In a recent review of Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), the critic wondered why people are still writing about Shakespeare’s plays. After all, it has been almost four hundred years since Will headed off to the undiscovered country. The critic raises a good point: will we ever reach a saturation point in our fascination with Shakespeare? Consider this: if you going onto a retail site like Amazon.com and search under the “Books” category for Shakespeare, you get over one hundred and thirty thousand results. Admittedly, there will be duplicate items or updated editions that pad that number, however, if you removed one third or even one half of the entries, it is still a staggering amount of text.

So, what the heck is everyone talking about? If Shakespeare only wrote thirty-five to forty plays (depending on which ones you do or do not include), then how could there be an average of three thousand books out there for every play written? Certainly, there is a lot of similar ground being covered. Anthologies abound because some use folio texts, others use quarto texts, while still others combine elements from both to create an “ideal” text. A whole other group is concerned with the man himself, though writing a biography based on the limited amount of documentation available is tricky business. Ultimately it is the analysis of the plays that takes up the bulk of this bibliography. While I cannot imagine slogging through all of them (particularly given the inevitable overlapping), it is easy to see why people write them. While the volume of analysis may seem overwhelming and redundant, the complexity of the plays themselves makes them compelling research subjects.

Posted Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:46:10 and filed under Books. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.