The sheer volume and diversity of writing about Shakespeare defies all attempts at compiling a representative short reading list. The following is intended primarily to supplement the bibliographies appended to entries in the body of this Companion by pointing to a few accessible, introductory studies for the general reader, and by indicating some standard reference works from which to obtain further suggestions.
The increasing specialization and professionalization of the academic world has led, regrettably, to the virtual extinction of up-to-the-minute books describing and interpreting Shakespeare’s oeuvre for a non-student readership. Among the small crop published during the 1990s, Harold Bloom’s best-selling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), every bit as hyperbolic and bardolatrous as its title implies, cannot be recommended, and Maynard Mack’s Everybody’s Shakespeare (1993), largely confined to the tragedies, seems a little dated. The most attractive exceptions to this trend are Jonathan Bate’s patchy but highly readable The Genius of Shakespeare (1997), which is particularly good on the development of Shakespeare’s reputation, Stanley Wells’ Shakespeare: the Poet and his Plays (1997, a revision of Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life, 1994), and Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All (2005), which offers a roughly chronological tour through Shakespeare’s oeuvre via a series of individual essays. Another lively general survey of Shakespeare’s output reached print rather belatedly at the dawn of the 21st century, namely W. H. *Auden’s introductory course on Shakespeare, given in New York in 1946–7, and published as Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch (2000).
The major Shakespearian periodicals are described elsewhere under *journals and in their own individual entries. The four most important are the German *Shakespeare Jahrbuch (1864– ), the British *Shakespeare Survey (annual, 1948– ), the American *Shakespeare Quarterly (1950– ), and the British Shakespeare (2005– ). Shakespeare Quarterly also oversees the creation of the web-based World Shakespeare Bibliography, an annotated database of Shakespearian scholarship and film and theatre production. Further electronic resources for the study of Shakespeare, including Shakespearian websites, are described under *digital Shakespeare. Other important Shakespearian holdings include those of the *British Library (at http://www.bl.uk/), the *Folger Shakespeare Library (at http://www.folger.edu), and those of the immense Widener Library at Harvard (at http://hcl.harvard.edu/widener/).
Useful general reference works on Shakespeare include The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (2010), which supplies up-to-the-minute essays on important topics within the academic study of Shakespeare. It is in general more immediately readable than David Scott Kastan’s A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), which is principally aimed at North American postgraduate students. Less oriented towards the university market, and still valuable despite having been in some areas overtaken by fresh research and changing intellectual priorities, are two comprehensive encyclopaedias, F. E. *Halliday’s A Shakespeare Companion (last revised in 1964) and Oscar Campbell and Edward Quinn’s much larger A Shakespeare Encyclopaedia (1966). Both, however, are now out of print, as is Stanley Wells’ less compendious but much prettier Shakespeare: An Illustrated Dictionary (revised 1985). The latter has been reissued, with fewer illustrations but considerable updating, as The Oxford Dictionary of Shakespeare (revised 2005). The theatre critic Andrew Dickson’s The Rough Guide to Shakespeare (revised 2009) also offers a very readable and intelligent overview of the plays, including useful summaries of their critical and performance histories.
Further reading on this subject can be found after the entries on *biographies, on William *Shakespeare, on *education and on *Stratford-upon-Avon: those with a taste for the pathological may also want to consult some of the titles listed under *Authorship Controversy. On all of these topics the work of Samuel *Schoenbaum is especially recommended, notably William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (1977). Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life (1999) is also very reliable, and James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) immerses Shakespeare in his immediate historical and cultural contexts by taking the novel approach of focusing on a single, pivotal year.
The short lists of representative critical reading appended to the entries on each of Shakespeare’s works in this Companion are necessarily highly selective. Outside the bibliographies cited above, the best place to start looking for a wider range of criticism on any given Shakespearian text is usually in the introduction to a good single-work edition of it, in a series such as the *Oxford, the *Arden, or the *New Cambridge. Major trends in Shakespeare criticism since his own time are described in the entry on *critical history, and in the separate entries cross-referenced from it. A helpful anthology of the first two centuries of Shakespeare’s critical reception is provided by Brian Vickers’ six-volume Shakespeare: the Critical Heritage, 1623–1801 (1974–81); the crucial three decades which followed are admirably cherry-picked in Jonathan Bate’s The Romantics on Shakespeare (1992). A very useful and attractive survey of the last 100 years’ contributions to the understanding of Shakespeare’s works is provided by Michael Taylor’s Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (2001). Bloomsbury’s multi-volume Great Shakespeareans series (2010–15) offers longer takes on some of the greatest Shakespearian actors, directors, composers, and critics, including, to name a few, *Garrick, *Verdi, and *Brecht.
Further reading on this subject can be found listed after the entry on *English. Standard reference works include Marvin Spevack’s The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (1973) and C. T. Onions’ much-reprinted A Shakespeare Glossary (1911); a good starting-point is provided by N. F. Blake’s Shakespeare’s Language: An Introduction (1983) and Russ McDonald’s Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (2001). Other accessible studies include M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay (1957); R. A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence (1976); and Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (1982). A very useful guide to the meanings of specific words in Shakespeare’s plays and poems is David and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (2004), which is also available online with additional features at http://www.shakespeareswords.com.
As the entries on *sources and on *education suggest, the most important reference books on Shakespeare’s reading remain T. W. Baldwin’s Shakespeare’s Smalle Latine and Lesse Greeke (2 vols, 1947) and Geoffrey *Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (8 vols, 1957–75). Other important studies in this field include Emrys Jones’ The Origins of Shakespeare (1976), Robert S. Miola’s two books on Shakespeare’s debts to ancient drama (Shakespeare and Classical Comedy and Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy, 1992) and his wider-ranging Shakespeare’s Reading (2000), Steven Marx’s Shakespeare and the Bible (2000), and Kenneth Muir’s The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (1975). On Shakespeare’s literary relations with his dramatic contemporaries, particularly readable discussions include James Shapiro’s Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991), Martin Wiggins’ Shakespeare and the Drama of his Time (2000), and Stanley Wells’ Shakespeare & Co. (2007). A useful introduction to the whole period is provided by chapters 2 to 4 of The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, edited by Pat Rogers (1987); chapter 3, by Philip Edwards, provides a good short introduction to Shakespeare’s achievement and its place in the context of Renaissance drama as a whole.
For further works discussing the theatrical world within which Shakespeare worked, see particularly the reading lists appended to the entries on Elizabethan *acting, on the *acting profession, on the *Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, on Elizabethan and Jacobean *theatres, on Philip *Henslowe, and on *censorship. Standard works in this field include G. E. Bentley’s The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (7 vols, 1966), E. K. *Chambers’ The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, 1923), and, more recently, Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage (4th edition, 2009) and Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa’s Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (2000). Gurr’s work incorporates, among much else, the findings from the partial excavations of the *Rose and *Globe theatres carried out in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Surviving visual evidence about the Shakespearian theatre is usefully collected in R. A. Foakes, ed., Illustrations of the English Stage, 1580–1642 (1985). The most comprehensive listing of the theatrical work of the period is without question Martin Wiggins’ monumental British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue (2011– ).
As with literary criticism, the writing of history, too, has become increasingly professionalized over the last few decades, and up-to-date introductions to Shakespeare’s period and its culture aimed at the non-specialist are comparatively few. W. R. Elton’s Shakespeare’s World: Renaissance Intellectual Contexts (1970) is still useful, as are Julia Briggs’ This Stage-Play World (1983, revised 1997) and Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). A useful reference work combining perspectives on the English Renaissance with information on the writing of the period is Michael Hattaway’s A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (2000). For further suggestions, see the reading lists appended to the entries listed under ‘Historical, social and cultural context’ in the Thematic listing of entries.
On this topic, see particularly the reading lists appended to the entries on *editing, on *printing and publishing, on *folios, and on *quartos. An excellent introduction to the subject is provided in the *Oxford edition of Shakespeare’s works (edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 1986), and it is handled in greater depth and detail by Stanley Wells et al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (1987). John Jowett’s Shakespeare and Text (2007) is an indispensable guide to the material processes and theoretical implications of textual transmission, and, more recently, Gabriel Egan has outlined the ongoing debates in Shakespearian editorial practice in The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text (2010).
Many of the most important works on the performance of Shakespeare since his own time are listed after the entries on *Restoration and eighteenth-century Shakespearian production, *nineteenth-century Shakespearian production, *twentieth-century Shakespearian production, *Shakespeare on sound film, *silent films, and *television. An attractive introduction to the history of Shakespeare’s interpretation and reinterpretation in the theatre is provided by Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson, eds., Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History (1996), while authoritative surveys of the interpretation of Shakespeare in the cinema are offered by Ken Rothwell’s A History of Shakespeare on Screen (1999) and Russell Jackson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (revised 2007). One particularly appealing and original perspective on the whole question of the stagecraft of Shakespeare’s plays and the ways in which it has been realized is offered by M. M. Mahood’s Playing Bit Parts in Shakespeare (1998, a revision of Bit Parts in Shakespeare’s Plays, 1992).
On Shakespeare’s posthumous involvement in art-forms outside poetry and the theatre, see especially the reading lists appended to the entries on *ballet, *dance, *fiction, *painting, *music, *opera, and *songs in the plays. The most comprehensive reference work on Shakespeare in music is A Shakespeare Music Catalogue, edited by Bryan Gooch and David Thatcher (5 vols, 1991), while the most wide-ranging general book on Shakespeare in the visual arts remains W. Moelwyn Merchant’s Shakespeare and the Artist (1959). Mark Thorton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray’s The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (2011) offers expert and very readable accounts of Shakespeare and literature, music, theatre, film, television, and multimedia. The catalogues of the art collection at the Folger and of the *RSC Collection and Gallery at Stratford are important resources in this field.
See the reading lists appended to entries on individual countries and regions and, especially, the entry on *translation. A worthwhile collection of essays on Shakespeare’s participation in cultures beyond the British Isles is provided by John Joughlin, ed., Shakespeare and National Culture (1997); see also Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, and Derek Roper, eds., Shakespeare in the New Europe (1994), Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds., Postcolonial Shakespeares (1998), and Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare and World Cinema (2012). Several online databases allow viewers to watch full recordings of global Shakespearian performance: see in particular MIT’s Global Shakespeares (http://globalshakespeares.com) and the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (http://a-s-i-a-web.org). Paul Prescott, Paul Edmondson, and Erin Sullivan’s A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival (2013) offers a lively anthology of essays describing and discussing the many intercultural productions staged in the UK during the 2012 Olympic year. The website Reviewing Shakespeare (http://reviewingshakespeare.com) includes reviews of recent productions of Shakespeare from all over the world.
MD(WS&ES)