Class and Society in Shakespeare: A Dictionary (review)

Reference books are a difficult genre. The needs of potential readers are so vastly different that hitting the right level offers a genuine challenge. Class and society are, however, unquestionably areas in which students often need guidance and scholars appreciate clear elucidation of complex topics, so I opened Innes’s contribution to the Continuum Shakespeare Dictionary series with eagerness. What I discovered there partially satisfied my very high expectations, once I got over my disappointment that it was not Raymond Williams’s Keywords recast for the Shakespeare scholar (that is, it is not a book in which words are foregrounded as “sites of struggle” that have material implications for “class” and “society”).

Judged on its own terms, Innes’s book would be most useful to readers who are just beginning graduate work in Shakespeare. They can browse the entries to get a feel for research themes to pursue on “social” issues, as well as profit from quick introductions to each. Organized into entries of varying lengths on key words, Innes’s volume moves from “abbot” to “youth” in 545 pages—long enough to give a decent overview—complemented by an extensive index (including name, title, and subject terms). The brief introduction promises that “this book is designed to illuminate and describe the somewhat arcane nuances of socially charged meaning that have been lost or subsumed into other meanings since Shakespeare’s time,” especially to correct for misunderstandings likely to occur in readers who take “individualism” for granted when it simply did not exist for early moderns in the same way it does for us (1). Each of the entries is divided into three sections: a definition, a brief “literary essay” on Shakespeare’s specific usage, and an annotated bibliography to direct further reading. Since the ground covered on Shakespeare is pretty basic, specialists won’t find much here to attract repeat visits, but for master’s-level students preparing essays or studying for exams, the book could be quite helpful. Furthermore, the scholarship consulted in preparation of the volume is fairly diverse—although, of course, not exhaustive—and often extends to 2005, so it is about as up to date as a print reference work can be expected to be.

When we consider the needs of undergraduates rather than graduate students, however, we can see how hard it is to meet the challenges that all such books face. For example, “abbot” begins, “The head of a monastery or abbey; the female form is ‘abbess’. The position ceased to exist with the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.” At least two problems—never resolved in the entry or the book—are already evident. First, would an undergraduate reader who needed to consult a dictionary to find out that an “abbot” is the “head of a monastery” know what the “dissolution of the monasteries” was or even, for that matter, what a monastery might be? Second, would he or she know when the reign of Henry VIII was, or that monastic life persisted on the continent, or how religious difference impacted international politics? The answers to the first set of questions would certainly seem to be “no” for non-British undergraduates. And I’m doubtful about answers to the second set—in the United States, I’ve had many students who were hazy on the century in which to situate even the most famous kings and queens. For these reasons, the virtual absence of dates from the volume is a serious omission; perhaps this is more of a problem for American students than British ones, but for any reader, even established scholars, a better sense of the time line would have greatly augmented the informativeness of almost every entry. For American undergraduates, the absence of dates and other historical detail seems to me fatal.

Browsing this book, I found again and again that, whether consulted collectively or singly, entries seemed pitched below the level of a specialist and yet less than informative for undergraduates...