The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry ed. by Jonathan F. S. Post (review)

values in forming her warrior son. Where Bliss in the New Cambridge edition has several pages discussing the relationship between mother and son, with comments on how in recent productions different Volumnias have played the climactic confrontation between the two in Act 5, scene 3, Holland largely devotes his commentary on this scene to questions of staging: who stands and who sits. Holland’s introduction includes an excellent discussion of the terms “Citizens” and“Plebeians”and their implications, and has many interesting things to say about the crowd scenes in the play—what they suggest and how they have been staged. But even here, there could have been much more about the politics of the play, the way the confrontations between rival groups of patricians in power and plebeians demanding to be heard both reflect and transcend the play’s historical moment. Though there are useful, well-informed pages about the relevance to Shakespeare’s play of riots over the scarcity and hoarding of grain in and around 1607, Holland neglects to mention that the 1950 essay he credits for raising awareness of these grain riots confidently assumes that Shakespeare would have applauded the speeches of Coriolanus attacking the “rabble.” More recent generations of critics have expressed sympathy for the discontented, hungry citizens and their early modern counterparts. For all its merits, Holland’s edition doesn’t sufficiently explain what it is about Coriolanus that makes it such a fascinating and problematical play. Again, it is a question of the intended audience for this Arden edition, which is sure to have a wide circulation. Though I would have no hesitation in recommending Holland’s edition to other Shakespeare scholars who are likely to have a half dozen other texts of Coriolanus and books about it in their libraries, I would have my doubts about recommending it to undergraduates and general readers, less likely to know a great deal about the topics Holland chooses to omit from his introduction. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry. Edited by JONATHAN F. S. POST. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xxvi + 748. $170.00 cloth. Reviewed by MEGAN HEFFERNAN The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, edited by Jonathan Post, offers a timely look at major developments in the past several decades of Shakespeare studies . The collection’s focus on Shakespeare’s “poetry” as “verbal art or poesis” (v) might feel conservative, yet this reorientation of critical perspectives inspires fresh readings of the philosophical and aesthetic concerns that span Shakespeare’s work, including the plays. Overall, these essays reflect the benefits of seeking a consensus among formal, historicist, and theoretical modes of reading. Accounts of plot and embodiment, for instance, illuminate the nondramatic pieces, while the poetic effects of performed speech are brought to bear on several plays. Across this capacious handbook, the competing institutional histories of the playhouse, the print shop, and the schoolroom recede behind an orientation to form and style that nonetheless resists essentialist accounts of literary writing. BOOK REVIEWS 465 With an understanding that poetry is more than“a formal category designating a particular literary genre” (vi), the collection comprises thirty-eight new essays in seven sections that variously approach Shakespeare’s poetics. This organization emphasizes interpretive categories, but historical arguments also surface, particularly in tracing Shakespeare’s responses to classical, continental, and native sources, as well as his influence on later English poets and even modern translators. Elsewhere , language and style—including diction, etymology and neologism, wordplay, grammar, and rhetoric—offer formal measures for thinking about Shakespeare’s development across his career. As Goran Stanivukovic observes, “Style is itself a historical category” (41). A pair of sections on the performance of music and the musicality of onstage speech explores the impact of the period’s shifting media formations on poetic craft. The collection’s center of gravity is the long section “Reading Shakespeare’s Poems,” which includes several treatments of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, the Sonnets,“A Lover’s Complaint,” and“The Phoenix and Turtle.” Post has admirably balanced the volume: few chapters repeat topics and the range of approaches is impressive. If anything, the even distribution of essays on the nondramatic writing slightly downplays...