Shakespeare and Language (review)
Heinemann (44), Mark Matheson (48), Paul Franssen (54), Günter Walch (40), John Drakakis (44), Terence Hawkes (40), E. Pearlman (39), and Barbara Hodgdon (52). Put bluntly, this book offers no new work. Libraries that buy it will, in most cases, already own all it contains; but some individual readers will no doubt find having these articles together convenient. Taken together, the authors represented touch on most of the Shakespeare canon; but the lion’s share of their attention is given to Coriolanus above all, and to a lesser extent, to Richard II, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, Henry V, 2 Henry VI, Measure for Measure, Othello, and Hamlet. In addition, two chapters focus on Shakespeare on film, specifically film versions of Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. “Politics” is a big umbrella. Given the miscellaneous gathering here of widely divergent articles and the easy accessibility of these articles in nearly any research library (one third have appeared together already in the 1992 number of Shakespeare Survey), it might have been a better service to scholars to have done something quite different. At the very least, perhaps a more thematically focused gathering (for example, on republicanism vs. monarchy in Shakespeare) would have better justified a new book, especially if it had pulled together pieces from a wider and less-available set of sources. JOHN BIENZ Mount Union College