A Companion to Shakespeare

this is a remarkable collection of informative and accessible essays that energetically lay out the intellectual, social, and material contexts in which Shakespeare's plays were written, performed,and ultimately read. This is what students and readers need to know, rather than some critic telling them what to think. A must for school libraries, but good to have on your own shelves. hurray!

One reviewer says that this Companion is a "steal." That is exactly how I got the book! I took it from my school library(it had not even been catalogued yet). My students are Protestant and the information on the theology of the times turned them on to Hamlet as nothing ever has in my years of teaching. The essay on reading habits is fascinating to them. Seniors in a public high school read and comprehended the essays and class discussions were so enriched. I took the book back to my library and ordered copies of my own and for several students who wanted them. A must!!

This book is ideal for teachers, students, and general readers looking for an all-in-one companion to the plays. It provides detailed information on Shakespeare's world which will enrich anyone's reading. The book has no axes to grind, but nor does it merely present a dry listing of facts and figures. Instead, the authors carefully and subtly place Shakespeare in the contexts--literary, philosophical, economic, religious, and textual--in which he wrote and others read his plays and saw them performed. Reading the essays returned me to the plays with new insight and new interest. Highly recommended. (The new paperback edition is a steal considering how often I refer to it!)

As a teacher at a large public high school, I would like to take this opportunity to recommend A COMPANION TO SHAKESPEARE as a volume that every single library should have on its shelves. Not only has the book been an invaluable resource for me as a teacher of Shakespeare but it has also served as a wonderful enrichment tool for all of my students. The essays give a wealth of information on the times and conditions in which Shakespeare was writing and my students scramble to be the next in line to check it out. In fact, I intend to order an additional copy for the library as soon as possible.

A COMPANION TO SHAKESPEARE is an invaluable addition to the collection of anyone, student, scholar or layman with an interest in the conditions that made Shakespeare's art possible. The unbiased essays are not slanted to unfairly represent any of the current popular "isms" reflected in the critical analysis of the past twenty years. In fact, the individual essays are clear, informative, useful and even fun. In compiling the book, the editor of the COMPANION, David Scott Kastan, seems to have made a conscious effort to present material that would, "restore Shakespeare's artistry to the earliest conditions of its realization and intelligibility: to the collaborations of the theatre in which the plays were acted, to the practices of the book trade in which they were published, to the unstable political world of late Tudor and early Stuart England in which the plays were engaged by their various publics" (see Kastan, SHAKESPEARE AFTER THEORY)In addition to its enlightening and insightful content, the COMPANION is beautifully designed and the new paperback edition is an incredible bargain.