In addition to the following books and articles, see www.folger.edu/shakespeare and www.folger.edu/online-resources.
Barber, C. L. “Testing Courtesy and Humanity in Twelfth Night.” In Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, pp. 240–61. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Barber’s well-known essay treats the festive spirit implied in the play’s title. Malvolio’s presence is appropriate in this sense, for he acts as a foreign body that must be expelled by laughter. By moving the audience through release to clarification, the play explores the powers in human nature that make good the risks of social courtesy and liberty displayed in Viola’s character.
Belsey, Catherine. “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies.” In Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis, pp. 166–90. London: Methuen, 1985.
By disrupting the difference between masculine and feminine, Shakespeare’s comedies radically challenge patriarchal values. As one instance, Belsey pursues the way Twelfth Night unfixes gender distinctions toward comic, romantic ends. Twelfth Night’s ending depends on the closing off of “glimpsed transgression” and the reinstatement of a clearly defined sexual distinction. But, as Belsey reminds us, “plays are more than their endings.”
Brown, John Russell. “Directions for Twelfth Night, or What You Will.” In Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance, pp. 207–19. New York: St. Martin’s, 1967.
For Brown, Twelfth Night poses a greater challenge to the theatrical practitioner than most plays. Exploring possible solutions that will answer the demands of both the text and the modern stage, Brown imagines a production that would bring together the varied elements of the Illyrian world, a world alternately—and often simultaneously—“gay, quiet, strained, solemn, dignified, elegant, easy, complicated, precarious, hearty, [and] homely. . . .”
Everett, Barbara. “Or What You Will.” Essays in Criticism 35 (1985): 294–314.
Everett explores musicality, characterization, verbal style, the significance of the play’s subtitle, and the role of Feste in response to what, for Everett, is the primary question posed by Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s earlier comedies: “Why do we take them seriously? Or how, rather, best to explore the ways in which it is hard not to take them seriously—the sense that at their best they achieve a lightness as far as possible from triviality.”
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Fiction and Friction.” In Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 66–93. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Exploring his sense that Twelfth Night forever skirts illicit, homosexual desire, Greenblatt traces the course of the “swerving” necessary to avert social, theological, and legal disaster. By historicizing the sexual nature of Shakespeare’s work within other social discourses of the body, Greenblatt establishes that, since women were understood to be inverted mirror images of men, there would be an inherent homoeroticism in all sexuality, although consummation of desire could be licitly figured only in the love of a man and a woman. It is this “mobility of desire” upon which the “delicious confusions of Twelfth Night depend. . . .”
Hartman, Geoffrey H. “Shakespeare’s Poetical Character in Twelfth Night.” In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker, pp. 37–53. London: Methuen, 1985.
Analyzing the ways Shakespeare’s language, especially punning and wordplay, relates to character, Hartman examines the flux of language between real consequence—as in Malvolio’s desperate pleas for release—and mere quibbling. Twelfth Night hints at moments of clarification (“Good madam, let me see your face”) but defers pure revelation because the text, sustained by wit, keeps turning. According to Hartman, “There is always more to say.”
Howard, Jean E. “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 418–40.
Howard uses preachers’ and polemicists’ attacks on cross dressing during the 1580–1620 period as signals of a sex-gender system under pressure to argue that cross dressing threatened the normative social order of hierarchy. But Howard argues that, in Twelfth Night, the cross-dressed Viola fails to challenge this social order, while Olivia powerfully challenges it.
Kermode, Frank. “The Mature Comedies.” In Early Shakespeare, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, pp. 211–27. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3. London: Edward Arnold, 1961.
Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the comedy of mistaken identity takes subtlest form, for Kermode, in Twelfth Night, where the inability certainly to distinguish between what is meant and what is said, between things as they are and things as they appear to be, develops “a peculiar relevance to life itself.” Kermode terms the play a “comedy of identity, set on the borders of wonder and madness.”
Novy, Marianne. “ ‘An You Smile Not, He’s Gagged’: Mutuality in Shakespeare’s Comedy.” In Love’s Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare, pp. 21–44. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Novy follows the linguistic implications of “mutuality”: the mutual dependence of romantic couples in Shakespeare’s comic world. Marking the similarities of the suppliant lover and court jester—both depend for success upon a response of acceptance—Novy reads both wooing speeches and jokes as attempts to establish relationships. Shakespeare’s most interesting comic lovers depend upon these verbal modes of interplay to develop their relationships. In this way, Shakespeare departs from both classical Roman comedy and the Petrarchan tradition in which “the focus is on the man, the initiator.”
Rackin, Phyllis. “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stages.” PMLA 102 (1987): 29–47.
Rackin explores the changing conceptions of gender and theatrical mimesis through transvestite heroines in five English Renaissance plays, including Twelfth Night. Topics include the sexual ambiguity of the boy heroine in association with the problematic relationship between the male actor and the female character he plays, the dramatic action and the reality it imitates, and the play and the audience that watches it. The increasingly rigid gender distinctions and the devaluation of the feminine are associated with a rejection of fantasy and a deepening anxiety about theatrical representation.
Summers, Joseph. “The Masks of Twelfth Night.” In Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by Leonard F. Dean, pp. 134–43. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Noting that in Twelfth Night the usual Shakespearean barrier to romantic fulfillment—a “responsible” older generation—has been abolished, Summers examines why the inhabitants of Illyria discover that they are anything but free. Summers removes the mask of each character, determining that most of them know “neither themselves, nor others, nor their social worlds.” Within comedy, “we laugh with the characters who know the role they are playing and we laugh at those who do not.” Summers divides the cast into those two broad categories but points out that the professional fool, Feste, “never makes the amateur’s mistake of confusing his personality with his mask. . . .”
Abbott, E. A. A Shakespearian Grammar. New York: Haskell House, 1972.
This compact reference book, first published in 1870, helps with many difficulties in Shakespeare’s language. It systematically accounts for a host of differences between Shakespeare’s usage and sentence structure and our own.
Blake, Norman. Shakespeare’s Language: An Introduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
This general introduction to Elizabethan English discusses various aspects of the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, offering possible meanings for hundreds of ambiguous constructions.
Dobson, E. J. English Pronunciation, 1500–1700. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.
This long and technical work includes chapters on spelling (and its reformation), phonetics, stressed vowels, and consonants in early modern English.
Hope, Jonathan. Shakespeare’s Grammar. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003.
Commissioned as a replacement for Abbott’s Shakespearian Grammar, Hope’s book is organized in terms of the two basic parts of speech, the noun and the verb. After extensive analysis of the noun phrase and the verb phrase come briefer discussions of subjects and agents, objects, complements, and adverbials.
Houston, John. Shakespearean Sentences: A Study in Style and Syntax. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
Houston studies Shakespeare’s stylistic choices, considering matters such as sentence length and the relative positions of subject, verb, and direct object. Examining plays throughout the canon in a roughly chronological, developmental order, he analyzes how sentence structure is used in setting tone, in characterization, and for other dramatic purposes.
Onions, C. T. A Shakespeare Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
This revised edition updates Onions’s standard, selective glossary of words and phrases in Shakespeare’s plays that are now obsolete, archaic, or obscure.
Robinson, Randal. Unlocking Shakespeare’s Language: Help for the Teacher and Student. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English and the ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, 1989.
Specifically designed for the high-school and undergraduate college teacher and student, Robinson’s book addresses the problems that most often hinder present-day readers of Shakespeare. Through work with his own students, Robinson found that many readers today are particularly puzzled by such stylistic characteristics as subject-verb inversion, interrupted structures, and compression. He shows how our own colloquial language contains comparable structures, and thus helps students recognize such structures when they find them in Shakespeare’s plays. This book supplies worksheets—with examples from major plays—to illuminate and remedy such problems as unusual sequences of words and the separation of related parts of sentences.
Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. 3 vols. London: Athlone Press, 1994.
Williams provides a comprehensive list of words to which Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and later Stuart writers gave sexual meanings. He supports his identification of these meanings by extensive quotations.
Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Petty School. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1943.
Baldwin here investigates the theory and practice of the petty school, the first level of education in Elizabethan England. He focuses on that educational system primarily as it is reflected in Shakespeare’s art.
Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944.
Baldwin attacks the view that Shakespeare was an uneducated genius—a view that had been dominant among Shakespeareans since the eighteenth century. Instead, Baldwin shows, the educational system of Shakespeare’s time would have given the playwright a strong background in the classics, and there is much in the plays that shows how Shakespeare benefited from such an education.
Beier, A. L., and Roger Finlay, eds. London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis. New York: Longman, 1986.
Focusing on the economic and social history of early modern London, these collected essays probe aspects of metropolitan life, including “Population and Disease,” “Commerce and Manufacture,” and “Society and Change.”
Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.
Analyzing in great detail the scant historical data, Chambers’s complex, scholarly study considers the nature of the texts in which Shakespeare’s work is preserved.
Cressy, David. Education in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Edward Arnold, 1975.
This volume collects sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early eighteenth-century documents detailing aspects of formal education in England, such as the curriculum, the control and organization of education, and the education of women.
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010.
This biography, first published in 2001 under the title Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life, sets out to look into the documents from Shakespeare’s personal life—especially legal and financial records—and it finds there a man very different from the one portrayed in more traditional biographies. He is “ungentle” in being born to a lower social class and in being a bit ruthless and more than a bit stingy. As the author notes, “three topics were formerly taboo both in polite society and in Shakespearean biography: social class, sex and money. I have been indelicate enough to give a good deal of attention to all three.” She examines “Shakespeare’s uphill struggle to achieve, or purchase, ‘gentle’ status.” She finds that “Shakespeare was strongly interested in intense relationships with well-born young men.” And she shows that he was “reluctant to divert much, if any, of his considerable wealth towards charitable, neighbourly, or altruistic ends.” She insists that his plays and poems are “great, and enduring,” and that it is in them “that the best of him is to be found.”
Dutton, Richard. William Shakespeare: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
Not a biography in the traditional sense, Dutton’s very readable work nevertheless “follows the contours of Shakespeare’s life” as it examines Shakespeare’s career as playwright and poet, with consideration of his patrons, theatrical associations, and audience.
Honan, Park. Shakespeare: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Honan’s accessible biography focuses on the various contexts of Shakespeare’s life—physical, social, political, and cultural—to place the dramatist within a lucidly described world. The biography includes detailed examinations of, for example, Stratford schooling, theatrical politics of 1590s London, and the careers of Shakespeare’s associates. The author draws on a wealth of established knowledge and on interesting new research into local records and documents; he also engages in speculation about, for example, the possibilities that Shakespeare was a tutor in a Catholic household in the north of England in the 1580s and that he acted particular roles in his own plays, areas that reflect new, but unproven and debatable, data—though Honan is usually careful to note where a particular narrative “has not been capable of proof or disproof.”
Potter, Lois. The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
This critical biography of Shakespeare takes the playwright from cradle to grave, paying primary attention to his literary and theatrical milieu. The chapters “follow a chronological sequence,” each focusing on a handful of years in the playwright’s life. In the chapters that cover his playwriting years (5–17), each chapter focuses on events in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London (especially in the commercial theaters) while giving equal space to discussions of the plays and/or poems Shakespeare wrote during those years. Filled with information from Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical worlds, the biography also shares frequent insights into how modern productions of a given play can shed light on the play, especially in scenes that Shakespeare’s text presents ambiguously.
Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Schoenbaum’s evidence-based biography of Shakespeare is a compact version of his magisterial folio-size Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Schoenbaum structures his readable “compact” narrative around the documents that still exist which chronicle Shakespeare’s familial, theatrical, legal, and financial existence. These documents, along with those discovered since the 1970s, form the basis of almost all Shakespeare biographies written since Schoenbaum’s books appeared.
Bentley, G. E. The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Bentley readably sets forth a wealth of evidence about performance in Shakespeare’s time, with special attention to the relations between player and company, and the business of casting, managing, and touring.
Berry, Herbert. Shakespeare’s Playhouses. New York: AMS Press, 1987.
Berry’s six essays collected here discuss (with illustrations) varying aspects of the four playhouses in which Shakespeare had a financial stake: the Theatre in Shoreditch, the Blackfriars, and the first and second Globe.
Berry, Herbert, William Ingram, and Glynne Wickham, eds. English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Wickham presents the government documents designed to control professional players, their plays, and playing places. Ingram handles the professional actors, giving as representative a life of the actor Augustine Phillips, and discussing, among other topics, patrons, acting companies, costumes, props, playbooks, provincial playing, and child actors. Berry treats the twenty-three different London playhouses from 1560 to 1660 for which there are records, including four inns.
Cook, Ann Jennalie. The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Cook’s work argues, on the basis of sociological, economic, and documentary evidence, that Shakespeare’s audience—and the audience for English Renaissance drama generally—consisted mainly of the “privileged.”
Dutton, Richard, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Dutton divides his study of the theatrical industry of Shakespeare’s time into the following sections: “Theatre Companies,” “London Playhouses,” “Other Playing Spaces,” “Social Practices,” and “Evidence of Theatrical Practices.” Each of these sections is further subdivided, with subdivisions assigned to individual experts. W. R. Streitberger treats the “Adult Playing Companies to 1583”; Sally-Beth MacLean those from 1583 to 1593; Roslyn L. Knutson, 1593–1603; Tom Rutter, 1603–1613; James J. Marino, 1613–1625; and Martin Butler, the “Adult and Boy Playing Companies 1625–1642.” Michael Shapiro is responsible for the “Early (Pre-1590) Boy Companies and Their Acting Venues,” while Mary Bly writes of “The Boy Companies 1599–1613.” David Kathman handles “Inn-Yard Playhouses”; Gabriel Egan, “The Theatre in Shoreditch 1576–1599”; Andrew Gurr, “Why the Globe Is Famous”; Ralph Alan Cohen, “The Most Convenient Place: The Second Blackfriars Theater and Its Appeal”; Mark Bayer, “The Red Bull Playhouse”; and Frances Teague, “The Phoenix and the Cockpit-in-Court Playhouses.” Turning to “Other Playing Spaces,” Suzanne Westfall describes how “ ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’: Household Entertainments”; Alan H. Nelson, “The Universities and the Inns of Court”; Peter Greenfield, “Touring”; John H. Astington, “Court Theatre”; and Anne Lancashire, “London Street Theater.” For “Social Practices,” Alan Somerset writes of “Not Just Sir Oliver Owlet: From Patrons to ‘Patronage’ of Early Modern Theatre,” Dutton himself of “The Court, the Master of the Revels, and the Players,” S. P. Cerasano of “Theater Entrepreneurs and Theatrical Economics,” Ian W. Archer of “The City of London and the Theatre,” David Kathman of “Players, Livery Companies, and Apprentices,” Kathleen E. McLuskie of “Materiality and the Market: The Lady Elizabeth’s Men and the Challenge of Theatre History,” Heather Hirschfield of “ ‘For the author’s credit’: Issues of Authorship in English Renaissance Drama,” and Natasha Korda of “Women in the Theater.” On “Theatrical Practices,” Jacalyn Royce discusses “Early Modern Naturalistic Acting: The Role of the Globe in the Development of Personation”; Tiffany Stern, “Actors’ Parts”; Alan Dessen, “Stage Directions and the Theater Historian”; R. B. Graves, “Lighting”; Lucy Munro, “Music and Sound”; Dutton himself, “Properties”; Thomas Postlewait, “Eyewitnesses to History: Visual Evidence for Theater in Early Modern England”; and Eva Griffith, “Christopher Beeston: His Property and Properties.”
Greg, W. W. Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931.
Greg itemizes and briefly describes almost all the play manuscripts that survive from the period 1590 to around 1660, including, among other things, players’ parts. His second volume offers facsimiles of selected manuscripts.
Harbage, Alfred. Shakespeare’s Audience. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941.
Harbage investigates the fragmentary surviving evidence to interpret the size, composition, and behavior of Shakespeare’s audience.
Keenan, Siobhan. Acting Companies and Their Plays in Shakespeare’s London. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014.
Keenan “explores how the needs, practices, resources and pressures on acting companies and playwrights informed not only the performance and publication of contemporary dramas but playwrights’ writing practices.” Each chapter focuses on one important factor that influenced Renaissance playwrights and players. The initial focus is on how “the nature and composition of the acting companies” influenced the playwrights who wrote for them. Then, using “the Diary of theatre manager Philip Henslowe and manuscript playbooks showing signs of theatrical use,” Keenan examines the relations between acting companies and playwrights. Other influences include “the physical design and facilities of London’s outdoor and indoor theatrical spaces” and the diverse audiences for plays, including royal and noble patrons.
Shapiro, Michael. Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and Their Plays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Shapiro chronicles the history of the amateur and quasi-professional child companies that flourished in London at the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the beginning of James’s.
Blayney, Peter W. M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Hanover, Md.: Folger, 1991.
Blayney’s accessible account of the printing and later life of the First Folio—an amply illustrated catalogue to a 1991 Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition—analyzes the mechanical production of the First Folio, describing how the Folio was made, by whom and for whom, how much it cost, and its ups and downs (or, rather, downs and ups) since its printing in 1623.
Hinman, Charlton. The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
This facsimile presents a photographic reproduction of an “ideal” copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare; Hinman attempts to represent each page in its most fully corrected state. This second edition includes an important new introduction by Peter W. M. Blayney.
Hinman, Charlton. The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
In the most arduous study of a single book ever undertaken, Hinman attempts to reconstruct how the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623 was set into type and run off the press, sheet by sheet. He also provides almost all the known variations in readings from copy to copy.
Werstine, Paul. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Werstine examines in detail nearly two dozen texts associated with the playhouses in and around Shakespeare’s time, conducting the examination against the background of the two idealized forms of manuscript that have governed the editing of Shakespeare from the twentieth into the twenty-first century—Shakespeare’s so-called foul papers and the so-called promptbooks of his plays. By comparing the two extant texts of John Fletcher’s Bonduca, one in manuscript and the other printed in 1647, Werstine shows that the term “foul papers” that is found in a note in the Bonduca manuscript does not refer, as editors have believed, to a species of messy authorial manuscript but is instead simply a designation for a manuscript, whatever its features, that has served as the copy from which another manuscript has been made. By surveying twenty-one texts with theatrical markup, he demonstrates that the playhouses used a wide variety of different kinds of manuscripts and printed texts but did not use the highly regularized promptbooks of the eighteenth-century theaters and later. His presentation of the peculiarities of playhouse texts provides an empirical basis for inferring the nature of the manuscripts that lie behind printed Shakespeare plays.