Vol. 18, No. 37	July 22, 1999

UD Press releases 'benchmark study' on Shakespeare

Called a "benchmark study" by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Naseeb Shaheen's Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays is one of the leading scholarly books published by the University of Delaware Press in 1999.

The book is a revised compilation of Shaheen's three previous books, Biblical References in Shakespeare's Tragedies, Biblical Reference in Shakespeare's History Plays and Biblical References in Shakespeare's Comedies, published by the UD Press but now out of print.

According to Shakespeare scholar Jay Halio, English, the book will be extremely useful to all Shakespeare scholars as it is the most complete compendium of references in Shakespeare's works. It will be especially useful to editors annotating Shakespeare's plays, he said.

In his introduction, Shaheen writes that his original goal was to list biblical references in Shakespeare's play. However, he broadened the scope of his study and read every "source that Shakespeare is known to have read or consulted prior to writing each play, as well as those works that give evidence of having come to his mind as he wrote the play." As a result of his research, the book not only examines the biblical references, but also the secular sources available to Shakespeare, as well as the Anglican Book of Homilies and Book of Common Prayer, which he used in his writing.

The book, which is almost 900 pages, meticulously examines each of Shakespeare's plays and discusses their probable biblical or secular sources.

Another Shakespeare book, Shakespeare: Text and Theatre (Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio), edited by Lois Potter, English, and Arthur F. Kinney, honors the member of the UD faculty. In addition to his career as teacher, scholar and editor, Halio served as associate provost for instruction from 1975-81 and chaired the board of editors of the UD Press from 1985-1995. A tribute to Halio, the volume brings together the works of many distinguished authors in the field from around the world.

Other books published in the past year by the University of Delaware Press include:

• Playing Robin Hood: The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries, edited by Lois Potter, Ned B. Allen Professor of English, a collection of essays looking at the Robin Hood legend in Tudor times, its adaptations in other cultures and its later history in theater and film;

• Tuned and Under Tension: The Recent Poetry of W.D. Snodgrass, edited by Philip Raisor, a series of essays pertaining to the later poetry of Snodgrass, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Creative Writing and Contemporary Poetry;

• Attending to Early Modern Women, edited by Susan Amussen and Adele Seeff, a collection of the work of almost 400 literary, history and art history scholars, who contributed to the 1994 symposium of the same name at the University of Maryland;

• After the Final No: Samuel Beckett's Trilogy by Thomas Cousineau, an examination of the three Beckett novels written after World War II, exploring their themes of destruction and renewal;

• Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie, essays delineating the religious, political, economic and aesthetic values surrounding the Western European myth of virginity;

• The Iconography of Power: The French Nouvelle at the End of the Middle Ages by David LaGuardia, a look at the role of the fictional characters as functions of power in French nouvelles, the forerunners of realistic novels;

• Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Michele Marrapodi and Giorgio Melchiori, a collection of Italian contributions to Shakespearean studies;

• The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions: The Evolution of a Theatrical Code by Linda McJannet, an overview of the development of Elizabethan stage directions and their importance to drama in general and specifically Elizabethan drama; and

• Rebel with a Conscience by Russell W. Peterson, the memoirs of the well-known environmentalist and former governor of Delaware.

-Beth Thomas