This edition has much to recommend it for classroom use, including insightful introductory commentary on the play’s relationship to “Farce, City Comedy and Romance,” and four appendices. The appended material analyzes the use of proverbial language in the play, and provides superb contextual materials including extracts from the 1688 Gesta Grayorum, William Warner’s 159 translation of Plautus’s Menaechmi, and extracts from Acts and Ephesians from the 1560 Geneva Bible. The notes are rich in detail, often providing an additional wealth of commentary in their own right.

Because Stage Directions in Hamlet consists of fourteen essays (plus an introduction by the editor, Hardin Aasand, and an afterword by Eric Rasmussen) it will be impossible to comment on all of the essays in detail here. “Stage Directions” is a term and concept with multivalent meanings in this collection, a fact that is not so well articulated in Aasand’s introductory essay as it might have been. In the essays that follow, “Stage Directions” are not limited to the rather literal treatment Aasand gives them in his introduction. Divided into three sections – Editing, Staging, Envisioning – the majority of the essays do not engage stage directions in a literal sense at all and in fact are more often connected by their interest in the tensions produced by textual variants between Q1, Q2, and F. While in some essays these variants specifically reside in explicit or embedded stage directions, more of the essays analyze other textual variants, often with concerns for the potential effects these variations might have on performance.

The essays by June Schlueter and James P. Lusardi (on Ophelia’s entrances and exits) and Bernice W. Kliman (on explicit stage directions and graphics), and the four-page note by George Walton Williams (on exits) are the most focused and sustained treatments of stage directions in the literal sense Aasand suggests in the introduction. Curiously, two out of three of the essays “especially commissioned for the volume” move on the farthest from the volume’s stated intention. This is particularly true of James Hirsh’s essay on “Hamlet’s Stage Directions to the Players.” Hirsh sees Hamlet’ direction as a harangue and proof, along with other details, that Hamlet is an unrepentant lout. Hirsh’s opening setup for this is anachronistic, inviting the reader to “imagine how members of the Royal Shakespeare Company would feel if Prince Charles stopped by one day to instruct them on the craft of acting” (47). Hirsh puts too much of the modern in early modern. Shakespeare and his fellow shareholders were, to an extent, the first generation of professional players. If, as Hirsh further invites us to imagine, “some aristocrat showed up at the Globe to give [Shakespeare and Burbage] a few pointers,” they might well have been grateful and likely flattered. If that aristocrat were someone like, say, Sir Philip Sidney, they might well have been honored. Sidney, for one, knew something of performance.

The third section, on “Envisioning the Stage Directions,” wanders perhaps farthest afield from what a reader might expect of the volume based on its introduction. However, the two essays by Frank Nicholas Clary and Alan R. Young on pictorial representations of specific moments in the play provide an excellent foundation for the detailed exploration of stage directions (explicit and embedded) in the graveyard scene Aasand provides in his concluding essay.

In his afterword, Eric Rasmussen asserts that a general disregard of stage directions by editors and critics has led to institutionalized prejudice. While this claim may have some support, given that stage directions do not officially count in the line numbering of modern editions and the far more intrusive treatment of stage directions by editors, I am inclined to think that Rasmussen doth protest too much. Rasmussen claims that the essays in this collection “collectively call for a radically new focus on the original stage directions in the early texts of Shakespeare’s works: and that “this book will prove “essential reading” (9) for a “broad range of readers” (10), this strikes me as an inflated claim. Aasand perhaps needed to qualify that the “students of Renaissance theater” and the “students of Shakespeare” (10) for whom these essays will be essential reading will necessarily be quite advanced students. The more obvious, if more narrow, audience that Aasand rightly identifies is “those engaged in theatrical productions” and textual scholars” (10). Indeed, the latter are perhaps engaged in theatrical productions” and “textual scholars” (10). Indeed, the latter are perhaps the most obvious audience as eight of the eighteen contributors are themselves currently involved in editing Shakespearean play texts (including the two coeditors of the forthcoming Arden 3 Hamlet - Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor – and three of the team-members working on the MLA New Variorum Hamlet).

The essays collected here are universally thought-provoking, well written, and insightful. They succeed collectively (some more so than others) in exploring stage directions as “sites of contested interpretations” (10). While these essays clearly have cohesive interconnections, more thought needed to be given to the collection’s title and the introductory expression of its organizing impetus. This collection of essays will not become essential reading for all undergraduate Shakespeare courses. It should, however, become required reading for textual editors of Shakespeare’s scripts; and theater practitioners looking to draw on outstanding scholarly investigations of a little-talked-about aspect of the tensions between page and stage would likewise be well advised to take on the many valuable insights offered here.