The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy (review)

Imagine a masterful lecture on Shakespearean tragedy delivered to your Shakespeare class through one or another critical prism; this lecture prepares your students to pursue their reading of several plays with a solid foundation of both interpretive and critical apparatuses. Now imagine thirteen such masterful lectures. For some of us, that's the semester's work nearly done or at least well advanced. Claire McEachern's contribution to the Cambridge Companion series is a gold mine for teachers and students of Shakespeare at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The series preface indicates that it aims to acquaint "the student reader with the forms, contexts, and critical and theatrical lives of the ten plays considered to be Shakespeare's tragedies" (i). This is both the point and beside the point; not only will students learn a great deal from this remarkable collection, but so will their teachers. McEachern presents work by some of the field's most highly regarded Shakespeare scholar/critics, and each of them teaches all of us something in these essays (called "chapters," with a nod to the organic unity of the collection).

I cannot single out individual essays for special praise: each one is excellent within the parameters of its topic. The collection opens with the briefest of prefaces (one-and-a-half pages) by the editor—and how rare it is for an editor to step back and give her contributors the full stage on which to display what they've been invited to contribute. Next comes a short but helpful chronological table identifying important dates of performance and publication in Shakespeare's career and that of his most important contemporaries in tragic drama. Tom McAlindon's "What is a Shakespearean tragedy?" launches the volume with a beautifully written introduction to the genre and its classical antecedents. Students will learn not only from the content of these essays but also from their style. The essays average about twenty pages in length, with Russ McDonald's compelling "The language of tragedy" the longest at twenty-seven. In quick succession the collection proceeds from McAlindon and McDonald to David Bevington's astute consideration of "Tragedy in Shakespeare's career" and Michael Warren's "Shakespearean tragedy printed and performed." Studies of Shakespeare's material and historical contexts form the first third of this collection, with Huston Diehl's "Religion and Shakespearean tragedy," Michael Hattaway's "Tragedy and political authority," Catherine Belsey's "Gender and family," and Catherine Bates's "Shakespeare's tragedies of love" each presenting a fresh interpretation of a standard topic in Shakespeare studies.

In Gail Kern Paster's, Robert N. Watson's, and Coppélia Kahn's chapters, students are treated to innovative critical interventions; Paster's essay, "The tragic subject and its passions," brings her pathbreaking current work into the ambit of student-accessible discourse, while Watson's "Tragedies of revenge and ambition" grounds readers in historical and theoretical overviews of "revenge tragedy" and also makes a useful distinction between revenge and ambition. Kahn's chapter, titled "Shakespeare's classical tragedies," offers a compact version of her important book, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (1997), and adds a fine discussion of Timon of Athens. The volume closes with another well-considered pair of essays: R. A. Foakes summarizes the history of Shakespeare criticism from Dryden to Derrida, though with perhaps a few too many jibes at postmodern "essays" in the "postmodern" mode (236-37); and Barbara Hodgdon's remarkably detailed, illustrated discussion of twentieth-century stage productions of Antony and Cleopatra pays important attention to the difference performance makes in understanding the plays. Her piece seems to me exactly the right way to end a collection aimed at students; it sends them and their teachers off to the theater equipped with a finely tuned sense of what to look for in any Shakespearean performance.

I have never assigned a collection of essays as a required text to supplement my own instruction in undergraduate Shakespeare courses...