The Shakespeare Handbooks. Series Editor: John Russell Brown. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
• John Russell Brown, Macbeth. ISBN 1-4039-2093-1.
• Paul Edmondson, Twelfth Night. ISBN 1-4039-3960-8.
• Christopher McCullough, The Merchant of Venice. ISBN 1-4039-3960-8.
• Lesley Wade Soule, As You Like It. ISBN 1-4039-3629-3.
Sensitivity to the theatrical potential of Shakespeare’s plays is the chief concern of this useful new series of student guides from Palgrave Macmillan. Each volume combines an 80-page scene-by-scene dramatic commentary with five chapters on miscellaneous background topics: ‘The text and early performances’, ‘Cultural contexts and sources’, ‘Key productions and performances’, ‘The play on screen’ and ‘Critical assessments’. Within these constraints, the authors of the first four ‘Shakespeare Handbooks’ to be published shape their materials quite differently. Even the order of chapters varies. Whilst the five background topic chapters appear in the same order in each volume, the commentary shifts about: after ‘The text and early performances’ in John Russell Brown’s Macbeth, after ‘Cultural contexts and sources’ in Lesley Wade Soule’s As You Like It and Christopher McCullough’s Merchant of Venice and after ‘Critical assessments’ in Paul Edmondson’s Twelfth Night. Accompanying these structural differences are broader divergences in approach.
The scene-by-scene commentary is the most original and valuable feature of the series. It is, writes the series editor, John Russell Brown, designed to direct the reader’s attention to ‘actions and meanings not readily perceived except in rehearsal or performance’. Rather than anthologise the performance decisions of past productions – an impossible task in the given space – the commentaries give snapshots of key performance issues. Room is thus available for many different types of material: questions, suggestions and recommendations about how particular moments might be played, speculation about character motivation, reference to past productions, analysis of verbal detail, interpretation in the light of Renaissance stage conventions, arguments in favour of a particular way of seeing the play, and so on. Handbook authors thus have considerable latitude.
Brown himself, in the commentary in his volume on Macbeth, is nicely sensitive both to brute spatial organisation (‘After entering, Lady Macbeth must in some way dispose of the light in order to wash her hands’ (76)) and to the interplay of verbal texture and event (‘Jocund’ is a light-hearted, cheerful word that that brings a surprising change of mood that progressively creates a barrier between them’ (50)). His commentary tracks Macbeth moment-by-moment, one or more lines at a time, focusing in on points where the need to take clear interpretative decisions is particularly important. Alertness to the imbrication of text and performance leads to some striking passages, such as his observation about Macbeth’s instructions for Banquo’s murder:
From its start, this private encounter is difficult to act, for the actors and for the persons in the play, and that was probably Shakespeare’s intention because the suggestion of unspoken restraints and pressures beneath the words takes the play’s action into new, clandestine territory in which the hero will seem belittled and his concerns trivialised. (48)
Of all the four handbook authors, Brown provides the least build-up to his commentary: all that precedes it is a pithy chapter on the text and early performances. Everything else follows, and therefore allows students to build on, the commentary: chunks of Holinshed, descriptions of great Macbeths of the past, a short discussion of films and a summary of ‘critical assessments’ that quotes heavily from A.C. Bradley and tellingly cites no work published between 1960 and 1981.
Christopher McCullough’s commentary for The Merchant of Venice is more straightforward and obviously functional than Brown’s for Macbeth – more of a vade-mecum for directors. It begins with a handy introductory list of key issues and a brief scene-by-scene plot summary. The commentary’s account of each scene is divided up into sections on ‘Plot objectives’, ‘Setting’ and ‘Action, language and actors’. Such a sharply-defined structure, though making it hard for McCullough to be as flexible in his analysis as Brown, allows him to provide readers with performance information in a very clear and accessible form. It also underpins one of the great strengths of his commentary, its emphasis on setting and theatrical space (‘Where is Bassanio on stage in order to hear Portia’s remarks?’ (163)). McCullough’s analysis of the play, peppered with enlivening questions, moves constantly and valuably in the direction of practical tips: discussing the trial scene, for example, he argues that ‘To allow actors to play with this scene before any kind of staging decisions are introduced will give a vitality that, otherwise, could easily be missed’ (144).
Accompanying the commentary in McCullough’s contextual chapters is a bewildering gallimaufry of material: inter alia, a good examination of the distinction between ‘script’ and ‘text’ (1-8), Matthew Arnold’s poem on Shakespeare (11), five pages on the legal status of Elizabethan acting companies (16-21), four pages on Hamlet’s advice to the players (26-9) and an interview with Antony Sher (47-55). This embarras de richesses, never less than stimulating, seems to have limited the space available for the treatment of more conventional topics such as literary genre, Judaism, commerce and the Elizabethan legal system. It also seems to have edged out the comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s source material that is such a valuable feature of the four other Handbooks reviewed here.
Paul Edmondson’s commentary on Twelfth Night reads the play from the point of view of a spectator seeing it for the first time, unaware of the names or relationships of any of the characters (‘The young woman speaks first. Her question betrays a sense of confusion as she tries to re-establish control and order’ (89)). The coup de théâtre Edmondson works towards is the revelation of Viola’s name in the final scene of the play (160). His commentary is full of creative uncertainty about the way in which specific moments might be staged. Tagging his interventions, like Brown, line by line, Edmondson leaves himself sufficient room for a supple, freewheeling approach to both text and action. Like Brown again, Edmondson comes up with some resonant formulations–for example, his comment on the climactic meeting of Viola and Sebastian:
It may be helpful to think about the dramatic texture of the next few minutes as taking place out of time, in a heightened sphere of emotional reality, with the script representing the characters’ inner thoughts and feelings rather than only their verbal expression. (159)
Of the four volumes it is Edmondson’s that comes closest to fulfilling Brown’s hope that the commentary will ‘offer an experience as close as possible to an audience’s progressive experience of a production’ (viii).
Edmondson places his commentary last, having carefully laid out in his other chapters an enticing smorgasbord of important contexts, including a props list, a table listing Irving’s rearrangement of scenes and a table of plot elements shared between Twelfth Night and other works by Shakespeare. There are also passages from key sources, a fleet-footed summary of critical approaches, good material on performance history and some appealingly silly jokes. Edmondson’s fresh, spectator-response approach to the commentary means that when it finally arrives it is not bowed down by this rich array of contexts, but deftly slips their traces.
Lesley Wade Soule’s commentary for As You Like It seems a bit more prescriptive than the commentaries in the other volumes. Part of its function is to back up and cash out her persuasive emphasis – set out in advance of the commentary, in chapters on ‘Text and early performance’ and ‘Cultural contexts and sources’ – on the play’s metatheatrical and pageant-like qualities (‘As any actor’s pretence requires the assistance of the spectator, Rosalind’s performance is helped by Orlando’s eagerness to cast her in the role of his ‘Rosalind’’ (96)). Soule asserts her control over the commentary by starting the section on each scene with a short summary picking out key themes. A particularly arresting feature is the generalised way in which she writes about Shakespeare’s language. She includes no direct quotations from the play and does not analyse the play’s images or verbal texture in any detail. That this is no accident is suggested by her quotation late in the book of John Russell Brown’s warning that ‘Shakespeare’s verbal art ‘is, in fact, a trap; it can prevent us from inquiring further’’ (162 (1)), a dictum that, ironically, her commentary puts into practice far more thorough-goingly than Brown’s own commentary for Macbeth. Character motivation is important to Soule (as for example in her analysis of possible reasons for Oliver’s volte-face (102), an emphasis which sits intriguingly alongside her argument earlier in her Handbook that dramatic characters should be viewed as discontinuous entities (41-2).There are some nice aperçus–the bossy Rosalind of Act V is ‘like a sports teacher’ (116) – and an extensive and well-organised anthology of source material.
On the face of it, it is surprising that such a performance-oriented series contains no illustrations–no photographs of recent productions, no diagrams of the Globe. (2) Is this simply a matter of cost? Or did the publishers and series editor worry that the inclusion of visual images might limit readers’ sense of the full range of performance possibilities? Was it felt that restricting the authors to the written word might help engender a more flexible and holistic sense of the plays’ theatricality? In the event, the vividness of the writing in these Handbooks means that the absence of visual stimuli does not at all feel like a drawback. More significant, perhaps, is the comparative absence of cross-referencing, an omission (more or less essential on grounds of space) that makes it difficult for the authors to construct pathways between the commentaries and the other chapters. Many topics introduced in the contextual chapters (Elizabethan attitudes to primogeniture in the As You Like It volume, for example) cry out for, but lack detailed exemplification in the commentary.
In the absence of a hyperlinked web edition (3), the onus is on the Handbook writers to provide students with guidance on how to navigate the extensive information provided. This is an area where more consistency between the authors might have been hoped for, as the books vary quite considerably in the amount of ‘scaffolding’ they give. Edmondson probably provides most overall (together with an excellent annotated bibliography) whilst McCullough is particularly helpful in the opening section of his commentary. Brown’s eloquent analyses, on the other hand, tend to be rather minimally annotated: his invaluable extracts from Holinshed, for example, are given without textual references of any type, putting the brake on any interested undergraduate keen to investigate further. The discussion of textual matters in all four books is also minimally referenced. Meanwhile, even the choice of editions differs from Handbook to Handbook: each author cites a favourite critical edition (McCullough uses John Russell Brown’s New Arden Merchant of Venice, Brown himself G.K. Hunter’s New Penguin Macbeth and so on), whilst references to other Shakespeare plays uniformly cite the Oxford collected works. This seems eccentric: would it not have been easier simply to put all the eggs in one basket and make things easier for everyone by citing the Oxford text throughout?
A number of very obvious questions are likely to occur to any student faced with one of these volumes. How (and when) should the commentary be read? Should the student read it all in one go, having read (or seen, or heard) the whole play? Or is she meant to read it alongside the play, looking scenes up in the commentary as soon as s/he has read them? How (and, again, when) should she bring the material in the very diverse contextual chapters to bear on the play? An introductory section (‘How to use this book’) broaching some of these questions and offering readers a range of possible pathways would help. And perhaps a little more emphasis on the inevitably subjective nature of each Handbook would have been salutary.
Quibbling too much, though, seems churlish: each of these first four volumes casts fresh light on the play in hand; each author is an engaging and well-informed guide to his or her play. It will be interesting to see how future contributors adapt their materials to the series’ ambitious brief.
Notes
1. Quoted from Brown’s Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance (1966).
2. Cf., for example, the new ‘Sourcebooks Shakespeare’ series – editions of the plays that come with copious illustrations and a CD containing videos of selected scenes in performance.
3. On the value of non-sequential, hyperlinked text for students, see Gavin Budge’s article in this newsletter.
