Great Shakespeareans ed. by Peter Holland, Adrian Poole (review)

When I was asked by Cary DiPietro to contribute an essay on Henry Clay Folger to a project called Great Shakespeareans, he suggested that I focus on the development of American philanthropy as a way to organize my account of the Folgers and their library. At first, I was reluctant to accept this commission because I had already published several accounts of Folger’s career as a collector and I wasn’t sure I wanted to run through that dossier again, especially since the essay was to be an extended discussion, much longer than anything I had done before. Notwithstanding these doubts, and with very little understanding of what Peter Holland and Adrian Poole were up to, I agreed to join the project because the topic of philanthropy offered a new way for me to think about my earlier research. I enjoyed writing the essay, which turned out to be a small monograph, and it was published in 2011 as part of volume 9. At the time I had no clear idea what the complete series was going to include and certainly no sense at all of the originality of the larger project. My discussion of Great Shakespeareans then is that of a participant-observer or “native informant” rather than a detached and dispassionate reviewer. From my perspective, this is a work of critical scholarship full of surprises, but it is the overall effect that generates the biggest surprise of all.

The series editors’ preface, included in each volume, begins by asking, “What is a Great Shakespearean? Who are the Great Shakespeareans?”¹ This is the right way to open up the discussion of this massive, eighteen-volume narrative, because it is precisely the question one asks as soon as one hears of such an undertaking. There is something a bit elephant-in-the-room-ish about their approach here because there is no mention of what makes the very idea of talking about Great Shakespeareans seem even minimally plausible—namely, the intuition that Shakespeare is himself Great. Perhaps the question is “mute” as some of my students like to say, because it goes without saying. Or perhaps it is an open secret, where everyone knows that Shakespeare is a great poet, dramatist, institution maker, and so forth, yet not comme il faut to say so in polite company.² Yet more than anything else and despite what is said in some of the individual essays, Great Shakespeareans bears powerful witness to the greatness of Shakespeare’s artistic achievement.

If you were to arrange the eighteen volumes of Great Shakespeareans on your bookshelves they would look like a compact encyclopedia, but this would be misleading, if you think of an encyclopedia as comprehensive and all-inclusive. Although this is a project of astonishing range, it is not in any real sense encyclopedic. The individual essays in Great Shakespeareans could certainly be consulted as if the project were an encyclopedia; many readers will find it satisfying to use it in this way. For example, if you were looking for a good introduction to the work of David Garrick as a theater artist, the extended essay on his life and career by Peter Holland would be an excellent place to start and maybe even an excellent place to finish. However, if you confined your attention only to the articles related to the history of Great Shakespearean actors or limited yourself to the material on textual editing, you would be overlooking Peter Bloom’s amazing discussion of Berlioz or Ruth Morse’s story of Victor-Marie Hugo and his son François-Victor Hugo, the translator of Shakespeare, among numerous topics that it would be a shame for you to miss.

The principle of selection, to the extent that there is any single guiding principle here, is quirky and idiosyncratic, but I don’t see how anyone could have done better. The figures who are included give us a powerful feeling for the reach...