Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes »

The essays in this collection, divided into two groups, "Shakespeare Performed in his Time" and "Shakespeare Performed in our Time," share a concern, to use Peter Holland's perfectly conceived notion, with the "invoked authorizing presence" of Shakespeare. Many of the contributors--E. A. J. Honigmann, Philip Edwards, M. M. Mahood, G. R. Proudfoot, and Stanley Wells among them--have been, like their colleague Reg Foakes, those most centrally involved in examining, promoting, and sometimes questioning the critical dominance of the stable Shakespeare text, particularly as a result of performance. These essays reflect the current state of Shakespeare study in all its breadth, richness, and diversity. They range from the traditional poetical and theater history inquiries of E. A. J. Honigmann, Peter Davison, and M. M. Mahood, through the bibliographical examinations of Ian Donaldson and Peter Wright and the hermeneutical interpretations of Jonathan Bate, Philip Edwards, and Alexander Leggatt, to the performance, film, and theoretical criticism of John Russell Brown, G. R. Proudfoot, Grace Ioppolo, Michael Hattaway, Carol Chillington Rutter, Alan Brissenden, Marliss Desens, and Peter Holland. The varied and multidisciplined authors of these essays remind us that these old and new fields do not merely co-exist but must work concurrently and interactively.