Essential Shakespeare: The Arden Guide to Text and Interpretation

Book Preface

One of the challenges involved in moving from pre-university to undergraduate study is shifting away from an intense focus on a relatively narrow range of prose, poetry and drama texts to a more expansive study of topic areas, not necessarily organized by work or author. This broadening out includes becoming familiar with a variety of critical perspectives and their terminologies. First encounters with contemporary criticism can be disorientating, akin to arriving in an unknown country. Its language can be formidably technical and its conceptual underpinnings can seem rather ‘foreign’, derived as they sometimes are from knowledge areas such as the natural and human sciences. However, getting to grips with the ideas and idiom of modern criticism and with the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of literary study is an important part of undergraduate learning. Each chapter of this book offers a brief introduction to one critical approach at work in current Shakespeare studies, followed by a practical example. Some critical practices have been selected for their undisputed influence on Shakespearean scholarship, while others have been included to represent new and emerging fields of interpretation.

The organization of the book means that the fourteen critical approaches demonstrated appear as discrete academic fields. The truth is, though, that what are often presented as separate schools of thought, regularly cross their own perceived borders, branching out to form new and highly stimulating modes of interpretation. Academic readings of Shakespeare can also be highly combative (indeed, critical discourse is sometimes described in terms of wars, battles and conflict). Yet whether friendly or hostile, critical approaches are constantly in dialogue with each other, ensuring that literary scholarship never grows complacent or falls behind the times.

Each chapter opens with what is no more than a snapshot of a particular reading approach and a demonstration of how it might be applied to the Shakespeare text. Taken in their entirety, these sections offer an overview of critical practice – a starting point from which readers can negotiate their way through competing viewpoints to form their own responses. Given the status of Shakespeare today, the body of secondary writings about the plays is vast and contains within it a complex and fascinating history of interprative reading. While this book focuses primarily on a range of current critical methods and writings, it also takes into account formative opinions from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, thus developing an awareness of how views of the works have changed as societies have changed and underlining the importance of situating critical writings in the political, social and historical contexts in which they were produced. As you build up and refine your knowledge of criticism now and over time, so you will be increasingly able to map, situate and contextualize the shifts of interpretation which have driven, and continue to drive, Shakespearean scholarship.

How to use this book

The purpose of this book is to introduce students new to undergraduate Shakespeare study to fourteen of the most commonly studied plays. Significant areas of recent critical debate are introduced, explained and put into practice, and the contexts in which the plays were written and performed are explored. Worked examples of close analysis demonstrate different ways of approaching both text and performance.

Each chapter is arranged through four discrete sections:

These sections can be read horizontally across the book, giving a comprehensive overview of each of these aspects of Shakespeare studies. At the same time, individual chapters provide a thought-provoking way in to the play itself.

The Further Thinking section at the foot of each chapter offers suggestions for making connections across texts and for trying out some of the critical approaches discussed. Each chapter concludes with ‘Afterlives’: brief references to some of the re-inventions of the plays as entirely new works of art