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RR 2016/255 The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare General editor Bruce R. Smith Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2016 2 vols. ISBN 978 1 107 05725 8 £400 $650
Having spent the past 35 years pottering around the Institute of Psychiatry trying to get psychiatrists to write comprehensible English or to get neuroscientists to explain what they are talking about and having even been an editorial assistant to the Maudsley Philosophy Group, such expertise as I can offer is on reference resources in psychology, psychiatry, the neurosciences and, at a pinch, philosophy. Every so often, however, when handbooks of the major depressive disorders get too depressing and The PsychoNeuroEndocrinology Glossary gets quite unbearably polysyllabic, I ask the editor of Reference Reviews if I can grab something out of his general bag of books. This has sometimes produced some ripe rutabagas but occasionally I pull out a plum. And what a plum I have pulled out this time. Two massive volumes, one of 137 erudite essays on the background to Shakespeare - not just theatre history but on Tudor and Jacobean ideas of geography, communications, science and technology, medicine, religion, the arts, social structures, etc., along with what little is known of Shakespeare's own life and work, the other dramatists and performers who are known to have worked with him, and such accounts and contemporary references to him that have survived. The second volume contains a further 140 essays surveying the ways in which Shakespeare's works have affected the world's cultures over the past 400 years. These include such topics as changes in the technology of performance, changes in the media, changes in the audiences, the problems of translation and performance in different cultures and the effects of his works on the other arts.
It took a general editor (from the University of Southern California), an associate general editor (from Smith College), four associate editors (from Utrecht, Tokyo, St Andrew's and Brazil respectively), two editorial assistants and 285 contributors from almost every country under the sun to put this together. The fact that it forms a coherent whole is obviously partly because of efficient editing and partly because of the extent to which our Early Modern English Shakespeare has become "The World's Shakespeare".
There...