Shakespeare at Stratford. Series edited by Robert Smallwood, Susan Brock, and Russell Jackson. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002; King Richard III. By Gillian Day. xiii + 259 pp. $24.99; Shakespeare at Stratford. Series edited by Robert Smallwood, Susan Brock, and Russell Jackson. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002; The Merchant of Venice. By Miriam Gilbert. xiii + 183 pp. $24.99; Shakespeare at Stratford. Series edited by Robert Smallwood, Susan Brock, and Russell Jackson. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002; The Winter's Tale. By Patricia E. Tatspaugh. xiii + 240 pp. $24.99.

Extract

Scholars preparing production histories of individual Shakespeare plays have long been faced with the challenges of structuring their studies. The scholar can choose to write a straightforward one-actor-or-production-after-another monograph (Rosenberg on Othello, Ripley on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, Bartholomeuz on Macbeth and The Winter's Tale, etc.), a transhistorical encyclopedic scene-by-scene and line-by-line collation (Rosenberg on King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet), a transhistorical interlineated text (Bratton and Hankey's Shakespeare in Production editions, under a variety of different series titles and publishers), or an exemplary-production snapshot album (Mulryne and Bulman's Shakespeare in Performance series).