Michael P. Jensen: The Battle of the Bard: Shakespeare on U. S. Radio in 1937 (Recreational Shakespeare Series). Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2018.

• Edward Pechter

In 1937, America’s two “leading media companies,” CBS and NBC, engaged in a “Battle of the Bard,” fighting “over which had the better claim to Shakespeare,” and Michael P. Jensen’s interesting and engagingly written book sets out to “explore” this “episode” in the context of “US cultural history.” As Jensen’s Introduction argues, radio was a mass medium, with an impact and reach equivalent to television later on or to the internet today, so this affair is a matter of real consequence. Moreover, since “there have been more audio productions of Shakespeare than film and television productions combined,” Jensen can claim that the field is “the neglected corner of Shakespeare performance scholarship,” offering his book as a corrective “example of just how interesting and rewarding the study of Shakespeare audio can be.”