The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (review)

Reading a reference work places special demands on the reviewer. You can't assess continuity and development; you have to read it in the guise of a skeptical yet interested seeker, flying hither and yon to test the book's utility, reliability, design, and (for want of a better word) browsability. On most counts the Oxford Companion performs impressively. Entries are usually well written and suavely concise, projecting an authority enhanced by the presence of the contributor's initials on each article and the inclusion of brief bibliographies in many. Naturally enough, the editors use the Oxford Shakespeare in their citations but devote separate entries to describing other well-known editions, too—a nice touch and especially useful for teachers. Obvious care has been taken with the volume's design. The pages look uncrowded despite the three-column layout, and the numerous photographs are judiciously chosen and high in quality. A bold border based on Renaissance type ornaments mark articles about major works of drama or poetry, serving as a reader's finding aid. (Minor confusions sometimes occur when a long article breaks up a shorter one; the addition of running subheads would have helped.)

As a tool for the student, the volume has enticing features, including entries on every stage character and song, and longer articles on each poetic work or play. Each play entry discusses the play's texts and sources, gives a synopsis, and provides overviews of the play's artistic features, critical history, stage history, and major screen versions. Students hunting for paper ideas will get good use from the admirably thorough "Thematic Listing of Entries" near the front, which groups all entries in dozens of categories, including biography, historical and cultural contexts, publishing and editing, theatrical and critical history, and Shakespeare as a global phenomenon. The volume is particularly good at giving the uninitiated a glimpse into the worldwide reach of Shakespeare and the institutions—such as festivals, theaters, societies, and journals—that have grown up around his works. Nonacademic browsers may be more interested in his posthumous influence and reception than in Renaissance culture or literary influences; they may also be more interested in people's lives than in history, bibliography, or criticism. Perhaps to satisfy such readers, the editors include a bargeload of short bios of Shakespeareans, from actors to editors, with the result that this Companion sometimes reads like a "who's who."

As a resource for my own graduate and undergraduate students, however, the book could have used fuller entries on early modern political, intellectual, and literary contexts and fewer one-paragraph biographies of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century actors, directors, impresarios, scholars, and translators. The volume's biographical bias shows most plainly in its handling of Shakespeare's life, very broadly defined. I discourage students from making biographical arguments or wasting essay pages praising Shakespeare's greatness, yet the Oxford Companion aids and abets such exercises by veering close to the antiquarian and bardolatrous—despite its attention to "bardolatry" as a thematic category and a separate article. Acreage associated with Shakespeare and buildings that he or his family owned dot the book like items in a realtors' catalogue. Most appear with little comment, as if their importance were self-evident. Too often, topics that don't appear to concern Shakespeare-the-man take a cozy old-fashioned turn. In "hunting and sports," we learn that there isn't much fishing in Shakespeare's works, and Cleopatra called a fish's jaws "slimy," so chances are good that the poet didn't like to fish, a supposition neither logical nor particularly useful.

If the editors wished to reflect "the breadth of present-day Shakespearian studies" (vii), they should have cut back on such statements, and they certainly should have given less space to authorship theories that have no standing among established scholars. A dozen entries are given...