Volume 33, Number 17 · November 6, 1986
New Bards for Old
By Robert M. Adams
On Shakespeare
by Northrop Frye
Yale University Press, 186 pp., $17.95
Shakespeare and the Question of Theory
edited by Patricia Parker, edited by Geoffrey Hartman
Methuen, 335 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets
by Joel Fineman
University of California Press, 365 pp., $35.00
New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama
by Richard Levin
University of Chicago Press, 277 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The Devil's Party: Critical Counter-interpretations of Shakespearian Drama
by Harriett Hawkins
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 196 pp., $19.95
Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays
by Paul N. Siegel
Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 168 pp., $25.00
William Shakespeare
by Terry Eagleton
Basil Blackwell, 114 pp., $14.95
That Shakespeherian Rag
by Terence Hawkes
Methuen, 131 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Such is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets
by Joseph Pequigney
University of Chicago Press, 249 pp., $19.95
Less than ten years ago a student of Shakespeare published a book entitled The Shakespeare Revolution.[1] What he meant by 'revolution' was a series of changes in the production of Shakespearean plays, from a realistic or even an archaeological mode to a variety of 'non-illusory' styles of which, for him, writing in 1977, the stagings of Peter Brook represented an ultimate achievement. The author of the book was a literate and thoughtful man, and it's hardly to be doubted that he would stand aghast at some of the excesses to which his revolution has recently led. The Shakespeare Quarterly reports them regularly: Mariana (in Measure for Measure) sprawled on a haystack glugging red wine, a nymphomaniac Ophelia, Claudio (in Much Ado) urinating publicly on Benedick. Still, though the results of his revolution were probably not all agreeable to him, the author's title was not absurd; the revolution in staging Shakespeare, though it began more than a century ago with the first amateur productions of William Poel, is recognizably present, for better or worse, in Shakespearean productions to this day.
Review, 5789 words
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