Shakespeare's Book: Essays in Reading, Writing, and Reception (review)

These days, a collection of essays entitled Shakespeare's Book could contain many things. We might expect essays that read Shakespeare in relation to the latest or most significant findings in the history of material texts and the history of reading. We might look forward to essays that collect and interpret the various references and allusions to books and texts, readers and scenes of reading in Shakespeare's corpus. Alternatively, we might read "Shakespeare's book" as a reference to the "book" as performance text and anticipate essays relating performance theory and theatrical practice to Shakespeare's plays. At different moments, the fine collection Shakespeare's Book touches on these approaches, but the element that dominates these eleven essays is not the book but Shakespeare, not the material text but the transcendent author. To the extent that the collection enlists the services of the history of the book or uses bibliographic tools, it does so to come to a greater understanding of the author at work. To the extent that Shakespeare's Book touches on performance or culls the plays for books and readers, it does so to situate the author more fully in his theatrical and publication milieus. Because of its focus on Shakespeare as author, poet, and playwright, and despite wide-ranging efforts by critics with very different agendas and methods, the collection is more consistent and coherent than we might expect. The presiding spirit here is Lukas Erne-mentioned in virtually every essay-whose 2003 Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist is cast as a foundational text for any future understanding of Shakespeare as a man of both book and theater.

In their introduction, the editors explore Shakespeare's relationship to the world of printers and print shops in an effort to refute the idea that Shakespeare was uninterested in seeing his work in print. Beginning with an allusion to printer Richard Field in Cymbeline, the editors have culled passages from the plays that suggest Shakespeare's ongoing interest in the book trade and world of print. The introduction offers a strong sense of what is to follow: some of the essays explore Shakespeare's imbrication within a network of printers and patrons; some explore the representations of reading, writing, and printing within the poems and plays; some turn to how Shakespeare was marketed, read, and received. The editors organize this material into three sections: "Books," "Texts," and "Readers."

In a characteristically lucid essay, which could serve as a second introduction to the collection, Patrick Cheney situates the volume within ongoing critical conversations. If recent work in Shakespeare studies has brought together theatrical and bibliographic, stage and page, Cheney suggests that such work nonetheless subordinates page to stage in its fundamental commitment to Shakespeare as a man of the theater. The "present volume," in contrast, "testifies to an even newer phase of criticism" inaugurated by Erne, granting Shakespeare "literary authorship" and seeing him as a dramatist who composed "scripts both for performance and for publication within his own moment," an author who wrote for "stage and page" (30). Cheney augments Erne's work by insisting that we take note of Shakespeare's poetic career, making a case for Shakespeare not simply as "literary dramatist" but as poet-playwright. Building on his Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (2004), Cheney traces two threads across Shakespeare's dramatic corpus: "a discourse of the book and a discourse of the theatre" (30, 31). "Letting the terms book and theatre jostle in historically telling ways," Shakespeare proffers a new model of literary "authorship that combines poems with plays in a single literary career" (31, 46). Another highlight of the collection, Helen Smith's "'A man in print'?" is a wonderfully sensible exploration of the deployment and representation of books in Shakespeare. Teasing out some of the implications of the terms "print" and "press" in Shakespeare's plays, Smith "question[s] the assumptions of our own print...