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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions, by Stephen Orgel. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: 2003. Pp. xvi + 172. Cloth $26.95.
A kind of decorated annex to his recent study, The Authentic Shakespeare, this book gathers six essays on patterns of representation (in print, on canvas, and in theaters) that relate to and shed light on Shakespeare's works. Orgel's essays in this sumptuously illustrated book (there are 16 plates and 101 figures by my count) extend our knowledge of how Shakespeare has been imagined over time. In doing so, they confirm his well-known appreciation of and eye for visual detail.
What is less widely known is that Orgel has led a long, productive life as a close reader. Why this has been such a secret is perhaps a mystery in itself. It was there for anyone to see, for instance, who picked up that landmark critical anthology, In Defense of Reading (1962). There, alongside essays by Ruben Brower and Paul De Man, among others, one finds a young Stephen Kitay Orgel whose engaging piece on The Tempest bears witness to the skills and insight that would make his later work so valuable--at times, seemingly indispensable--to the field.
A typical Orgel essay will exhibit something like the following trajectory of argument: "We have always heard, and thought, that X is Y, and thinking so has been quite comforting. But if you actually read X, you will find that there's no Y there at all. The real state of X is quite different. However uncomfortable the notion, we need to get Y out of our heads and start conceiving of X as Z instead." This is of course...
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