‘Tis the season to see Shakespeare, especially in America, where summer Shakespeare festivals are as thick as fireflies on a hot night. I gallop from one festival to another in my capacity as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, and my calendar is so crowded that I occasionally have to write my reviews in hotel rooms and departure lounges instead of in my book-lined Manhattan office. My knowledge of the Bard is considerable but not infinite, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for a reasonably compact one-volume Shakespearean reference book that I can slip in my carry-on bag and consult as needed on the road. This season I’m giving The Rough Guide to Shakespeare (Rough Guides/Penguin, 532 pp., $23.99 paper) a tryout, and so far it’s passed every test.
The Rough Guide series of reference books, which runs the gamut from jazz to gangster movies, offers its readers attractively designed handbooks packed with useful information and written in a no-nonsense style. I’ve read several Rough Guides and found most of them to be pretty much as advertised (though the travel volumes are written from a British point of view, which can be a problem when you’re relying on them for information about destinations in America).
The Shakespeare volume, written by Andrew Dickson, is exemplary of the series’ virtues. The style is transparent and accessible, the perspective that of an unusually well-informed journalist who has gone to considerable trouble to mug up his subject. Each play is covered in a chapter consisting of a crisp synopsis, an interpretative essay, a brief stage history, and an annotated list of film and TV versions, audio recordings, published editions and critical studies. Newspaper-style “sidebars” are sprinkled throughout the book-the chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, contains a concise introduction to Ovid-and separate chapters are devoted to the sonnets and longer poems. The last section contains a potted biography of Shakespeare, a discussion of the Elizabethan stage, a short glossary, an annotated bibliography and a list of Shakespearean Web sites.
What I like most about The Rough Guide to Shakespeare is that its author grinds no axes of any kind. His purpose, so far as I can tell, is to offer a straight-down-the-center summary of the best current thinking about Shakespeare, and his native good sense shines through on every page. Whenever he recommends books, they’re the right ones (Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life and Park Honan’s 1998 biography head the list).
Above all, Dickson understands that Shakespeare’s plays are plays first and foremost, and while he is aware of and interested in what scholars have had to say about them, his main interest is in how they work on stage:
Sublime though it may be, “Antony and Cleopatra” is well-nigh unstageable-and seems frequently at risk of falling apart. Despite a mere handful of main roles (and no crowd scenes), there are around forty characters in the play, with some 220 entrances and exits, many involving significant groups of people. The stage empties over forty times (scenes are not marked in the only surviving text) and as the action builds, everything gets progressively faster. Even in the fluid, rapid-fire theatre of Shakespeare’s time the effect must have been dazzling, even disconcerting-a constant procession of people across the stage; cross-cutting, filmic scenes that finish practically as they’ve begun.
I know an alarmingly large number of otherwise well-educated people who find Shakespeare intimidating, usually because they were unfortunate enough to have seen tiresome productions of his plays in their youth and never got over the experience. To them–and to anyone else who wants to brush up his Shakespeare–I strongly recommend The Rough Guide to Shakespeare.
