Volume 30, Number 7 · April 28, 1983
Shakespeare for the Eighties
By Frank Kermode
BOOKS REVIEWED IN THIS ESSAY
Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare
by Linda Bamber
Stanford University Press, 211 pp., $18.50
Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare
by Lisa Jardine
Barnes and Noble, 224 pp., $28.50
Shakespeare the Director
by Ann Pasternak Slater
Barnes and Noble, 244 pp., $23.50
The Artist and Society in Shakespeare's England: The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook, Volume I
by M.C. Bradbrook
Barnes and Noble, 177 pp., $24.95
The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets
by Robert Giroux
Atheneum, 334 pp., $17.95
Troilus and Cressida
by William Shakespeare, edited by Kenneth Palmer
The Arden Shakespeare, Methuen, 337 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Troilus and Cressida
by William Shakespeare, edited by Kenneth Muir
The Oxford Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 205 pp., $19.95
The Taming of the Shrew
by William Shakespeare, edited by H.J. Oliver
The Oxford Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 248 pp., $19.95
Henry V
by William Shakespeare, edited by Gary Taylor
The Oxford Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 330 pp., $19.95
From time to time one hears somebody asking how it can be that the output of Shakespeare studies actually increases Shakespeare studies actually increases every year; why don't they exhaust the subject? Nothing could more clearly reveal the questioner as a layperson. Within the clerical institution that concerns itself with these matters, Shakespeare remains a privileged text. A few weeks back the British playwright Trevor Griffiths said to me on a television talk show that there were at least thirty (or was it three hundred?) British dramatists alive today who were better than Shakespeare. It was his way of establishing his status as an extreme heretic. We all respect Mr. Griffiths, of course, but if he wants to change anything he will have to do better than that. He might as well walk down Piccadilly with a placard announcing The End.
Review, 3694 words
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