Reading Room - Key Interpretations Down the Ages

[from the eighteenth century to the turn of the millennium, listed chronologically, not alphabetically]

Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare , edited by Henry Woudhuysen (1990) – includes the great preface of 1765

The Romantics on Shakespeare , edited by Jonathan Bate (1992) – includes substantial extracts from Coleridge, Goethe, Schlegel, Hazlitt, Keats, Hugo and others

Edward Dowden, Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (1875) – highly influential reading of the plays in terms of the supposed arc of his life (happy comedies in the 1590s, a dark night of the soul and the great tragedies in the early 1600s, the serene last 'romances' at the end of his career); around the same time, the poet A. C. Swinburne was developing a similar theory of Shakespeare's development, though with more emphasis on his style and especially his metrics (A Study of Shakespeare, available as a free e-book, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16412/16412-h/16412-h.htm)

A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) – possibly the most influential work of Shakespearean criticism ever published (as suggested by a rhyme about its importance for people taking exams on the plays: 'I dreamt last night that Shakespeare's Ghost / Sat for a civil service post. / The English paper for that year / Had several questions on King Lear / Which Shakespeare answered very badly / Because he hadn't read his Bradley'); has been attacked for treating the characters as real people, but is actually attuned to questions that are very important (a famous anti-Bradley essay by L. C. Knights [1933] was entitled 'How many children had Lady Macbeth?', implying that this was not an appropriate thing to ask, but actually sterility and childlessness are key motifs in the play)

Shakespeare Criticism 1919-1935 and Shakespeare Criticism 1935-1960, edited by Anne Ridler (1936, 1963) – neat little anthologies in the Oxford World's Classics series, gathering many of the best and most influential essays from the period when criticism was dominated by the approaches of T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and the 'new criticism'

E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (1944) – much-contested account of the histories in relation to the 'Tudor myth'

Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (1949) – Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytical approach to Shakespeare were very influential in the mid-twentieth century; this book by Freud's English protégé is the fullest working-through of the theory that Hamlet suffered from an Oedipus Complex (Jones originally articulated the argument in an article of 1910, which greatly influenced Laurence Olivier's approach to the character in his stage performances and his 1948 movie)

A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare (1961) – superb treatment of 'ambivalence' as a key to Shakespeare, especially good on the history plays and darker comedies

Modern Shakespearean Criticism , edited by Alvin Kernan (1970) – very well selected anthology of mid-century criticism, including such classic essays, from which no student of Shakespeare could fail to profit, as Northrop Frye's 'The Argument of Comedy' (1949) and Maynard Mack's 'The Jacobean Shakespeare' (1960)

Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary (1964) – impassioned, engaged, political, the quintessence of the 1960s but still alive today, if now best taken with a pinch of salt; especially notable on King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Titus Andronicus

Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1975) – the first full-length Shakespeare study to benefit from the feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, setting the plays in the context of early modern attitudes to women and marriage

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988) – foundational essays for the so-called 'new historicist' approach to Shakespeare, the most influential being 'Invisible Bullets', on Prince Hal in Henry IV (in the second collection), but probably the best being the treatment of Iago in the final chapter of the first book (an essay well worth comparing to the poet W. H. Auden's treatment of Iago as 'The Joker in the Pack', in his 1963 collection The Dyer's Hand)

The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of 'King Lear' , edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (1983) – the manifesto for the revisionist editorial position; conclusively shows that the two early texts of King Lear represent different stages in the life of the play, but overstates the case for systematic authorial revision

'The Tempest' and its Travels , edited by Peter Hulme and William Sherman (2000) – wide-ranging collection of essays on the play that has provoked particularly strong debate in the age of post-colonialism and globalisation

 

There are hundreds more fine books on Shakespeare, but anyone who reads The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works from cover to cover and then devours a reasonable proportion of the above will have earned the right to consider themselves an exceptionally highly informed Shakespearean.