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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare and Politics
  • John Bienz
Catherine M. S. Alexander , ed. Shakespeare and Politics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. viii + 268 pp. index. illus. $70 (cl), $24.99 (pbk). ISBN: 0–521–83623–9 (cl), 0–521–54481–5 (pbk).

The first chapter of Shakespeare and Politics attempts to corral the fairly heterogeneous selection of fifteen essays that follows into "a range of interlinked thematic clusters" (2). This task proves difficult: the articles that Catherine Alexander has selected are uniformly strong but complex, qualified, and suggestive. As a result, they do not lend themselves easily to summation. However, all the articles that follow the opening chapter have already been published in Shakespeare Survey. They appear here in the following order, given by author and (in parentheses) the number of Shakespeare Survey where the article was originally published: Blair Worden (44), Peter L. Rudnytsky (43), Anne Barton (38), S. Schoenbaum [End Page 1045] (28), David George (53), Pierre Sahel (44), William C. Carroll (44), Margot Heinemann (44), Mark Matheson (48), Paul Franssen (54), Günter Walch (40), John Drakakis (44), Terence Hawkes (40), E. Pearlman (39), and BarbaraHodgdon (52). Put bluntly, this book offers no new work. Libraries that buy it will, in most cases, already own all it contains; but some individual readers will no doubt find having these articles together convenient.

Taken together, the authors represented touch on most of the Shakespeare canon; but the lion's share of their attention is given to Coriolanus above all, and to a lesser extent, to Richard II, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, Henry V, 2 Henry VI, Measure for Measure, Othello, and Hamlet. In addition, two chapters focus on Shakespeare on film, specifically film versions of Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.

"Politics" is a big umbrella. Given the miscellaneous gathering here of widely divergent articles and the easy accessibility of these articles in nearly any research library (one third have appeared together already in the 1992 number ofShakespeare Survey), it might have been a better service to scholars to have done something quite different. At the very least, perhaps a more thematically focused gathering (for example, on republicanism vs. monarchy in Shakespeare) would have better justified a new book, especially if it had pulled together pieces from a wider and less-available set of sources.

John Bienz
Mount Union College
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