In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature Edited by Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster
Book Review
Also distributed by Associated University Presses is a book on G[wynne] Blakemore Evans. His scholarly career spanned more than 60 years. It is celebrated (with a bibliography of all his publications, including reviews by him of the works of others) in the Festschrift edited by Thomas Moisan (St. Louis) and Douglas Bruster (Texas at Austin) and called In the Company of Shakespeare (US $57.50). Evans is a scholar much loved by his students and peers and if you have not yet looked at his collection do so now because the contributors are a distinguished group who rise to this important occasion. They are William H. Bond (Harvard, emeritus), Heather Dubrow (Wisconsin at Madison), Marjorie Garber (Harvard), Brian Gibbins (Münster), Scott Paul Gordon (Lehigh), Jonathan Hart (Alberta), Frederick Kiefer (Arizona), John L. Klause (Hofstra), Vincent F. Petronella (Massachusetts at Boston, emeritus), Marvin Spevack (formerly of Münster and remembered for his studies of the Shakespeare scholar and bibliophile James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips), J.J.M Tobin (Massachusetts, Harbor Campus), Helen Vendler (Harvard), Robert N. Watson (UCLA), and Bruce W. Young (Brigham Young). These experts are not all limited to the field of Shakespeare and The Renaissance but all of them reflect the high standards and broad interests of Evans. This is a first-class anthology. I seem to recall having mentioned this before in these chroniques but at this time I want to make certain you read this book. I repeat myself. Also, I want to use the occasion to comment on the fact that anthologies of all kinds need more focus, a variety but also a high standard of contributors, and usually only a single editor, preferably not a member of the younger faculty but a distinguished scholar who can generate important contributions and tie them together with an introduction that is substantial, not just dashed off (or simply summarizing the contents). We need collections that add up to more than the sum of the pieces and that do not simply print articles that could have been better placed in the learned journals (and actually benefit from being read together), if indeed acceptable in the journals where scholars would expect to find them. We need higher standards of inclusion and editing in anthologies. We need to limit printed proceedings of conferences to those that are actually of interest to the scholarly community and not just to the participants. We need fewer repetitive collections on topics of the day and occasional representative collections selected from runs of journals that are not widely available and which (in the view of a capable editor) need to be pulled together and made available in one volume. And we need to distinguish between good and bad anthologies—for academic promotion purposes those that can legitimately count for the editor as a book—and devise some credit system that will be fair to articles in an anthology and articles in refereed learned journals. Finally, most anthologies these days are unnecessary. This one for Evans is not unnecessary, either as honor or scholarship. It is exemplary.
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Photograph courtesy of Louise Dell-Bene Stahl © 2001