Student Reading Lists

To demonstrate how the Cambridge Shakespeare collection can support research and teaching, we're working with instructors to design course reading lists. The collection includes the New Cambridge Shakespeare series, The Early Quartos series, the Shakespeare in Production series, The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, the full back catalogue of Shakespeare Survey, and Emma Smith’s Cambridge Shakespeare Guide, and provides excellent materials for developing undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Each of Shakespeare’s texts has a main page that displays highlights from the collection, all of which offer prompts for developing seminars, reading lists, and assignments. Instructors and students alike can browse Cambridge Shakespeare by play and by topic to develop ideas for seminars or coursework essays, and can also use the search function within Shakespeare Survey to find relevant articles from its expansive back catalogue.

Being Critical with Shakespeare

By Dr Simon Smith, University of Birmingham

This reading list provides a thorough introduction to the various contemporary critical approaches to Shakespeare that make the field so urgent, thriving and relevant today. It equips students to put those approaches into practice in their own work, and seeks to demonstrate the range and diversity of methods that modern scholarship embraces. 

Each week introduces a different critical approach, using three essays and articles (and occasionally a specialised textual edition) from Cambridge Shakespeare. The trio is selected to give students a secure basis for understanding each methodology, but also a sense of the variety that a given approach – such as sensory studies – might result in. Students are encouraged not just to evaluate the arguments being made in the readings, but to consider how they might apply the methods being used and questions being asked to their own critical work. To help with this, prompt questions are supplied each week.

1. Sensory Studies
2. Shakespeare and Race
3. (Re)sources, Influences and Inter-Texts
4. Ecocritical Shakespeares
5. Gender and Sexuality
6. Textual Studies and Early Modern Publishing
7. Early Modern Performance Culture
8. Shakespeare in Production
9. Adaptation and Reception Studies

Shakespeare and Language

By Dr Jonathan P. Lamb, University of Kansas

Language makes up Shakespeare's central accomplishment as a writer. Every aspect of the plays and poems ultimately routes through the hub of language. Drawing on the rich resources of the Cambridge Shakespeare collection, this list guides readers through six plays and the sonnets at the intersections of language. Each play has been grouped with three articles from The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare and one or two articles from Shakespeare Survey. The goal of these groupings is to create sometimes unexpected but fruitful combinations of ideas, while overall the list allows readers to develop their grasp on major concepts running through the plays and poems.

1. The Merchant of Venice and character as an effect of language
2. King Richard II and artificial language
3. The First Part of King Henry IV and theatrical language
4. The Sonnets and eventful language
5. Love's Labour's Lost: language and the intersections of race, gender and class
6. Hamlet and critical theory, cultural translation, and rhetorical theory
7. Othello: connecting language to race and gender

Staging Shakespeare in his Time

By Dr Amy Lidster, University of Oxford

‘Staging Shakespeare in his Time’ provides an introduction to a wide range of Shakespeare’s works and to performance practices and spaces within early modern England. It is suited for undergraduate-level courses and could be developed further for postgraduate students. Each week features a core primary text that uses editions from the Cambridge Shakespeare collection and a set of secondary materials that collectively helps students to explore aspects of early modern staging and performance. The arrangement of main primary texts is roughly chronological; additional works could also be considered in full or in extract alongside the core text. All materials are drawn from Cambridge Shakespeare to illustrate the richness of its resources and how useful it is for designing and developing reading lists, which can then be supplemented with materials from elsewhere. 

1. Titus Andronicus and Staging Spaces, Props, and Costumes
2. Richard III and Staging History
3. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Staging Practices and Rehearsal
4. Henry V and Staging Language, Dialect, and Nation
5. Twelfth Night and Staging Gender and the Body
6. Othello and Staging Race
7. King Lear and Staging Clowns and Casting
8. The Winter’s Tale and Staging Genre