Shakespeare and Genre: From Early Modern Inheritances to Postmodern Legacies ed. by Anthony R. Guneratne (review)

This collection of twelve new and two previously published essays is an important contribution to the growing scholarship on genre in Shakespeare criticism. In this book, genre is understood as a flexible category, including both traditional literary forms and new forms like media, and incorporating special genres like legal lexicon. Most of the essays apply some kind of external frame like historical, national, political, or global critical theories and approaches to one or more plays; the majority of the essays are concerned with the modernity of our times than with the complex ideas about genre circulating in Shakespeare's age.

The book is divided into two sections, each consisting of three parts dealing with different conceptual approaches to genre. Of the fourteen essays, only those by Stephen Greenblatt and Andrew Gurr have been published previously. The book follows a "complex template for the various divisions" (xiv), which depends on the thematic, critical, methodological, and topical angles from which the subject of genre is addressed. The division appears less complex than the editor announces it to be, since the sections and parts are assembled to follow seamlessly and logically from the microanalysis of language to the larger concern of digital media and teaching, and there are topical overlaps between the sections.

David Crystal's essay on metalanguage in Shakespeare, with which the book opens, critically surveys Shakespeare's use of the specific lexicon that describes different forms of writing, parts of speech, linguistic entities, rhetorical "speech events," and "everyday products" of written language (21). Crystal explores the linguistic background against which Shakespeare wrote and which furnished him with the language to "talk about language" (23), shape plot, think thoughts, craft characters, and create a specific stylistic effect. Anyone who may have doubts that the horizon of opportunities for original research in Shakespeare scholarship is narrowing will come out full of hope after reading this resourceful essay. One should, therefore, hope that this essay will blow a strong and much-needed wind in the sails of language-oriented criticism of Shakespeare, since after many years of critical neglect in the era of new historicism, language, itself a material practice, has again become a vibrant field of early modern (especially Shakespeare) scholarship.

Stephen Greenblatt's early essay, "Murdering Peasants," is used to frame discussions in this volume. The editor lauds it as a piece that "placed genre studies at the center of what became known as the New Historicism" (3) and that "maps the world of genre into which Shakespeare was born" (3). While Greenblatt's essay does indeed map that world, framing it with material from sixteenth-century Germany and prose and epic romance of the late 1590s, his treatment of genre (focusing on the rise of the history play) is removed from the field of drama and theater into which Shakespeare's dramatic genre was born. To a large extent, the genres of Shakespearean drama are a direct product of the history of theater in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London: the companies and their politics, theater buildings, the practices of play production, competitions among the playwrights and players, and hostility toward theater, plays, and actors. Against this background of the theater as a generator of ideas and styles within various kinds of drama, different modes of writing and influences, domestic and international, contributed to genre formation in Shakespeare.

Greenblatt's essay is followed by Andrew Gurr's contribution on stagecraft, which returns the discussion of genre in Shakespeare back to the theater and the stage play. David Bevington's essay deals with the earliest Shakespeare, a playwright who starts his career with the romantic comedy and moves toward the English history play, which Bevington considers "a composite and informal kind of dramatic entertainment made from disparate historical and theatrical material" (93). Lawrence Danson explores in fine detail the mixing of narrative and stylistic modes in Shakespearean romance, a "remix" (101) and "mixed...