David Scott Kastan

Published to accompany an exhibit this spring at Yale's Beinecke Library, Remembering Shakespeare (Yale University Press, 2012) is everything a good exhibition catalog should be: short, but thorough; well-designed, and pleasurable to read and to look at. If I can, I certainly hope I'll be able to get to New Haven and view the show in person, but this excellent catalog will serve as a good stand-in should that prove impossible.

David Scott Kastan and Kathryn James have encapsulated the exhibit show more well, highlighting not just the major themes, but also the fact that this is an exhibit about Shakespeare at Yale, not just Shakespeare at the Beinecke. Items from the collections of the Elizabethan Club, the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, the Lewis Walpole Center, and the Yale Center for British Art are also on display, and their inclusion makes for a much richer, more satisfying experience.

The short chapters are well-written and crisp; there's not a superfluous word, and as it should the text continues to return to the main theme, on the very different ways Shakespeare has been "remembered" over the centuries. The illustrations are reproduced very well, and the overall design is attractive. A great success; if the exhibit comes anywhere near the high quality of the catalog, I'm sure it's just as much worth viewing as the book is worth reading.

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The book consists of twenty six essays by various contributors and its aim according to the editors is to provide the most comprehensive account of early English drama. It has been labelled as new because it also intends to summarise the current state of knowledge and to banish some myths that have been in existence since the 1930’s. This book was published in 1997 and so there might be time now for an even newer History of Early English Drama.

By the very nature of the book the essays are show more topic driven rather than a chronological history. For the most part the essays are well written; not too academic and many contain interesting details that cumulatively work to give a good impression of early English drama. I tend to think of early English drama as pre-Shakespeare and I was pleased to see many essays based on the origins of stage plays, before there were any permanent theatres. For example there are essays on; The English church as a theatrical space, staging at the universities, entertainments at court and private functions as well as streets and markets and the tableaus that were produced for Royal events (Wonderful Spectacles). There were also good essays on the building and design of early London theatres and how they were financed, as well as an examination of the theatre goers and the popularity of the plays. However once the essays started to focus on the permanent stage theatres, then many of the examples of productions and other staging issues tended to relate mainly to Shakespeare. Of course there has been much research on the staging and production of Shakespeare’s plays and so there is much to draw on to provide examples, but I was hoping that he would not appear so often in some these essays as he did.

There are a group of essays around the topics of manuscripts, revisions of scripts and the publication of play books and this is where the myth busters have gone to work. Sir Walter Wilson Greg’s theories on the authorship of manuscripts, publishing and the demand for play books, which seem to have held sway since the 1930’s come in for some serious criticism, so much so that it would appear that the whole subject has been sidetracked by him for a considerable number of years and have resulted in critics going off at tangents in unearthing issues of skullduggery by various patrons, printers and playwrights based on Greg’s research. The essays in this book expose the flaws in Greg’s theories and do a good job in setting the record straight as well as making the point that intellectual property was not the issue in the 16th century that it has become today. Plays were written, revised, sometimes rewritten by more than one author, it was how it worked when the issue was all about making the play fit for a production or a new revision.

I enjoyed the book and it has provided me with some essential background for some projected reading of 16th century drama, which after all was the jewel in the crown of the English Renaissance. I am not so sure about the title ‘A New History’, perhaps a revised history would be nearer the mark. Still an interesting and informative read and so 4 stars. show less

The best thing about this book might be the cover, which is beautiful. David Scott Kastan is clearly a guy who likes to hear himself talk; it is unclear exactly what "with Stephen Farthing" means... presumably as "an artist" he brought some technical expertise in colors and painting. Is it fair to downgrade a book because it didn't give me what I was hoping for, instead of judging it for how well it does what the author(s) intended to do? (The eternal reviewer's dilemma.) According to the show more jacket blurb, the book "investigate[s] color from numerous perspectives: literary, historical, cultural, anthropological, philosophical, art historical, political, and scientific." That's an awful lot for a book clocking in at just over 200 small-format pages, and definitely too much to deliver more than a pretty superficial skim of the subjects. Arranged in chapters each devoted to a particular color, they can be read (the author assures us) in any order. Which means there is no arc, no building, no synthesis, and a fair amount of repetition (including rather too much about artist Yves Klein and his famous blue, who I'm thinking must be a particular favorite of Farthing's?). The chapter on green spends a lot of words on how red and blue became codes for political leanings... so, all right, maybe the intent is to hang each chapter on a conceptual hook, rather than focusing on the actual color? Well, not really. Kastan is good at library (or internet) research, and cheerfully marshals lots of anecdotes and examples - many of which are interesting - in a chatty tone that too often veers into cute, punny, smart-aleck asides. The best chapter is the one on the color (or non-color) white, as he chooses to weave Moby Dick well into it, and as a literary scholar, this is what he's best at. Overall, though, the book reads more like a conglomeration of Wikipedia content processed with his own random ruminations and commentary. And yes, "The Dress" is mentioned (with photos) - but with very little serious examination or explication. Disappointing. show less

Kastan's work was an excellent companion to The Book of William. I read them one after the other and found Kastan's to be the more theoretically grounded, which makes sense for the type of publication (i.e. academic).
Shakespeare and the Book focuses on the textual history of the plays. The materiality of their production and circulation is brought to the fore. The research is solid and there is little that stood out as a revelation after reading Collins. However, Kastan was writing earlier show more and has more formal notes and an index.
Kastan can be repetitive at times, but I think that part of this is explained by the newness of his argument. It is relatively new to consider the physicality of early modern works. The focus has been aesthetic and literary rather than practical or material. Kastan points out that aesthetic work is liable to faulty and anachronistic logic when it fails to proceed from a grounding in how the text under consideration came into being. He does not argue against aesthetic work, but rather hopes to reorient it from a platonic concept of the authorial intention or textual perfection marred by others (e.g. printers, publishers, adapters).
The book is quite short (only 137 pages of text) and left me wanting more examples and examination. There are a number of title page reproductions, which help make the argument clearer (except in instances when Kastan treats a title page that he does not reproduce).
I did have some serious reservations about Kastan's fourth section. He writes about the shift from print to electronic texts and seems to have a wide-eyed naivete about the possibilities of electronic media. I was taken aback by his assertion that "there is no technological reason why it (the e-book) cannot approximate 'the charming little clothy box'" (114) of a book. While Kastan is otherwise clearly theoretically grounded in his argument he seemingly uncritically accepts that an "approximation" is both possible and equally desirable. He does talk about desire and fetishization of the book, which I agree undoubtedly occurs (I am not always immune) but his argument in part IV has a serious flaw: Kastan never discusses preservation. He has one sentence about the issue: "The issue of how long sites will be maintained, like the related issue of how compatible the always improving technolgies will be with the one they render obsolete, is an important one for thinking about the electronic environment as an alternative to so-called 'hard copy'" (131). In the next paragraph, however, this concern is merely a "caveat." Kastan is absolutely convincing in his discussion of the approaches to Shakespeare scholarship but his work (of 2001) seems overly willing to accept without critique the ways in which electronic texts are made available and kept available. Digital preservation is in its infancy. He does mention control over sites (with these digital texts) but this is also a "caveat." Rather than exploring in more depth who "owns" Shakespearean texts Kastan simply expounds on the possibilities of hypertext. I share his enthusiasm but also realize that preservation isn't happening. It is barely past the stage of first standards and it is glacially slow, especially compared to the rapid changes in computer hardware and software.
This book is highly recommended for those interested in early modern books, the formation of reputation, the life of texts, and Shakespeare. However, the book is not without its flaws. Given that Kastan repeats (and repeats) that Shakespeare never evinced any interest in publishing his plays, more discussion about the "ownership" of Shakespeare after the 1709 copyright act would be useful. Kastan does mention a great deal about the early stationers and their legal milieu, but he gives little depth as the book progresses beyond the 17th century. show less