The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy. Ed. Heather Hirschfeld (Oxford Handbooks). Oxford University Press, 2018.

• David Ellis

Impossible as it is to discriminate between the thirty-three contributors to this book in a short review, I shall try instead to comment on its rationale as set out in the editor’s Introduction. Hirschfeld notes that, in recent years, commentary on Shakespeare’s comedies has been reconfigured “under the influence of theories and methodologies including Marxism, Russian formalism, structuralist linguistics and anthropology, semiotics, Foucauldian historiography, New Historicism and materialism, and feminism”. Her ambition is to add what she calls “critical semantics” to this list. As far as I can see, which is not very far given that the description offered is frustratingly brief, this means focussing on certain key terms that can serve as indices of a period’s “explicit values and internal contradictions”, and Hirschfeld takes as an example Shakespeare’s use of “encounter” in four mildly different contexts. The encounters she then goes on to evoke are mainly with non-European cultures, so that one might reasonably expect the contributions which are to follow to be heavily weighted in favour of postcolonial studies (as her footnotes to this section of her introduction certainly are). That this is very far from being the case means she is often made to seem like a member of the vanguard who strides boldly forward without looking to see how many of the troops are following behind.