Preface
Preface
This book is intended as an aid to the enjoyment of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, a writer, actor, and man of the theatre who lived from 1564 to 1616. In pursuit of this objective, it hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the place occupied by his writings both in the Elizabethan and Jacobean era in which they were composed and in the many subsequent periods in which they have been read, performed, and reinterpreted. In so far as the two aims are separable, The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare is designed primarily to inform readers about Shakespeare's works, times, lives, and afterlives rather than to interpret them, so we have preferred to balance its composition in favour of short, informative entries as against chapter-length meditations on large topics. A map of the coverage which these entries offer of the many different fields of knowledge which the word ‘Shakespeare’ has come to include—biography, theatre history, printing and publishing, criticism, translation, and so on—is provided by the Thematic Listing of Entries.Shakespeare and his canon have come to be so central to anglophone culture over the last four centuries that the category of knowledge about them might easily be extended indefinitely in almost any direction, and any readers hoping, for example, that this book will describe the whole of Western cultural history prior to Shakespeare as a background to his achievement and the whole of literary history since as an index to his influence are bound to be disappointed. Nor does it offer a glossary to all the now unfamiliar words in Shakespeare's vocabulary, nor a family tree of his entire clan (although it does offer entries on all of Shakespeare's characters, with the exception of those who, like Hamlet and Othello, are both eponymous and fictitious, who are covered as part of the entries describing the plays to which they give their names). With a mere half-million words at our disposal we have of course had to be selective, and we hope that readers will concur in the often difficult decisions we have had to make about the relative space to be apportioned between, for example, the literary sources, the original performances, and the subsequent worldwide reception of Shakespeare's plays. Selective as it is, however, we hope that this volume reflects something of the breadth of present-day Shakespearian studies, a diversity of opinions as well as scope which we have not attempted to iron out. Our wide range of contributors, who are in no way answerable for one another's views, can be identified by initials appended to each entry. Cross-references are marked by an asterisk, but, since there are separate entries on all Shakespeare's works and all his characters, we have generally refrained from asterisking their titles and names except under special circumstances.
As an Oxford Companion, this book is appropriately geared to the Oxford Shakespeare, specifically the modern-spelling edition of the Complete Works published under the general editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor in 1986 (and subsequently used as the basis of the Norton Shakespeare, published under the editorship of Stephen Greenblatt in 1997). All scene and line references are to this text of Shakespeare's works, and accounts of the dating and of the textual histories of individual works are in broad conformity with its complementary volume William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Wells, Taylor, et al., 1987). The Oxford edition is notable for, among many other things, a scrupulous return, as far as is possible, to the texts of Shakespeare's plays as they were produced in Shakespeare's theatre: in place of the standardized titles of some of the history plays imposed after Shakespeare's death by the editors of the First Folio, for example, it returns to the titles under which Shakespeare composed them. Wherever these titles might be unfamiliar, we have added the Folio titles in brackets, and have of course supplied appropriate cross-references: hence a reader looking up Henry VIII will be referred to the entry describing the play under its original name, All Is True, and references to the third of Shakespeare's plays to be set in the reign of Henry VI call it Richard, Duke of York (3 Henry VI). The Oxford edition is notable, too, for the consistency with which it modernizes Shakespeare's spellings, including those of foreign names, so that readers looking up the characters ‘Iachimo’ and ‘Petruchio’ will be referred to Giacomo and Petruccio, the forms also used here in the entries describing Cymbeline and The Taming of the Shrew respectively. In outlining the stage histories of such roles, however, we have retained the names by which different performers actually knew them: hence in describing the plot of Cymbeline we have called the play's heroine Innogen (as did Shakespeare, despite the Folio's posthumous printing error to the contrary), but in summarizing the career of one of her most notable impersonators, the Victorian actress Ellen Terry, we have called her Imogen (as did Terry and her contemporaries).
Entries on individual plays supply an account of their place in the chronology of Shakespeare's works, a brief discussion of their early texts and their provenance, a short account of their literary and dramatic sources and how they treat them, and a scene-by-scene synopsis. (These synopses are designed solely to aid readers in finding scenes in the play, rather than as attempts to provide narrative equivalents for the play's own effects; as an antidote to the potentially misleading impressions such plot summaries can give, each is followed by a very short account of the play's most distinctive artistic features. Any scene-by-scene synopsis of Hamlet, for example, is liable to make the play seem a good deal more busy and plot-centred than it ever does in performance, and it seems only fair to record that it is in fact as notable for meditative soliloquies as it is for crowded action.) The synopsis is followed by summaries of the play's critical reception, its performance history, and its fortunes in the cinema and on television, and then by a very short and selective reading list including recent important single-play editions. With limited space at our disposal, we have had to be especially selective in discussing the stage histories of these endlessly revived plays, and given that this is an Oxford Companion to Shakespeare—published in the city through which Shakespeare himself passed between the town of his birth and the city of his career—we hope we may be forgiven for betraying some small bias in favour of the theatres found at the two destinations between which Shakespeare commuted, London and Stratford-upon-Avon.
Michael Dobson
Stanley Wells
April 2001