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From the Domesday Book to Shakespeare's Globe: The Legal and Political Heritage of Elizabethan Drama, Berpols Publishers, 2023. First up is this book by Dominique Goy-Blanquet, which I found challenging [...]

Two former Artistic Directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) published books within seven months of each other. Both are from Bloomsbury Publishing. Adrian Noble's How to Direct Shakespeare was [...]

Background There were more Shakespeare-related plays in Oregon's Rogue Valley in 2023 than plays written by him, a ratio of four to two. Shakespeare is normal at the Oregon Shakespeare [...]

Part One of this article (71.2) established that Shakespeare performance historians have shamefully neglected audio productions. Attention was eventually paid by a few scholars, but there is still much to [...]

People working on 'Screen Shakespeare' may overlook this collection of essays exploring the perks and problems of putting all sorts of plays on British television. Shakespeare is not in the [...]

This 2020 Cambridge University Press book is so dense, closely argued, heavily theorized and documented that it would take several thousand words to review it properly. This short response must [...]

Michael P. Jensen Talking Book Update 70.2 This update begins with former guest Lukas Erne then will look at two issues of Shakespeare Survey, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on [...]

In tribute to Dr. Michael Hattaway, who passed on July 7, 2021, we have reprinted Michael P. Jensen's 'Talking Books' interview with him, originally published in Volume 57, Issue 3 [...]

David Lindley was to be my next 'Talking Books' guest, that interview intended for the previous issue of The Shakespeare Newsletter. He agreed, I requested review copies of his books [...]

The Covid-19 lockdown disrupted lives and livelihoods, some beyond repair. Theatre companies were forced to cancel shows already open and others before opening. Some theatres used the internet to put [...]

After triumphant seasons in Stratford and London, Peter Brook's legendary 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night's Dream toured the world. An invitation to perform in Japan in [...]

I was first impressed by Mark Thornton Burnett in 1999 when he was on a Shakespeare Association of America panel in San Francisco. His thrilling talk 'Constructing 'Monsters' on the [...]

Before telling you about new books by past 'Talking Books' guests, I need to get something off my chest that the introduction to Reconceiving the Renaissance put on my chest. [...]

'Part One' (69.2) showed that the American Shakespeare Center and the Flatwater Shakespeare Company streamed subprofessional video captures during the 2020 pandemic, which is having its 2021 Delta surge as [...]

Hailey Bachrach was not able to review OSF 2018 Romeo and Juliet when a July show was cancelled because of unhealthy amounts of smoke from the forest fires north, west, [...]

M.L. Stapleton has used his classical education in service of a very interesting aspect of early modern English literary studies: the influence of Latin-to-English translations on the writers of the [...]

I asked myself and a brace of former guests just one question for this digital-themed issue: how has digitization changed the way you do your work? It is a deliberately [...]

The first part of this book (Routledge, 2022) leads to chapter 5 and the subsequent chapters look back to it, so we begin there. Freebury-Jones believes that Robert Greene wrote [...]

After the dark COVID years of 2020-1, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon is back on the boards, but that is a mixed blessing. It is goodish for the [...]

Part One of my conversation with Gabriel Egan concentrated on Green Shakespeare, Marxist approaches to Shakespeare, and a whole lot of science, for science infuses his work on these subjects. [...]

Gabriel Egan was not known as a textual editor, but that has changed with the publication of the New Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Works Modern Critical Edition and the two volume [...]

Emma Smith gets those writing jobs we all envy. In 2002, she published Shakespeare in Production: King Henry V, a wonderful edition of the play that uses Andrew Gurr's Cambridge [...]

I was so starved to have some chat about Shakespeare in 1999 that I took a continuing studies class at Stanford built around the plays performed at the Oregon Shakespeare [...]

I am frustrated by language barriers, but I learned the hard way that I do not acquire other languages easily or with competence, no matter how much effort I make. [...]

Classical mythology is so far outside the mainstream that most people cannot tell a Titan from a Muse. Former 'Talking Books' guest, Virginia Mason Vaughan, wanted to better know Classical [...]

An exciting corner of early modern studies is in what Gabriel Egan calls the 'sociology-of-texts movement,' (1) seen in works such as Peter W. M. Blayney's two volume The Stationers' [...]

Bloomsbury Publishing Pic began an aggressive Shakespeare program after acquiring the Arden list from Cengage Learning in 2009. (2) The imprint, once known only for excellent editions of Shakespeare, began [...]

First books by now eminent scholars do not always indicate the direction their careers will take. Katharine Eisaman Maus's first book is the underknown Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame [...]

There is continuity in the work of Martin Wiggins. Whether we begin with his thorough monograph, Journeymen in Murder: The Assassin in English Renaissance Drama (OUP, 1991),' or with his [...]

Ben Jonson once suffered from false compare. Critics found the differences between Jonson and Shakespeare as Jonson's deficiencies. Regarding anyone who was not Shakespeare as unworthy by definition is problematic. [...]

Most of the public knows Stacy Keach from his many appearances in film and his work on television as both a series regular and a guest star. Shakespeareans know him [...]

After listening to Tiffany Stern's fantastic lecture at the 2011 Shakespeare Association of America meeting titled 'Marts and Fairs: Shakespeare and Mass Entertainment,' illustrated with dozens of engravings, posters, and [...]

The first part of my interview with David Scott Kastan was published in the last issue (60:3 [Winter 2010/ 2011], 82, 89, 92-94, 97). To recap just who Professor Kastan [...]

David Scott Kastan has done so much, and in this interview has spoken of it so interestingly, that our dialogue turned out to be very long, but also so fascinating [...]

For years I have wanted a handy reference guide to tell me what Shakespeare's company put on the boards in 1598, 1602, 1612, or any year that I want to [...]

Patrick Cheney believes in authors. Not in the Frankenstein constructs patched together from the corpses of poets, playwrights, scribes, compositors, actors, and others, as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes would [...]

Greek and Latin texts in translation continue to fascinate and entertain me, so I envy Robert S. Miola who mastered the languages in addition to becoming one of the finest [...]

Even more than Shakespeare's, Gail Edwards's Macbeth is a production of symmetry. While the play begins and ends with rebellion, Edwards's begins and ends with beheadings that conclude those rebellions. [...]

Casting her net widely, Barbara Hodgdon starts her first book, The End Crowns All. Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History (Princeton University Press, 1991), with quotations from John Webster, John [...]

Michael Hattaway wears so many scholarly hats that he needs two hat racks. As a textual editor, his books include the three Henry V/plays and As You Like It (Cambridge [...]

The first two parts of this article surveyed the series that presented Shakespeare comic books from the forties through today, series that include Classics Illustrated (in various incarnations), A Classic [...]

Part one of this article began with an overview of the various series that publish Shakespeare comic books, noting that most are created for the education market. This guides editorial [...]

Shakespeare comics receive increasing scholarly attention, (1) but there is no history to put them into context. This article attempts to create that context so readers may understand how the [...]

Attributions are common. Convincing attributions are rare. That fact makes MacDonald P. Jackson one of the few important attribution scholars of our time. For decades and in dozens of books [...]

Anthony B. Dawson is the co-author of one of me most novel scholarly books in recent years, if only because of the way it makes its arguments. The Culture of [...]

The authorship of many anonymous works has been attributed to William Shakespeare. It began during his lifetime by putting his name on the title pages of plays he did not [...]

The next 'Talking Books' is still developing, so here is an update on three books by two former guests. These books contain a tremendous amount of learning in the service [...]

MPJ: You are interviewing yourself? Isn't that a bit obvious in a column about interviews? Michael P. Jensen: It is. I wrote a standard history of 'Talking Books' for a [...]

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, 2016, edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk, has a four-part structure, 'Genre,' 'Textual Issues,' 'Reading the Tragedies,' 'Stage and Screen,' and 'The Tragedies [...]

The 'Update' might be called the 'Latedate,' for these are books I requested a couple of years ago, then mislaid. The books turned up when I rearranged my office to [...]