William Baker is Trustee Professor, Distinguished Research
Professor, Department of English and University Libraries, at
Northern Illinois University, USA. He is the author/editor of
numerous books and his co-authored Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical
History and his The Letters of Wilkie Collins were honoured by
Choice as the year's most outstanding books (2006 and 2000).
WILLIAM BAKER is Professor, Department of English, and Professor,
University Libraries, at Northern Illinois University. His previous
books include Recent Work in Critical Theory, 1989-1995: An
Annotated Bibliography (1996), Twentieth-Century Bibliography and
Textual Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography (2000), and A
Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002), all available from
Greenwood Press. He also coedited The Letters of Wilkie Collins
(1999), and has been awarded a National Endowment for the
Humanities Fellowship for 2002-2003 to edit another three volumes
of Wilkie Collins's letters. Brian Vickers is a Fellow of the
British Academy and a Distinguished Senior Fellow in The School of
Advanced Study, University of London.
"'Shakespeare, the Critical Tradition' is an immensely useful and
important series. As Vickers states, scholarship is in danger of
losing the criticism of the previous 150 years because of the
amount of modern criticism and the rejection of previous schools of
criticism. By bringing together scholarly and performance-based
essays from 1775 to 1939, Baker and Vickers assure that this will
not happen to the rich and varied history of The Merchant of
Venice, and their choices are uniformly excellent...Summing up:
Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general
readers." - Choice, March 2006
*Choice*
"Shakespeare, the Critical Tradition" is an immensely useful and
important series. As Vickers states, scholarship is in danger of
losing the criticism of the previous 150 years because of the
amount of modern criticism and the rejection of previous schools of
criticism. By bringing together scholarly and performance-based
essays from 1775 to 1939, Baker and Vickers assure that this will
not happen to the rich and varied history of The Merchant of
Venice, and their choices are uniformly excellent. However, this
reviewer was quite disappointed with Vickers's preface, which is
strongly biased. In a collection such as this, works should be
allowed to stand on their own. Vickers instead argues openly and
strenuously not only for reading Shylock as a comic villain but
also for the claim that one does great damage to the play and to
Shakespeare by attempting any other reading. This presumes a
specific view of Shakespeare, plays, and characters in general, and
a point of criticism with which many readers will not agree. The
strident preface may stop some from discovering the riches
contained in the rest of the volume. Summing Up: Recommended.
Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general
readers."
*Choice Reviews.online*
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