Reviews for Studies in Shakespeare

The average rating for Studies in Shakespeare based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-20 00:00:00 Chris Sexton It was an ok curriculum for lower levels. I was teaching this for twelfth graders, though, and found very, very little of it to be of use (the insult slam idea being the one exception). Also, having studied Shakespeare quite a bit in grad school, I found the interpretations of the play to be very poor, basic at best and inaccurate at worst. They just didn't get to the thematic core of the play. If you're teaching the play in junior high, this may be useful, but I would look elsewhere in high school.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-10 00:00:00 Daniel J Drain This book is an intriguing examination of authorship in early modern English drama. Johnson examines some of the ways that authorship could be built not in opposition to the theater where plays were performed (as Ben Jonson wanted his plays to be remembered) but rather out of and with direct attention to the theatrical. She looks at the careers of four actor-authors and the ways each one builds his authorial reputation out of a theatrical or otherwise distinct from the author-as-we-know-it (the owner of the text, the perfectly-formed author whose internal self restricts meanings) foundation. I'm not going to rate it, since I don't have a great knowledge of Johnson's period--my critical interests tend towards the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and towards poetics rather than literary history--but her argument seemed to be reasonable and interesting. She fluidly constructs alternative authorships for her history, deftly weaving extant historical scholarship and theory into her book. Her notes are mostly just bibliographic, but that's still useful if you want to read more about a particular author she discusses or claim that she makes. This is decidedly academic, but still readable and engaging, which makes it a fitting and pleasant read for the casual reader interested in literary history.