A
recent New Yorker cartoon says it all: "I could go for something Shakespearean,
just as long as it's not Shakespeare ."
And yet, just when we think we've had enough, a new spate of scholarly works help
return the edge to one's appetite for the Bard. Oxford
University Press put its stamp on  Shakespeare
in 1986 when it published a complete works that represented the most thorough
reworking of the text in centuries. In presenting its strange new texts sometimes
in two versions of plays we had considered "finished," the Oxford editors created
a sense of crisis in Shakespeare
studies. Their effort met with mixed reviews; it is still controversial.
... try a volume in the new Oxford Shakespeare
Topics series. These short books present new scholarship without pedantry, everything
from Shakespeare and
Eastern Europe to Shakespeare and the Bible
or Shakespeare's
Reading. New titles arrive each season. (I particularly look forward to studies
of Shakespeare's
rhetoric and his handling of genre). ... | Perhaps
my favorite among the new Shakespeare
Topics series is Shakespeare and the Bible
(OUP, 176 pages, $39.95). Here, Steven Marx follows out the implications of the
first publication of the Comedies, Histories and Tragedies of Mr. William Shakespeare
(1623). In a tour-de-force of interpretation, he shows how this text of Shakespeare
was modeled on the new King James Bible
(1611). |
... Tom
D'Evelyn of Providence is a frequent reviewer. KEYWORDS: REVIEWS; BOOKS |
