MA Pathways in
Shakespeare and English Literature: Text, Influence and Creativity
Preliminary Reading
The Pathway (made up of 3 units)
The Pathway as a whole assumes a familiarity with Shakespeare’s works. Your first priority
in preparing for the pathway, or any of its units, is to make good gaps in your Shakespearean
reading, and to deepen your acquaintance with works you have already seen and read. You
need good editions of the works, and you need to begin to think critically about the practices
of individual editors.
Editions to consult are the Arden, the New Cambridge, the Oxford World’s Classics, the
Signet, and the New Penguin.* All of these editions provide individual volumes of individual
works. Undoubtedly they prove expensive. But a one-volume edition of the complete
works—the best is probably the Riverside Shakespeare or, much more controversially, the
Complete Oxford edited by Wells and Taylor (reissued with some changes and notes as the
Norton edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and others)—has two disadvantages:
i)
textual apparatus and notes are, for obvious reasons, much less full, or, in the case of
the Oxford, in a separate and expensive volume; and
ii)
more practically, experience suggests that students find one large volume
uncomfortable to carry around from seminar to library, etc.
*
Though now becoming out of date, Ann Thompson, with Thomas L. Berger, et al.,
Which Shakespeare? A User’s Guide to Editions, provides a useful guide to the many editions
up to 1992.
1. Shakespeare and Literary Relations: Or, Influence, and ways of describing it.
Read the section on ‘Influence’ in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical
Terms for Literary Study (Chicago: 2nd edn., University of Chicago Press, 1995)
See also Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text,’ in Image-Music-Text, essays selected and
translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977)
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. by Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)
Jonathan Culler on deconstruction and intertextuality in his The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981)
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: 2nd edn., Oxford University Press, 1997), or
(arguably easier)
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Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)
These theoretical works will appear unintelligible to the uninitiated, but it is important that
you have a look, if only to see how peculiar they can be.
A useful general introduction to the range and variety of theories of influence is:
Graham Allen, Intertextuality, The New Critical Idiom (London and New York: Routledge,
2000)
2. Hamlet: Text and Interpretation
The ‘set text’ is Hamlet. You should certainly be pursuing very detailed knowledge of the text
(or, indeed, the texts), and might usefully begin to compare different editions of the play.
Some very surprising differences will emerge very quickly.
Also, you might look at Martin Scofield, The Ghosts of ‘Hamlet’: the Play and Modern
Writers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)
i. Shakespearean criticism: Hamlet
In addition to acquiring a very detailed knowledge of the text(s) of Hamlet and looking at
different editions of the play, including their editors’ introductions, and annotations (at crucial
junctures), there is, of course a vast range and quantity of critical writing on Hamlet (some
crucial commentary or essays written by some of the major critics listed below—notably
Coleridge and Hazlitt in pre twentieth-century criticism, T.S.Eliot, in twentieth-century
criticism).
There is too much criticism of the play to make specifying particular readings useful.
However, one quick way to orient yourself is to consult collections of essays or books devoted
exclusively to Hamlet (by, for example entering ‘Hamlet’ in the Library catalogue’s ‘Browse’
function). You might also consult the World Shakespeare Bibliography online (1960-2011) -the University has a subscription. Additionally or alternatively, make some preliminary use
of either or both of the following reference works to observe something of the range of
criticism and to act as a guide to further reading:
Wells, Stanley, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986)
[PR2976 CAM]
Wells, Stanley, ed., Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1990)
[Z8811 SHA]
The following may also be useful guides
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
[PR2984 CAM]
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, general editor, Michael Dobson; associate general
editor, Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
[Oversize PR2892 OXF]
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a)
Reading the major Shakespearean critics
Samuel Johnson in various editions: ed., W. Raleigh, 1908; W. Wimsatt, 1960 and 1969; A.
Sherbo, 1968 (2 vols in the Yale edition); or H.R. Woudhuysen, 1989 (the Penguin selection).
Also P.J. Smallwood, ed., Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press,
1985)
You might look at G.F. Parker, Johnson’s Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
[Here you might also want to look at Michael Dobson, Authorising Shakespeare: Adaptations
and Canonization 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)]
Jonathan Bate, ed., The Romantics on Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)
S.T. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. by Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols. (London:
2nd edn., Dent, 1960)
Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the Lectures of 1811-12, ed. by R.A.Foakes (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971)
[Here you might also want to look at Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic
Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)]
William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (London: Dent, 1957)
[Here you might also look at Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre,
Criticism 1730-1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). But see also ‘The Anxiety of
Criticism’, review article on Jonathan Bate’s two books, by J.M. Lyon, Keats-Shelley Review
(1990)]
Oswald LeWinter, ed., Shakespeare in Europe (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1970)—a very
useful gathering of responses to Shakespeare by major, non-English figures. Highly
recommended.
b)
20th Century criticism
Here the choice is vast, and the following few suggestions—listed chronologically by date of
first publication—would not command anything approaching widespread agreement. Nor are
these critical works necessarily recommended, except in so far as they afford evidence of the
wide variety of approaches to Shakespeare pursued in this century.
A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, (London: Macmillan, 1904)
G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930)
T.S. Eliot, in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932)
F.R. Leavis, in The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952)
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C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1959)
A.P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns, ed. by Graham Storey (London: Longman, 1961; with an
introduction by Peter Holland, 1989)
Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965)
Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1968)
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967)
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981)
Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987)
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books,
1998)
Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003)
The ‘new’ criticisms—New Historicism, Feminism, Cultural Materialism and such like—
have had much to say about Shakespeare in the last twenty years or so, and you should be at
least aware of these approaches. Three collections are:
Alternative Shakespeares, ed. by John.Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985)
Political Shakespeare, ed. by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1985; 2nd edn., 1994)
Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman
(London: Methuen, 1985)
Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare (London: 2nd edn., Prentice Hall, 1995)
More particular, idiosyncratic and—arguably—stimulating are:
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980), and his more recent Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) and
Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1990)
Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), and
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987) -- there is a more recent edition which adds a play and so becomes
Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays ...
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3. Shakespeare and Intertextuality: Or, Shakespearean Connections
A central aim of the course is to pursue the variety of creative transformations which
Shakespeare made in respect of earlier writers and/or which later writers have made in respect
of Shakespeare. This is an area where your own particular interests can fruitfully develop.
Please read ‘Shakespeare’s After-Life’, Chapter 11 of Peter Conrad’s The Everyman History
of English literature (London: Dent, 1985), pp.177-96
The following relatively recent publications might be of interest:
Marianne Novy, ed., Women’s Re-visions of Shakespeare (Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 1990)
Marianne Novy, ed., Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-visions in
Literature and Performance (Boston: St Martin’s Press, 1999)
Jean I. Marsden, ed., The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions
and Myths (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991)
Peter Erickson, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley:
California Press, 1991)
University of
Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993)
Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (London: Hogarth Press, 1990)
David Ellis, That Man Shakespeare, Icons of Modern Culture (Mountfield:
Information, 2005)
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