Shakespeare (Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature)

305 Pages·2008·0.99 MB·English

by  Gabriel Egan

Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature
Series Editors: Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley
This series provides accessible yet provocative introductions to a wide range of
literatures. The volumes will initiate and deepen the reader’s understanding of
key literary movements, periods and genres, and consider debates that inform
the past, present and future of literary study. Resources such as glossaries of
key terms and details of archives and internet sites are also provided, making
each volume a comprehensive critical guide.
SHAKESPEARE
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SHAKESPEARE g
a
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Gabriel Egan
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s This book helps the reader make sense of the most commonly studied writer in
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the world. It starts with a brief explanation of how Shakespeare’s writings have
e H Gabriel Egan
come down to us as a series of scripts for actors in the early modern theatre
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d industry of London. The main chapters of the book approach the texts through A n
a series of questions: ‘what’s changed since Shakespeare’s time?’, ‘to what
i uses has Shakespeare been put?’, and ‘what value is there in Shakespeare?’ K b
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These questions go to the heart of why we study Shakespeare at all. The book
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G encourages readers to consider for themselves this central issue in relation to
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their own critical writing.
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Key Features E g
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a • A chronology of Shakespeare’s career as an actor/dramatist that locates him A h
within the theatre industry of his time
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• New readings of twelve plays that form a core of the Shakespeare canon:
i A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard 2, Henry 5, E C
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Hamlet, Othello, All’s Well that Ends Well, The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth,
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Measure for Measure, The Tempest and Timon of Athens
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• Critical analyses organised by genre (comedies, histories, tragedies and
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romance) and by four key critical approaches: authorship, performance,
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identities, and materialism c
h • An extensive resources section, including a glossary of the important critical
a
terms that are often used in debates about Shakespeare
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l
Gabriel Egan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Drama at
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Loughborough University. He is the author of Shakespeare and Marx and of G
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Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism.
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Edinburgh University Press E d
i 22 George Square d
d Edinburgh EH8 9LF in e
www.eup.ed.ac.uk b
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E ISBN 978 0 7486 2372 3 rg s
Cover design: Michael Chatfield h
Egan cover 2.indd 1 28/6/07 17:05:00
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Shakespeare
Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature
Series Editors: Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester and
Andy Mousley, De Montfort University
Published Titles:
Gothic Literature, Andrew Smith
Canadian Literature, Faye Hammill
Women’s Poetry, Jo Gill
Contemporary American Drama, Annette J. Saddik
Shakespeare, Gabriel Egan
Forthcoming Titles in the Series:
Asian American Literature, Bella Adams
Children’s Literature, M. O. Grenby
Eighteenth-Century Literature, Hamish Mathison
Contemporary British Fiction, Nick Bentley
Contemporary American Fiction, David Brauner
Victorian Literature, David Amigoni
Crime Fiction, Stacy Gillis
Renaissance Literature, Siobhan Keenan
Modern American Literature, Catherine Morley
Scottish Literature, Gerard Carruthers
Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley
Modernist Literature, Rachel Potter
Medieval Literature, Pamela King
Women’s Fiction, Sarah Sceats
Shakespeare
Gabriel Egan
Edinburgh University Press
This book is dedicated to my graduate students in the –
cohort of the degrees ‘MA Texts in Performance’ and ‘MA Early
Modern Writing’ at Loughborough University, upon whom its
ideas were first tested and, in the light of their wise critiques, thor-
oughly revised.
© Gabriel Egan, 
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
George Square, Edinburgh
Typeset in Ehrhardt
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN (hardback)
ISBN (paperback)
The right of Gabriel Egan
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act .
Contents
Series Preface viii
Acknowledgements ix
Chronology x
Introduction 
How Shakespeare’s works come down to us 
PI D G
Chapter  Comedies: A Midsummer Night’sDream
and Much Ado about Nothing 
Transformation, Translation, and Plays to Pass the Time 
Benign and Malign Deceptions 
Soldiers Turned Lovers 
Determining Genre 
Dirty Jokes and Sexual Mores 
Chapter  Histories: Richard and Henry  
This England 
Providence 
Serialised History and the Tudor Myth 
The Order of Composition 
What Kind of King is Henry ? 
vi 
Chapter  Tragedies: Hamletand Othello 
Large and Small Affairs in Hamlet 
Sex, Suicide, and Scepticism 
Testing the Supernatural 
The Character of Othello in Isolation 
The Character of Othello in the World 
Racial Difference – Cultural Difference –
Multiculturalism 
Chapter  Problem Plays and Romances: All’s Well that
Ends Welland The Winter’s Tale 
Not Hamlet in a Dress, nor Helen in Breeches 
Choosing Among the Men 
Helen’s Quest 
Unsuitable Husbands 
Do Hermione and Polixenes Paddle Palms? 
The Winter’s Taleas Proto-novel 
Summer/Winter – Man/Woman – Land/Class 
PII CA
Chapter  Authority and Authorship: Measure for Measure 
History: Then 
Proposing to Isabella 
Being a Nun 
Meaning: Now 
Recovering Shakespeare’s Version 
Chapter  Performance: Macbeth 
The Witches 
The Timing of Exits and Entrances 
The Bipolar Stage 
The Apparitions 
Indeterminacy 
Chapter  Identities: The Tempest 
The Identity of Caliban 
Nature/Nurture 
 vii
The New World 
Colonialism in General 
Ariel as Subaltern 
Chapter  Materialism: Timon of Athens 
Base and Superstructure 
Timon as Unaccommodated Man 
Money, Gold, and G(u)ilt: Shakespearian Alchemy 
The Second Law of Thermodynamics 
The New Materialism versus Gaia 
Conclusion 
Student Resources 
Electronic Resources and Reference Sources 
Glossary 
Guide to Further Reading 
Index 
Series Preface
The study of English literature in the early twenty-first century is
host to an exhilarating range of critical approaches, theories and
historical perspectives. ‘English’ ranges from traditional modes of
study such as Shakespeare and Romanticism to popular interest in
national and area literatures such as the United States, Ireland and
the Caribbean. The subject also spans a diverse array of genres from
tragedy to cyberpunk, incorporates such hybrid fields of study as
Asian American literature, Black British literature, creative writing
and literary adaptations, and remains eclectic in its methodology.
Such diversity is cause for both celebration and consternation.
English is varied enough to promise enrichment and enjoyment for
all kinds of readers and to challenge preconceptions about what the
study of literature might involve. But how are readers to navigate
their way through such literary and cultural diversity? And how are
students to make sense of the various literary categories and peri-
odisations, such as modernism and the Renaissance, or the prolif-
erating theories of literature, from feminism and marxism to queer
theory and ecocriticism? The Edinburgh Critical Guides to
Literature series reflects the challenges and pluralities of English
today, but at the same time it offers readers clear and accessible
routes through the texts, contexts, genres, historical periods and
debates within the subject.
Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the general editors, Martin Halliwell and
Andy Mousley, for inviting me to propose this volume in their
Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature series and for their for-
bearance when I failed to meet the agreed deadline. Andy Mousley
read the entire typescript and made hundreds of small and dozens
of large changes, all of which improved the book immeasurably and
for which this sentence is too little thanks. I would like to thank
Charles Edelman for talking over points of military protocol that
I use in relation to the opening moments of Hamlet in Chapter .
The rest of the book, for better or worse, is all my own work.
The Department of English and Drama at Loughborough
University in the United Kingdom has provided an ideal environ-
ment in which to teach and research and I am grateful to my col-
leagues, and especially to my heads of department Nigel Wood and
Elaine Hobby, for creating these conditions. This book was typed
by its author on an AlphaGrip keyboard, which allows the hands to
rest comfortably in the lap (www.alphagrip.com). I have no con-
nection with this company, but I am grateful to its president
Michael Willner for his remarkable invention.