Anecdotal Shakespeare

Shakespeare's four-hundred-year performance history is full of anecdotes - ribald trivial frequently funny sometimes disturbing and always but loosely allegiant to fact. Such anecdotes are nevertheless a vital index to the ways that Shakespeare's plays have generated meaning across varied times and in varied places. Furthermore particular plays have produced particular anecdotes - stories of a real skull in <i>Hamlet</i> superstitions about the name <i>Macbeth</i> toga troubles in <i>Julius Caesar</i> - and therefore express something embedded in the plays they attend. Anecdotes constitute then not just a vital component of a play's performance history but a form of vernacular criticism by the personnel most intimately involved in their production: actors. These anecdotes are therefore every bit as responsive to and expressive of a play's meanings across time as the equally rich history of Shakespearean criticism or indeed the very performances these anecdotes treat. <i>Anecdotal Shakespeare</i>provides a history of post-Renaissance Shakespeare and performance one not based in fact but no less full of truth.