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Shakespeare's Letters By Alan Stewart Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008
Shakespeare's Letters has much to offer both to the emerging study of early modern correspondence and to Shakespeare studies. Each chapter of this elegantly structured book brings some richly illuminated aspect of historical letter writing into relation with the stage letters in one or more Shakespearean plays. In previous studies, including Letterwriting in Renaissance England, co-authored with Heather Wolfe, Alan Stewart has been a key player in opening up the field of English epistolary culture, and this new book further advances our knowledge about the material culture of letter writing in early modern England. At the same time, in exploring stage letters in relation to the material culture of historical letters, it provides a fresh perspective on some of Shakespeare's most welltraveled works.
Given that 111 letters - by Stewart's count - appear onstage in Shakespeare's plays, it is astonishing that this is the first book to make Shakespeare's letters its main subject. Once one sees how fertile Stewart's approach proves in illuminating Shakespeare's engagement with early modern cultures of literacy and communication and providing new insights into the dynamics of particular scenes and plot trajectories, one wonders why earlier scholars found the topic largely unproductive. Often, it was assumed that real letters and stage letters were disconnected, with the latter owing more to theatrical convention than to life. Or, in the poststructuralist era, stage letters sometimes served as opportune vehicles for deconstructive performances. Beyond that, there was the disappointing fact that no actual correspondence by Shakespeare survives, making his own engagement in epistolary culture seem a non-starter as a route into reading epistles in his plays. Indeed, Stewart makes precisely that disappointment the starting point for his absorbing storytelling. He crafts the book's beginning out of some tantalizing accounts of historical "discoveries" of Shakespeare's letters or seals (none of which turn out to be authentic). Then, when we are quite certain that there is no place to go with Shakespeare's "real" correspondence, Stewart later bases a stunning chapter on letter carriers in Henry IV Part One and Elizabethan England on the non-delivery of an existing historical letter written by Richard Quiney to William Shakespeare!
The general argument of the book is that the vast...