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John c. Meagher’s Pursuing Shakespeare’s Dramaturgy: Some Contexts, Resources, and Strategies in His Playmaking pursues what he acknowledges to be an “unfashionable assumption”: “I think that many of Shakespeare’s intentions for the performance of his plays are detectably retrievable from their texts”(p. 9). To retrieve these, he reviews at considerable length much of what we know about the condition of the texts and of the theatrical business within which Shakespeare worked, including matters of printing, orthography, punctuation, stage directions and speech headings, stages, acting styles, playing conditions, the numbers of actors in casts (including doubling), costumes, stage properties, sound and music, arts and crafts of language, and audiences. Along the way he illuminates many moments in the plays when these offer insight into how it was probably staged, and his conclusion is well justified: “From start to finish, he was the dramaturge as much as the poet, and the playmaker rather han the playwright” (p.323). Yet precisely what it proves is difficult to say. There is no study of a whole scene, much less aplay, and it is difficult to see how the assembled information could be translated into a methodology for reading whole texts. We will be more alert historical readers of the plays if we carry this book with us, but how much closer it will take us to Shakespeare’s “intentions” in a wider sense is questionable. Barbara Hodgdon (in Erne and Kidnie’s Textual Performances) is in no doubt that this whole approach should be abandoned: “relinquishing this Globe-al space [i.e., the idea of original staging conditions] would be an initial step towards creating a less restrictive commentary, one attuned to changing spaces and to fluid potentialities of how bodies and texts take on meaning in such spaces” _(pp.216-7).