قراءات إضافية
ثمة كتاب أو مقالة جديدة تخرج للنور كل ساعة كل يوم تقريبًا. ولن تستطيع مطالعتها كلها بطبيعة الحال، ولا نستطيع نحن أيضًا. كيف إذن نختار ما تَحْسُن قراءته؟ نقدم هنا للقارئ نخبة من القراءات الإضافية في شكل سردي كي نعطيه إحساسًا بمحتوى الكتب التي نوصي بها وعلة استمالتها لنا من الناحية النقدية.
حياة شكسبير
The standard life of Shakespeare is still Samuel
Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life
(1975; there’s also a Compact Documentary
Life, 1987): Schoenbaum gives the documentary evidence and
assesses difficult questions with even-handed restraint. His Shakespeare’s Lives (1991; paperback 1993) is a
perfect supplement, taking as its subject the history of Shakespearean
biography, and enjoying many of the more eccentric interpretations of
Shakespeare’s life. Other recommended biographical works include James Shapiro
on Shakespeare’s most productive year, 1599: A Year in
the Life of William
Shakespeare (2005; paperback 2006), Stephen Greenblatt’s
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became
Shakespeare (2004; paperback 2005), and Michael Wood’s book
accompanying his television series In Search of
Shakespeare (2003). We quote often from the detailed work of our
colleague Katherine Duncan-Jones: her biography of a less than likeable
Shakespeare is Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life
(2010 – a revised edition of her 2001 Ungentle
Shakespeare), and her account of Shakespeare’s immediate
reputation is Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan,
1592–1623 (2011). Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life (2000) is especially good on the early years
in Stratford; Jonathan Bate’s Soul of the Age: The Life,
Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2008; paperback 2009)
looks at Shakespeare and his context through the life-stages identified by
Jaques in As You Like It (“All the world’s a
stage, / And all the men and women merely players”; 2.7.139-40). Charles
Nicholl’s in-depth analysis of a court case in which Shakespeare was called as a
witness (a somewhat evasive one, it has to be said) is in The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (2008).
Lois Potter’s The Life of William Shakespeare: A
Critical Biography (2012) is not just (just!) a biography of
Shakespeare: it is a biography of his theater world, informed by Potter’s
unrivaled theatrical understanding.
شكسبير في عمله
The conditions of writing and printing drama are well
covered by the contributors to David Kastan (ed.), A
Companion to Shakespeare (1999), and Kastan’s Shakespeare and the Book (2001) is a readable
account of changes in editing and bibliography and why they matter. The British
Library’s digital quartos website
(http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html) allows
access to all the early printed editions of Shakespeare: you can view a number
of digital facsimiles of the First Folio online via the Folger Shakespeare
Library (www.folger.edu). Lukas Erne’s controversial Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2007) has turned old notions
of the relation between long and short versions of Shakespeare’s plays on their
head; he posits a Shakespeare who was
interested in the publication of his plays.
John Jowett’s Shakespeare and
Text (2007) is accessible and learned; his editions of Timon of Athens (2004) and Thomas More (2011) extend the discussion of collaborative
working practices. Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespeare
Company, 1594–1642 (2004) studies Shakespeare’s works from the
point of view of the structure and methods of the Chamberlain’s, later King’s,
Men. Tiffany Stern’s Documents of Performance in Early
Modern England (2009) is one of those books that changes totally
how you think about the early modern play – she shows it not to be a unified
text as published by Arden or World’s Classics, but rather an assemblage of
fragments: songs, letters as props, parts, epilogues, prologues. David Crystal
is the expert on Shakespeare and language, in
a vast array of works including Shakespeare’s
Words (with Ben Crystal, 2002) and “Think
on My Words”: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language (2008); Frank
Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language (2001) is a
more evocative and associative take on Shakespeare’s poetic use of rhetoric and
vocabulary.
شكسبير في المسرح
Classic books on the Elizabethan theater are by Andrew
Gurr again: The Shakespearean Stage, (4th
edn., 2009) and Playgoing in Shakespeare’s
London (3rd edn., 2004). Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper’s
Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical
Experiment (2008) is full of insights from a decade of
productions in the rebuilt Globe on London’s Bankside. Tiffany Stern’s Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (2004)
understands the literary and theatrical contexts for Shakespeare’s work, and
her Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon
Palfrey, 2007) is a groundbreaking study of the way Shakespeare’s actors
understood their roles. Martin Wiggins’s Shakespeare and
the Drama of his Time (2000) is recommended as a way to counter
the myopia with which we often consider Shakespeare, and Arthur Kinney’s
Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and
Entertainments (2nd edn., 2005), is the best place to sample
contemporary writers.
Cambridge University Press’s series Players of Shakespeare (6 vols., 1985–2004),
supplemented by Michael Dobson’s Performing
Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today (2006), provide a series of unique
perspectives. Written by actors reflecting on their roles, these essays combine
sophisticated analysis of individual actors’ roles with a deep understanding of
the play in which they perform. Carol Rutter’s Clamorous
Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today (1988) gives Shakespeare’s
female characters the same treatment: conversations between actors about their
interpretation of, for example, Measure for
Measure’s Isabella or As You Like
It’s Rosalind, are revelatory about the sexual politics of
specific productions at specific historical moments. Barbara Hodgdon, W.B.
Worthen, Carol Rutter, and Bridget Escolme are all writers on Shakespeare in the
theater who are methodologically sophisticated and genuinely revealing about
performance: any of their works is well worth reading.
تفسير شكسبير
There is no single way of interpreting Shakespeare: here
we propose some recent survey volumes, all of which introduce a range of
interpretative methods and frameworks and offer extensive suggestions in turn
for further reading. Finally, we highlight some specific critical works to which
we find ourselves returning for their acumen and
provocation.
There are any number of guides to Shakespeare:
particularly useful are Robert Shaughnessy’s The
Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare (2011), which works
through the plays and their historical, theatrical, and critical contexts;
Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin’s Shakespeare: An
Oxford Guide (2003), which tries to set out, with detailed
examples, different interpretative approaches; and The
New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2011), edited by Margreta
de Grazia and Stanley Wells, which covers different historical and critical
aspects and has good suggestions for further reading. Russ McDonald collects
significant twentieth-century criticism in his Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000
(2003). There are two excellent series, the Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford
University Press) and Arden Critical Companions (Arden, Bloomsbury), giving
up-to-date interventions in a range of topics, from biography to religion to
literary theory. Works such as Dympna Callaghan (ed.), A
Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (2000), Sonia Massai (ed.),
World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in
Film and Performance (2005), and Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin
(eds.), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (1998),
give a sense of how the field has changed. We, and our students, love Doing Shakespeare, Simon Palfrey’s brilliant book
of close reading (2nd edn., 2011); Marjorie Garber’s collection of provocative
essays, Profiling Shakespeare (2008), is
similarly lively. Michael Neill’s Putting History to the
Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance
Drama (2000) offers lucid, humanely historicist
arguments.
Gary Taylor’s Reinventing
Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the
Present (1990; paperback 1991) reads like a critical version of
Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, in which our
hero morphs through centuries. Anything by Taylor is well worth reading: here he
combines performance history, publication history, and political history; as an
added bonus, each chapter is written in the style of the period it chronicles.
Alexander Leggatt has published on every Shakespeare genre over thirty years:
Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (1974,
reprinted 2005), Shakespeare’s Political
Drama (1988), and Shakespeare’s
Tragedies (2005). His critical interpretations are based on the
words in the play and the play’s theatrical effects: no other critic could get
away with this limited focus, but Leggatt’s critical insights show you why he
can. A. D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker
(2007) and Tony Tanner’s Prefaces to
Shakespeare (2010) each offer a play-by-play approach, highly
recommended if you require a refresher before going to the theater. Nuttall
focuses on Shakespeare’s ideas; Tanner on the language in which those ideas are
expressed.
Our final injunction was to read Shakespeare himself:
there is a plethora of available editions, each aimed at a particular
readership. Although publishers offer Shakespeare series in individual volumes,
it’s hard to recommend any one series uniformly: you will have your own criteria
– portability, price, font size, electronic or paper, amount of intrusive
explanation, page design – for choosing. We are drawn to different editions for
different reasons: New Penguin for carrying to lectures, with their up-to-date
and crisp introductions; Bedford St Martin’s “Texts and Contexts” series for its
inclusion of historical material to contextualize each play; Arden series 3 for
extensive scholarship and annotation. The “Shakespeare in Production” series
from Cambridge University Press does not cover every play in the canon, but for
those currently available in this series it gives a reading experience
referenced to the myriad interpretations on stage: each line is keyed to how it
has been interpreted by actors and directors, thus offering a quickly accessible
range of interpretative possibilities. Elizabeth Schafer’s The Taming of the Shrew (2002), for instance, is a
particularly good volume to start with. You may wonder whether or why you would
need to buy a new edition: is not a text from school or college days adequate?
But interpretation of Shakespeare has developed, and new things are being
discovered, as this book has shown: these changes and developments also affect
the text we read. Publishers therefore are constantly updating and
recommissioning editions to reflect this evolution.
Three academic journals dominate the market for new work:
Shakespeare Quarterly, published by the
Folger Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare
Studies (Farleigh Dickinson University Press), and Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge University Press);
Shakespeare (Routledge) is a relatively
new entrant. The professional association in the USA is the Shakespeare
Association of America: there are Shakespeare associations in India, Japan,
Germany, Australia and New Zealand, Norway, Korea, Southern Africa, and many
other countries. The British Shakespeare Association
(http://www.britishshakespeare.ws/) has a wide base of
teachers, theater practitioners, academics, and enthusiasts: the website
highlights new work, Shakespeare in the news, and events and
recordings.
