Also in the November 7 TLS (belatedly on my desk) is a review of Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist , in which Erne challenges the popularly accepted notion that Shakespeare was writing for viewers rather than readers. He shows that plays were being written for publication in Shakespeare’s time, and were considered equal to other forms of literature for reading purposes. He speculates too that the published plays of Shakespeare are too long to have fit into the “two... Read more

A review of Jeffrey Knapp’s Shakespeare’s Tribe in the November 7 TLS begins with the comment that Elizabethan dramatists approached their work with a missionary aim: “Countering the fears of religious commentators who believed acting to be nothing more than hypocrisy, this approach admitted the element of deception in theatre but saw dramatic entertainment as a way of cozening the viewer into religion and morality. It went hand in hand with the idea that communal festivity was beneficial to society,... Read more

An interesting summary of the work of Nobel-prize winner J.M. Coetzee in the December 8 issue of The Weekly Standard . The reviewer, Michael Kochin, suggests that Coetzee, who is both an academic critic and a novelist, poses unique challenges to Western intellectuals, whether postmodern multiculturalists or conservative classicists. Kochin summarizes: “Coetzee is a disturbing writer because he excavates the lost possibilities of the Western tradition only to extinguish the hopes that we have wrongly placed in Western high culture.... Read more