Essaying Shakespeare chronicles the critical acumen of Karen Newman across the past quarter century of Shakespearean criticism. It brings together published essays, some seminal to Shakespeare studies, alongside three new essays that provide a prolegomenon to current directions in the field. A personal scholarly retrospective, the collection also serves as an index to major trends in early modern studies from the poststructuralist turn, gender studies, cultural materialism, race theory, and new historicism to globalization.

The eleven-essay collection traces a trajectory of reading Shakespeare from multiple critical perspectives. As it does so, it implicitly dismantles Harold Bloom's claim of a universal Shakespeare who transcends vested cultural interests. Rendered explicit in her essay on “Charactery,” which offers a blistering riposte to Bloom's “self-indulgent and self-satisfied” psychologizing Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (111), Newman locates Shakespeare's continued appeal not in the personality of his characters but in his characters, whom she reads as a sum of their textuality; their enduring impact results from the effects of their language (rather than any essential interiority) and our ever-shifting understanding of how we read their words.

Indeed, central to Newman's work is language as a medium and marker of different kinds of social exchange. Attentive to its nuances through all of her readings of Shakespeare's plays, she follows how linguistic labor reveals contradictions in Elizabethan society—from its sex/gender relations and its racial prejudice to its class anxieties. In her seminal essay “Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew,” for instance, Newman argues that the play foregrounds gender relations as culturally constructed by making those constructions accessible to us as audience through narrative. Similarly, in “Myrrha's Revenge: Ovid and Shakespeare's Reluctant Adonis” and “Portia's Ring: Gender, Sexuality, and Theories of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” Newman traces how language—and specifically its performative, dramatic qualities—becomes a strategy for ensuring hierarchical gender relations.

Language, in Newman's reading, also functions crucially in the erection of racial and class prejudice. In “‘And Wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,” she demonstrates how what she calls “rhetorical miscegenation” (42) serves through its chiasmus of semantic antithesis to ally the play's linked oppositions between black and white, male and female, with all of their cultural associations. Even clothing, that most material of Renaissance theatrical props, in Newman's “Sartorial Economies and Suitable Style: The Anonymous Woodstock and Shakespeare's Richard II” is shown to play an important symbolic linguistic role as a class marker making sartorial extravagance equal to treason.

Newman's attention to Elizabethan linguistic nuance gets forwarded into modern contemporary debates about the canon and Shakespeare's place in it as what she terms “the gold standard” of cultural capital. In “Cultural Capital's Gold Standard: Shakespeare and the Critical Apostrophe in Renaissance Studies,” she engages the theories of John Guillory and Pierre Bourdieu to analyze critics’ relationship to Shakespeare. Taking the critically neglected Timon of Athens as her case study, she shows how the play itself anticipates different economies of value as tied to linguistic performance. The play functions on an economy of words using the trope of apostrophe to give and receive, thus displacing value from the material to the verbal, making it akin to academic discourse that too depends on knowledge and canons of reading for its status.

Two other chapters, “Hayman's Missing Hamlet” and “Ghostwriting: Hamlet and Claude Chabrol's Ophélia,” turn from the verbal to the visual to examine renderings of Shakespeare's works in drawing and on film. Newman's interest in the reception history of Shakespeare's plays anticipates her attention to the reception of Shakespeare by other cultures, notably the French. “Englishing the Other: ‘Le tiers exclu’ and Shakespeare's Henry V” and the final new essay, “French Shakespeare: Dryden, Vigny's Othello, and British Cultural Expansion,” show Newman's interest in cultural globalization. Her work on the French reception of the quintessentially English Shakespeare asks critics to rethink claims about cultural translation and globalization as modern phenomena.

Essaying Shakespeare covers many dominant trends that have shaped Shakespeare studies. Newman herself notes, however, that omissions are inevitable. The “new boredom” study of print and textual culture, for instance, is missing from her critical repertoire, as is any attention to religious controversy, both major forces in recent early modern studies. Thus, although not a comprehensive guide to work on Shakespeare, the collection does provide a significant map of its evolving focus. The book, a useful companion to graduate and undergraduate studies, invites readers to think meta-critically by showing how the central questions of analysis constantly change, holding up a mirror not to nature but to culture.