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It is something of an academic industry, writing about how Shakespeare is being constantly refashioned to suit the tides of taste. For the years 1660-1682 now we have the thorough and readable Restoration Shakespeare. Seventeen versions of 16 of The Bard's plays are discussed in detail by Barbara A. Murray. Here are imaginative and proto-romantic examples of "viewing the voice", changing Shakespeare's language and even his plots to reflect contemporary concerns. The adaptations were not all by playwrights as talented as Dryden. Dryden appears in portrait of 1695 with texts of Homer, Virgil, and Horace stacked beside him, with laureate leaves on top, either crowning them or boasting of surpassing them, but with the volume of Shakespeare open and Dryden's name on a sort of bookmark. Others far less famous also cut Shakespeare to the fashion of their age. Then there was a kind of hiatus until Cibber's revision of Richard III and other eighteenth-century reworkings of Shakespeare were followed by a return to originals as bardolatroy triumphed and before the films got to work on him in the twentieth century. Shakespeare is indeed for all time--in one form or another. This much-footnoted study demands to be a much-noted study. Recommended.

Bibliothèque D' Humanisme et Renaissance, 2002