Shakespeare for Readers

Also in the November 7 TLS (belatedly on my desk) is a review of Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist , in which Erne challenges the popularly accepted notion that Shakespeare was writing for viewers rather than readers. He shows that plays were being written for publication in Shakespeare’s time, and were considered equal to other forms of literature for reading purposes. He speculates too that the published plays of Shakespeare are too long to have fit into the “two hours traffic of our stage” that Shakespeare mentions as the standard length of a drama (and which Erne perhaps takes too literally). In short, Erne suggests that Shakespeare wrote with the awareness “that a certain artistic ingenuity survives better on the page than the stage.”