About FDU Press

The annual publication, Shakespeare Studies, now in its 29th year is now established as one of the major international Shakespeare journals. Under the expert editorship of J. Leeds Barroll, aided and abetted by a very persuasive Reviews editor, Susan Zimmerman, the journal has gone through a number of transformations in an attempt to ensure that its concerns remain up-to-date despite the inevitable time lapse between submission and publication of material. Some three years ago Barroll and Zimmerman introduced the innovative concept of the 'review article' in which the work of significant Shakespeare scholars might be appraised in relation to a topic of current interest. In Volume 29, for example, Paul Whitfield White expertly evaluates the scholarly work now emerging on "Playing Companies and the Drama of the 1580s" drawing together in an exemplary critical debate a number of pertinent issues, such as Shakespeare's relationship with the Queen's Men (p.273), the performance conditions in Court Theatres, (pp.274-5), and the contribution of the professional actor to the development of the inner life of dramatic characters (p.280). Such innovations counterbalance the perennial conflict between the reviewer's desire for prolixity and the editor's insistence upon adherence to word limits. One further innovation, that is clearly an attempt to convey a sense of ongoing debate, despite the constraints of print, is the introduction of the 'symposium' format. Volume 28 contains a series of short focused statements on 'Material Culture' introduced by Peter Stallybrass. There are some 21 short contributions collected under three headings: 'Material Texts', 'Clothes, Properties, Textiles', and 'Languages of Materiality'. The list of contributors reads like a Who's Who of North American Shakespeare Studies, and the range of detail is impressive, but what this symposium--which functions here like a conference in print--lacks is a clear and rigorous interrogation of the concept of 'materiality' itself. There is, however, some finely observed empirical detail that various contributors use as the basis of some sophisticated arguments; Lena Cowen Orlin's "The Secret History of Richard Bellasis", or Patricia Parker's "Murder in Guyana", or Stephen Orgel's "The Art of the Lacuna", but only in the section on 'Languages of Materiality' (with distinguished contributions by Margretta de Grazia and Jonathan Goldberg in particular) does the debate begin to consider its own theoretical underpinnings. Any reader, however, wishing to avail themselves of a series of examples of what Patricia Fumerton has recently called 'The New New Historicism' would do well to work through this first symposium. As a stimulus to further thought it is exemplary, but as a reflection on a practice it is deficient in that the concepts of the 'material' and 'materialism' are often fudged, and the boundaries between 'matter' and 'representation' prove to be inexplicably porous. Volume 29 returns to a refinement already tried and tested in previous issues of the journal, the 'forum'. In what is now the fifth Forum, chaired by Bruce Smith entitled 'Body Work' the debate is more clearly in evidence. Beginning with Alan Dessen's solid account of "The Body of Stage Directions", and moving through "Between the Lines: Bodies/languages/Times" (James R. Siemon), "The Body and its Passions" (Gail Kern Paster), "Bodies in the Audience" (Cynthia Marshall), "The Body and Geography" (John Gillies), the forum reaches a conclusion that is both interrogative ("Whose Body?" (Jyotsna Singh)) and combative ("Body Problems" (Dympna Callaghan)). Under Smith's expert 'chairmanship' this forum manages cleverly to question effectively the practices on display in the earlier Stallybrass symposium, and thereby to sustain the debate across two volumes, something for which the judicious editor should also take some creadit. It remains to be seen how the format of the symposium will develop in the journal, but the Forum is now an established form that combines the dynamism of interaction with the necessary process of reflection.