From the Editor

Frequent readers of this journal will notice that this Fall 2015 issue and the Winter issue to be published early in 2016 have more pages than our usual 128—pages we are devoting to book reviews. We at Shakespeare Quarterly have never wavered in our commitment to publish reviews of books published in the field of Shakespeare studies broadly defined to include theater history and textual history where applicable to the drama. Doing so is a core part of our mission to be a journal of record for Shakespeare.

But we have sometimes found it necessary to print fewer book reviews than might otherwise be optimal in order to stay within the 128-page parameter and still publish long essays or special issues devoted to a single topic (like the Winter 2014 biography issue). As a result of these and other factors, we increasingly found ourselves with an unacceptable lag between the date a book might be published and the date it was reviewed in SQ. Such a time lag is a disservice to authors, reviewers, and readers—and for it, we offer both an apology and a promise to do better in the future.

The expanded Fall and Winter 2015 issues are designed to reduce the backlog so that the Spring issue can return to a regular pattern of reviews published much closer in time to a book’s publication date. And, in order to maintain this pattern, we will use extra pages as necessary. But more important, we have decided going forward to ask reviewers to write somewhat shorter book reviews in order to cover more books with each issue. Readers will begin to notice the change gradually, and we hope that the improvement in timeliness will more than compensate for the briefer notice.