Reading Room - Introduction

There are thousands of books and tens of thousands of academic articles on Shakespeare.

Click here for a listing of recommended online resources and useful websites.

Of the many valuable Shakespeare reference guides available in printed form, perhaps the best is The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells (2001). Such is the quantity of work on Shakespeare that print bibliographies go out of date all too quickly (though a fairly comprehensive listing of older work is to be found in A Shakespeare Bibliography, 1971, the catalogue of the Birmingham Shakespeare Library). Excellent critical overviews of new work on Shakespeare are provided in two annually published journals, Shakespeare Survey and The Year's Work in English Studies. The longest established academic journals devoted specifically to Shakespeare are Shakespeare Jahrbuch in Germany, Shakespeare Survey in Britain, Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Studies in the USA; Shakespeare Quarterly is based at the Folger Shakespeare Library (www.folger.edu), the world's greatest Shakespeare's library, which has an invaluable online catalogue of its rare book collection (http://shakespeare.folger.edu/).

For comprehensiveness, print bibliographies can no longer keep up with electronic ones. Besides, there is little value in listing as many titles as possible for the sake of it: the simple act of including or excluding particular titles is a matter of judgement. To the student and generally interested reader, there is nothing more intimidating than a long unannotated list of academic titles. And nobody has world enough and time to read even a small proportion of all that might be read about Shakespeare. For all these reasons, the following FURTHER READING list consists of what are, in the view of Jonathan Bate, the general editor, JUST OVER ONE HUNDRED OF THE BEST BOOKS on Shakespeare (plus some of his own!).

Bibliographies often include such details as place of publication and publisher's name, but the digitisation of library and bookseller stock means that author and title are now sufficient for finding purposes. The screenscraper of new and used online bookstores, www.bookfinder.com, makes it possible to obtain publication information about almost all these works (and to buy many of them at competitive prices). Original year of publication is, however, included in the list to indicate the particular historical moment of each commentary.

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.