Book Review: The Definitive Shakespeare Companion: Overviews, Documents, and Analysis

Abstract

This multivolume work is an updated version of The Greenwood Companion to Shakespeare: A Comprehensive Guide for Students (Greenwood, 2005), also edited by Rosenblum. Overviews and the History Plays (vol. 1), The Comedies (vol. 2), The Tragedies (vol. 3), and The Romances and Poetry (vol. 4) make up the set. At 1,987 pages, the updated version is 523 pages longer that its predecessor, with the number of contributors having grown from forty to sixty-two. Six new essays bring the total number to eighty-three. The additions include five- to ten-page overviews in each of the four volumes, a nineteen-page essay by Rosenblum titled “The Authorship Questions,” and a second six-page overview in volume 4 introducing the longer poems. The additional content in many entries reflects scholarship published between 2005 and the publication of the new set, but other books and articles not cited in 2005 but published before that date make up a portion of the newly consulted sources. A comparison of entries in the old and the new reveal major additions to some entries (the entry for Hamlet is considerably longer and cites twenty-six sources, while the 2005 entry cites eleven) and minor additions and changes in word choice in others.