The Shakespearean Forest

Description

The Shakespearean Forest, Anne Barton's final book, uncovers the pervasive presence of woodland in early modern drama, revealing its persistent imaginative power. The collection is representative of the startling breadth of Barton's scholarship: ranging across plays by Shakespeare (including Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, Macbeth, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Timon of Athens) and his contemporaries (including Jonson, Dekker, Lyly, Massinger and Greene), it also considers court pageants, treatises on forestry and chronicle history. Barton's incisive literary analysis characteristically pays careful attention to the practicalities of performance, and is supplemented by numerous illustrations and a bibliographical essay exploring recent scholarship in the field. Prepared for publication by Hester Lees-Jeffries, featuring a Foreword by Adrian Poole and an Afterword by Peter Holland, the book explores the forest as a source of cultural and psychological fascination, embracing and illuminating its mysteriousness.

Anne Barton was the author of Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (1994), Byron: Don Juan (1992), The Names of Comedy (1990), Ben Jonson, Dramatist (1984) and, (as Anne Righter), Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962), as well as many essays and introductions. In 2000, she retired as Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; she had previously been a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Girton College, Cambridge, and was a Fellow of the British Academy. From the 1960s onwards, her work had a profound influence on the Royal Shakespeare Company and the performance and academic study of early modern drama more generally. Anne Barton died in 2013.

'While the book is primarily a testament to Barton's scholarly erudition and keen eye for both stage and page, the foreword (by Adrian Poole), editor's note (Hester Lees-Jeffries) and Holland's afterword make it also a moving testimony to the ideal of pedagogy which Anne Barton represented to those who knew her.' Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, The Times Literary Supplement '... Hester Leer-Jeffries has done a scrupulous job in making The Shakespearean Forest cohere and communicate ... it is a remarkable book that luckily ended up being published even posthumously, written in a way that is amicable to lay readers as well as specialists.' Tommi Laine, Helsinki Book Review