An introduction to Shakespeare seems to perform a comically unnecessary task. If ever someone literally needed no introduction, William Shakespeare would seem to qualify. His plays are performed throughout the world on a daily basis, those plays and his poems are widely read and are staples of education in all English-speaking countries, and references to Shakespeare and his works occur frequently in popular culture. But many of the assumptions in general circulation about Shakespeare are, alas, misleading or wrong. As a result, an introduction to his works can serve the valuable function of replacing such assumptions with accurate information and more sophisticated perspectives. It would be more accurate to call a book with this function a reintroduction to Shakespeare. The first of the texts under review accomplishes this goal intermittently; the second does so with greater consistency.

Emma Smith's volume contains sections on characterization, performance, textual history, language, dramatic structure, sources, and history. (It is odd that a general introduction to Shakespeare, however brief, does not include even one paragraph on the sonnets.) Some of her comments about characterization are unconvincing. Smith argues that Shakespeare undermines Hamlet's uniqueness by setting up parallels between his situation and those of other characters. But similarities between two characters do not erase differences, and differences between other characters and Hamlet are vividly dramatized. Smith goes on to assert that Laertes, Ophelia, and other characters “represent attributes of Hamlet” and that they “are in his head” (15). But Laertes and Ophelia are themselves far too complex to represent mere attributes of Hamlet, and each displays traits that cannot plausibly be attributed to Hamlet. Smith turns the play into a solipsistic “psychomachia” (16). In another passage, she gives a muddled explanation of soliloquies: “in the context of the theatre there is no possibility of being alone: even these private moments are observed by, and perhaps therefore articulated for, an audience” (18). Smith naively confuses the actor with the character portrayed by that actor. An actor performing in front of an audience is obviously not alone, but the character portrayed by that actor may be alone in the fictional, hypothetical world depicted in the play. That the actor obviously speaks in order to be heard by playgoers does not “perhaps therefore” or in any way entail the notion that the character speaks to be heard by playgoers. None of the Shakespearean characters most famous for their soliloquies (Richard III, Hamlet, Iago, and Macbeth) ever acknowledge the presence of playgoers, and the soliloquies of each contain numerous markers of self-addressed speech. Smith turns the most private kind of speech (in which a character addresses only himself, perhaps to talk himself into believing or doing something) into public oratory (in which a character attempts to persuade a multitude of strangers to share his point of view).

Smith's chapter on history creates the impression that Shakespeare was a simple conduit for the prejudices of others. She quotes racist comments that occur in writings by Queen Elizabeth I, Leo Africanus, George Peele, and Thomas Dekker as if these passages somehow prove that Shakespeare “endorses” racial stereotypes (153). But to assume that all people who lived in a past age thought alike is itself a form of stereotyping. Evidence in Shakespeare's own works indicates that he did not share the racist views of some of his contemporaries. Rather than endorsing Iago's racism, for example, Shakespeare dramatized it as despicable.

Fortunately, Smith's book also contains much valuable material. Instead of apologizing for the difficulties of Shakespeare's language, Smith demonstrates by means of well-selected examples that, at least to a thoughtful person, these difficulties can be stimulating. Many people assume that difficulties they encounter in reading Shakespeare's works are simply the result of changes in the English language since his time, but as Smith rightly points out, Shakespeare's language “must have been knotty and difficult for playgoers” in his own time (72) because characters often employ unconventional metaphors and intricate syntax. Correcting other common misconceptions, she explains that “prose isn’t always associated with lower-class characters” (81) and that prose can be as artful as poetry. Smith alerts readers that, in some dramatic episodes, “what is important … is not … the intrinsic connotations of either blank verse or prose, but the arresting interplay between them” (83). In her chapter on “Structure,” Smith provides illuminating discussions of “juxtapositional ironies” (106) in Shakespeare's plays. In Henry V the king eloquently laments that a monarch cannot “sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,” who with a “vacant mind … / Sleeps in Elysium” (4.1.241–47). The current Prince of Wales has asserted that this account of the awesome burdens of a prince is among his favorite passages in Shakespeare's works. But, as Smith notes, the context indicates that Henry's soliloquy is not only subjective but self-deluding, self-flattering, and elitist. The passage occurs immediately after Henry's encounter with some of his soldiers. Their astute comments are clearly not the product of “vacant” minds; their insistence on thinking for themselves belies the term “slave,” and, rather than sleeping in Elysium, they are kept awake by doubts that the war in which the king has enlisted them to fight may not be just.

In the introduction to her Introduction, Janette Dillon points out discrepancies between Shakespeare's tragedies and Aristotle's generalizations about the genre of tragedy in the Poetics. Shakespeare was an “experimental” artist engaged throughout his career in an “ongoing testing of tragic form” (5, 6). Dillon quotes Stephen Booth's insight that one feature Shakespeare's tragedies have in common is that they provide playgoers with an experience of “indefinition,” a frightening and yet exhilarating confrontation with “the limits of human understanding” (King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy, quoted in Dillon, 4). In chapter 1, Dillon provides an excellent brief account of English tragedies before Shakespeare. Those plays exhibit both classical influences (most notably Seneca) and native, medieval influences (e.g., morality plays and poetic narratives about the high and mighty brought low). Philip Sidney objected to the mixture of comedy and tragedy in English plays of his time and the “mingling of clowns and kings” (Apology for Poetry, quoted in Dillon, 16), but Sidney wrote before Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare demonstrated that such mingling could increase rather than dissipate dramatic intensity.

In each of the remaining ten chapters, Dillon focuses on a single tragedy. She deftly balances discussions of features that a play shares with other tragedies and discussions of features that make the play distinctive. By sensibly focusing on only a small selection of issues, she avoids misleading generalizations and has room to provide close analyses of particular episodes. In her chapter on Titus Andronicus, she expresses agreement with the general critical view that “excess of violence operates in tension with a highly patterned formality” (29), but she also notes that the play contains moments of “simple intimacy and directness” (36). Countless allusions to Romeo and Juliet in popular culture make the play seem sentimental. Dillon's chapter provides a useful corrective by showing that the play actually dramatizes “conflicting ways of seeing the world” and that among these is the “cynical, knowing dismissal of love” (46–47). Citing Coppélia Kahn, Dillon explains that in Julius Caesar Shakespeare “destabilises the gendered concept of virtue” by dramatizing Portia's possession of the supposedly masculine traits of courage and endurance of pain. The chapter on Hamlet focuses on Shakespeare's daring juxtapositions of “modes of dramaturgy” (64), including realism and self-conscious theatricality, seriousness and farce, and ritual and parody. The graveyard scene presents “a sequence of different perspectives on death” (69). In her analysis of the character of Othello, Dillon focuses on his often “rhythmic, lyrical, persuasive” language, his “rhetorical fashioning of events” whereby (after Iago arouses his jealousy) he deceives himself into believing that his murder of Desdemona is a ritual sacrifice (88). Dillon shows how Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's least-regarded tragedy, both employs and transforms elements of the allegorical morality drama of an earlier period. The Lear chapter focuses on the play's frequent and sometimes abrupt alternations between depictions of humane behavior and depictions of inhumane behavior, between quasi-pastoral and antipastoral motifs, and between hope and despair. Dillon argues effectively that Macbeth, although a monster, is nevertheless a tragic figure whose “tragedy is to know so clearly how he has failed as a man” (125). In Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare adopted a risky strategy to elicit ambivalent responses to the title characters. Their almost relentless, self-conscious role playing is often engaging but sometimes becomes awkwardly “stagy” or even “embarrassing” (136). Shakespeare's last tragedy, Coriolanus, is also set in the ancient Roman world, but as Dillon explains, the title character of that play is radically different from Antony and Cleopatra in that he “loathes the very idea of performance” (150). Dillon does not include chapters on plays that qualify as both tragedies and history plays (e.g., Richard III) and that presumably will be dealt with in a future Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's History Plays.

Dillon's frequent references to post-Renaissance stage and film versions of the plays serve at least two important functions. They are reminders that, in order to understand some particular moments in Shakespeare's tragedies, a reader of the play must visualize the implied stage action. References to performance history also serve to differentiate elements of a particular production that enact features of Shakespeare's script from elements of a production that alter Shakespeare's script in order to serve a new and different artistic purpose. The appearance of this review in a journal devoted to British culture is a useful reminder that, although Shakespeare's works have appealed to playgoers and readers around the world, they were created within the specific culture of a certain island off the northwest coast of Europe.