Shakespeare (Magill's Choice) [Hardcover]

Joseph Rosenblum (Editor), Salem Press (Editor), Christina J. Moose (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

To buy or not to buy, that is the question. For this entry in its Magill's Choice series, Salem has compiled a survey volume exclusively on Shakespeare. It includes a biography that considers Shakespeare as both a dramatist and a poet. This is followed by entries on the plays in alphabetical order, and then the poems. Most of the material is taken from various larger Salem sets, but bibliographies have been updated, and four of the essays, three on poetic works and one on Edward III, just recently attributed to Shakespeare, are new.

The biographical summary is brief but covers Shakespeare's underdocumented life well. The section that considers Shakespeare as a dramatist provides analytical surveys of the history plays, the comedies, the romances, and the tragedies. The overview of Shakespeare's poetry looks briefly at the early poems and focuses on the sonnets. Each of these three sections concludes with a bibliography.

The entries for the plays follow the pattern of the familiar Critical Survey and Masterplots series. Entries range from about five (All's Well That Ends Well) to seven (King Lear) pages. Given their brief length, the volume will give students a broad overview but will not explore themes in any depth. The Hamlet essay, for example, discusses Hamlet's motivations well, but none of the other issues common in students' papers, like Ophelia's role. Each entry is signed and accompanied by a black-and-white illustration, sidebars on famous quotes, and a bibliography. Some of the bibliography items will be at public libraries, but there is some leaning to university press titles. There is no overlap with the bibliography in the back of the book. The poems are handled similarly. Major poems such as A Lover's Complaint and The Rape of Lucrece are handled separately. The sonnets are looked at first in an overview, with 14 given individual entries. The book closes with "A Brief History of Shakespeare Studies," a 50-page bibliography, and character, quotation, and subject indexes.

Libraries with space constraints that do not own the larger Salem sets may want to consider this compact reworking of previous materials. For a similar audience, Gale's Shakespeare for Students [RBB Jl 1 92] and Shakespeare for Students: Book II [RBB S 15 97] cover only 16 frequently assigned plays and no poetry, but the entries are much deeper.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 482 pages
• Publisher: Salem Pr Inc (February 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0893569666
• ISBN-13: 978-0893569662
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,597,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)