced The Tempest (1610–11), it is oddly situated in a book about Shakespeare in 1606. The masque mostly seems to function as a clever device to allow Shapiro to bring in the epilogue of this disastrous marriage, the scandalous Overbury affair (1615–16). In addition to this cultural reconstitution

“Presumption is our natural and original malady,” wrote Montaigne, who never ceased to be astonished by our epistemological arrogance. In typically Montaignean fashion, he implies both condemnation of and forgiveness for this mortal failing. Presumption is our “original” sin—eating from the tree of knowledge—but it is also “natural,” unavoidable. James Kuzner cites this sentence from the “Apology for

Abstract: This essay examines how Edmond Malone’s editions of The Passionate Pilgrim in Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare’s Plays Published in 1778 (1780) and The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare (1790) dictated the ways late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors presented and interpreted the poems in the miscellany. Malone’s substantively different approaches to The Passionate Pilgrim

sometimes leave one unsatisfied, wishing a few dangling questions had been addressed, a key idea pushed further, an unmentioned source recognized. The impulse to leave out citations is understandable but mistaken. Cutting off such immediate access to the texts that feed each essay limits the utility of the collection. That said, the short essays and wide range of topics recommend this book to students

"Editing Shakespeare in Parts" argues that single-text editing is not the most effective response to the pressing need to adjust editorial methods to a theoretically and historically informed understanding of early modern theatrical and textual cultures. Single-text editing has undoubtedly allowed fresh and astute thinking in relation to early modern modes of dramatic authorship, but it has also unhelpfully

Abstract:This essay asks what bibliographical and book-history perspectives can reveal when applied to digital editions themselves as artifacts in the long continuum of Shakespeare editing. What is the history of Shakespearean information architecture, digital and otherwise, and how does it take material form in the working practices of editors? To what extent does available infrastructure determine