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“... especially in its literary/dramatic forms, has been a story of kings.) With the exception of King John and Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s English history plays have survived not as one series but two. The first works its way from Henry VI to Richard III. The second turns back into the past to cover the prequel reigns from Richard II to Henry V. It is hard to ...”

“... as places of pastoral refuge from the cares and brutal competition of society, as the Forest of Arden does for Duke Senior and his exiled companions in As You Like It: there they can ‘fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world’. Indeed in his Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forrest (1598), the fittingly named ...”

“... death, minority but important voices declare that they don’t care for shows. In 1661 John Evelyn noted that ‘the old plays’ like Hamlet were starting ‘to disgust this refined age’, and a decade later Dryden felt that the play smelled ‘a little too strongly of the buskin’ – the archaic theatrical boot. These are English Restoration ...”

“... There’s a revealing slip near the start of John Banville’s new novel. Ursula Godley, whose husband lies dying upstairs, reflects on her son and daughter: ‘These are the creatures she carried inside her and gave birth to and fed from her own breast, phoenix-like.’ A phoenix can never feed its young because there is only ever one of it at a time ...”

“... only by porous membranes, and the outside world can and does break in upon them. Such places, like Arden, are associated with genres in extremis: made overtly unreal by parading their accumulated conventions, they have the magical and consciously literary ability to allow characters to transcend the reader’s, author’s and genre’s normal parameters of ...”

“... portable and more useful books I can’t say much; they will be judged by comparison with the New Arden editions, some of which are now showing signs of age (some of them always did), and possibly with the New Penguin. There is a Cambridge set now well under way; the Oxford Hamlet is the third considerable edition of that play in five years, following hard ...”

“... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...”

“... and Milton with respect to their ‘concreteness, precision, subtlety’. A footnote to an Arden edition of Macbeth that Leavis had already deplored in print was set for discussion in the exam paper. The teacher who was versed in Leavis’s writing would have known how to prime his pupils. It was a reciprocal arrangement. Nearly all of his students ...”

“... is competing for space in bookshops whose shelves are already straining under the burden of the Arden (1998, revised 2001), the Collins (1994, revised 2006), the Complete Pelican (2002), the Everyman Signet (1992-96), the Norton (1997), the Oxford (1986, revised 2005), the Portable (2007, a boxed set in paperback of an edition first published in 1992 and ...”

“... by Shakespearian editors. He remarks that the inadequacy of the note to this passage in the New Arden edition is ‘extraordinary’, but the other recent editions I have looked at (Cambridge, London, New Penguin, Pelican) are little better, though of course some of them are lightly annotated throughout. This would seem to be more evidence, if more is ...”

“... The LRB became a paper in its own right in May 1980, when the first independent issue appeared. (John Lanchester will write about Karl and the LRB in the next issue.) For all its genius Karl’s Listener was still a conventional London weekly, though affiliated to the BBC, rather than a political entity of one sort or another. The LRB is more sedate (no ...”

“... big morose Ajax in Troilus and Cressida (with, according to Honigmann, the diminutive epigrammist John Weever as Thersites). Others say Jonson is a model for Jaques, the embittered satirist of Arden (‘They that are most galled with my folly, They most must laugh’). Riggs offers, rather unconvincingly, Malvolio in ...”

“... melancholic Mrs Joan Drake, who fell about when paid a professional visit by the famous divine John Dod because he reminded her of the character of Ananias in The Alchemist. Lake turns the story around. It was because Dod with his great beard and upturned eyes really existed that Jonson was able to put him into his play, even if disguised as a separatist ...”

“... up in Rochester, Upstate New York (coincidentally the birthplace of another sui generis writer, John Ashbery). Abandoning an early ambition to become a composer, he graduated from Haverford College, and then worked for a year on Wall Street. Attracted by ‘the prosperous-seeming world of books’, he had short stories and ‘quasi-philosophical ...”

“... twins warns us to watch for traces of Twelfth Night, and the fact that their mother is called Mary Arden makes it slightly surprising that they live in Minneapolis rather than, say, Stratford, Ontario. Their father (also called Arthur), who describes himself as ‘gently used. Slightly foxed. Warmly inscribed’, keeps ending up in jail for a variety of ...”