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The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents. By Russ McDoNALD. Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996. Pp. xxii + 373. Illus. $35.00 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Reviewed by JoHN D. Cox
Explicitly addressing his book to teachers and their undergraduate students, Russ McDonald offers introductory comments about Shakespeare, his works, and his world in nine densely packed chapters. These he has arranged by subject from the specific to the general-from the man to his society-including authorship, playgoing, text, sources, genres, language, urban and rural life, gender, politics, and religion. Along with his own comments, McDonald provides documents, maps, woodcuts, portraits, and charts that illustrate his comments and to which those comments copiously refer. To assist readers, the table of contents lists the subheadings of each chapter and separately identifies each item of documentation for easy reference. The book is well indexed, and it includes a list of works cited, with full bibliographical information for each entry, in addition to suggestions for further reading in several different categories.
In short, the book presents itself as a thoughtful, learned, and helpful teacher-a "companion," as the title suggests, who is extraordinarily knowledgeable, and who provides access to that knowledge in helpful ways. In the manner of a good teacher, this companion also corrects as well as informs. In three trenchant pages, for example, McDonald offers one of the best corrections I have read of ubiquitous undergraduate oversimplifications about character flaw and catharsis in tragedy (160-62). The teacher of undergraduates who has not faced these repetitious and seemingly ineradicable platitudes is both rare and fortunate: the rest of us will be grateful for these pages.
Coincidentally, the Bedford Companion has been published at about the same time that three important one-volume collections of Shakespeare's complete works have appeared (or reappeared), and teachers deserve to know how the Companion compares to the background information these editions provide. Both David Bevington's introduction to his updated fourth edition (Longman, 1997) and Stephen Greenblatt's introduction to the new Norton edition (1997) compare favorably to Russ McDonald's. Bevington and Greenblatt organize topics differently and include less documentation, but they certainly offer enough to make one hesitate before asking students to buy the Bedford Companion in addition. G....