Shakespeare After All [Hardcover]

Marjorie Garber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 7, 2004

In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber—professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University—gives us a magisterial work of criticism, authoritative and engaging, based on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years. Richly informed by Shakespearean scholarship of the latter half of the twentieth century, this book offers passionate and revealing readings of all thirty-eight of Shakespeare’s plays, in chronological sequence, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen. With erudition lightly carried, Garber illumines the overarching patterns and lush details of the plays, closely attentive to what matters most in Shakespeare: language, theme, plot, and character.

Here are fresh meditations on plays we have come to know and love, such as Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth,
Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest, and fruitful engagements with others not often read or produced—Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3; The Merry Wives of Windsor; King John; Timon of Athens; Pericles; and Cymbeline. Garber affords us a rare chance to trace Shakespeare’s stylistic development as a writer of verse and prose, an artful designer of dramatic scenarios and revelations, a masterly sketcher of woman and man, and a keen observer of society high and low.

Complete with a comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare’s life and times and an extensive bibliography, Shakespeare After All is a landmark work that enlarges our understanding of the most celebrated writer of all time.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

In recent years, Garber, a professor at Harvard, has attracted notice with offbeat work about such subjects as dogs and cross-dressing, but this book—a collection of her lectures on each of Shakespeare's plays—marks a return to the core curriculum. Garber is appealingly undogmatic, deploying insights from textual scholarship, post-colonial theory, and Elizabethan stage history, without being beholden to any single approach. Although she has no blockbuster Bard thesis to prove, her introduction is an exemplary account of what is known about Shakespeare and how his work has been read and regarded through the centuries, while the individual essays display scrupulous and subtle close reading. It is well known that Romeo and Juliet's first lines to each other form a sonnet, but Garber adds that it reverses the Petrarchan tradition of unrequited love: it is "a sonnet that works. It results in a kiss."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Bookmarks Magazine

Remember the last time you read a work of literary criticism and actually understood it? The tide has changed with Shakespeare After All. Forgoing cultural studies jargon for an eclectic approach that draws from gender studies, post-colonial theory, and Elizabethan stage history, Garber focuses on close, erudite readings of the Bard’s work. Comparing her tome to Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), critics agree that Garber is more readable and enjoyable; Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (**** Nov/Dec 2004) will give her a run for the money, however. A few reviewers wondered why Garber omitted discussion of Shakespeare’s sonnets and poems; others criticized the book’s significant length. Yet, until "somebody even smarter than Garber comes along with a 1,200-pager, this is the indispensable introduction to the indispensable writer" (Newsweek).Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1008 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First edition (December 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375421904
• ISBN-13: 978-0375421907
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #231,028 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

170 of 184 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and complete, January 23, 2005

By 

Q (Q Continuum) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shakespeare After All (Hardcover)

I bought this book on the strength of Marjorie Garber's excellent past Renaissance scholarship. I was expecting something more theoretically informed and original, but as it is this is a very worthwhile book, and I predict it will be an essential reference book for teachers and students. It's a BIG book with a substantial chapter on each play (but not the sonnets), as with Harold Bloom's book on Shakespeare. Garber, however, is less idiosyncratic than Bloom; She synthesizes the best of recent scholarship, but without footnotes or extensive theorizing a la Derrida and Lacan. Garber combines close attention to language with valuable historical background and context. For example, in her chapter on Macbeth, she relates a "new critical" analysis of the clothing imagery to sumptuary laws regarding clothing (laws which served to enforce the social hierachy of Renaissance England). The strengths of this book are her comprehensive discussions of the play, which sum up what we know for sure about the plays including the relevant historical contexts, and her brilliant analysis of Shakespeare's language, i.e., close reading. While her work is illuminated by recent scholarship, she avoids the Stalinesque imperatives of political correctness. Compare Garber's intelligent discussion of the problem of gender in Macbeth with Stephen Orgel's "introduction" in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, in which he reductively reads the play as a "misogynist fantasy." The only reason I docked the book one star is that, based on the chapters I've read so far, she doesn't really make a major original contribution to Shakespeare studies (in contrast to, for example, Greenblatt's recent bio of Shakespeare, Will in the World) so much as synthesize what we already know. All in all, a very valuable reference book that I will be consulting regularly in my college teaching. Highly recommended for high school teachers, English majors (undergraduate and graduate), and all fans of Shakespeare.

66 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Invaluable Resource, March 6, 2006

By 

Sara "Sara" (Washington, D.C., District of Columbia USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shakespeare After All (Paperback)

My husband and I are lawyers who have recently returned to reading Shakesepare, decades after college. We wanted literary criticism that was qualitative superior to the plot summary readers guide--criticism that would help us explore the imagery, themes and metaphors of the plays. Marjorie Garber is the answer to our prayers. We recommend to readers returning to Shakespeare that they purchase a paperback edition of each play with good notes to help with line specific language issues--the Arden series is the best-and then supplement/enrich the experience with Garbers insights. It is a pleasure for us to carefully read each play and then see what treasures she has mined based on her own reading and that of prior critics. We considerably prefer Garber to Bloom as a single compendium. Garber packs an enormous amount of insight into a single 30 page chapter. Shakespeare is surely worth the detail she provides. I would also suggest that you purchase the Ambrose DVD set of tapes of the great BBC plays--after you have read the plays it is wonderful to watch Jacobi et al. The DVD format enables captions which is very helful to savoring every line.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last, a real overview of Shakespeare for adults with imaginations, September 26, 2005

By 

Rex Slater (Beaconsfield) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shakespeare After All (Paperback)

This is a wonderful, rich, exploratory book that holds nothing back; a meditation about the Shakespeare canon that resonates in all planes at once. It is certain to be [...] by college teachers everywhere, and so it should be; together with Shapiro's 1599 as a biography and a solid encyclopaedia like the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, this is one of the only supplementary volumes you'd ever want to shelf next to the Complete Works. This is the kind of full-service critical homage and investigation Shakespeare has been waiting for all these years. I hope he and Marjorie Garber meet in Heaven, and that someone leaks the resulting sonnets.