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I do hope every teacher and professor can love and illuminate the plays as well as Tanner does in these insightful, elegant, and witty essays. -- Arthur Phillips Barnes and Noble Review 20100423 Prefaces to Shakespeare is a collection of the essays that the Cambridge professor Tony Tanner wrote to accompany the plays for the Everyman's Library series. Tanner, who died in 1998, maintains an easy, book-club tone, at once gentle and generous. Though some essays probe more deeply than others (he's sharpest on the comedies), he's always sensitive to how the themes of change and regeneration recur. And at almost every juncture, he resists the temptation to speculate out of hand. -- Jeremy McCarter New York Times Book Review 20100502 To read this collection of introductions to Shakespeare's plays, more than ten years after Tanner's death, is to be reintroduced to his conversation. For in this, his final and finest critical work, Tanner's writing is at its most brilliant: he can summarize with the utmost economy; he can describe sources with the deftest of touches; he can, in sentences bristling with parentheses and boiling with quotations, develop the most complex of arguments, his own language engaging with Shakespeare's in a graceful dance...It is an impressive introduction not only to the plays, but also to the whole tradition of Shakespeare criticism from Dryden to Stanley Cavell, from Johnson to Kermode, with Coleridge an especial favourite. There is very little repetition and almost every page contains illumination, from the critical tradition, from the historical context, from contemporary debate...If you ever go to the theatre to see Shakespeare, or even just read the plays at home, Tanner's introductions are an indispensable guide. -- Colin MacCabe New Statesman 20100809 It is tempting to devour this superb book in one long session, though at 3 lbs. and 800-plus pages there is a serious physical challenge. Our attention is constantly provoked by dazzling insights and informative zest, but the writing also promotes long thought and deep reflection...There have been few books on Shakespeare's art as good as this. -- Tom Deveson Around the Globe 20100901 As an extended introduction, especially for students and other readers looking to become more familiar with the plays, it is a very good one indeed. -- William H. Pritchard Hudson Review 20100901 Terrific. -- James Boyle Sunday Herald 20101128
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When Tony Tanner died in 1998, the world lost a critic who was as sensitive a reader of Jane Austen as he was of Thomas Pynchon, and who wrote with a warmth and clarity that belied his fluency in literary theory. In the final ten years of his life Tanner tackled the largest project any critic in English can take on - writing a preface to each of Shakespeare's plays. This collection serves as a comprehensive introduction for the general reader, the greatest and perhaps the last in the line of great introductions to Shakespeare written by such luminaries as Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tanner brings Shakespeare to life, explicating everything from big-picture issues such as the implications of shifts in Elizabethan culture to close readings of Shakespeare's deployment of complex words in his plays. Although these prefaces are written for a general audience, there is much value for the scholar as well. Tanner introduces some of the most significant recent and historical scholarship on Shakespeare to show the reader how certain critics frame large issues in a useful way. This scholarly generosity permits Johnson, Hazlitt, Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin, Pater, and many others to enter into conversation. "The Independent" said of the project, 'All of Tanner's life and education had prepared him for this task and the results are magnificent - both accessible and erudite'.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
A MUST for anyone who teaches Shakespeare
25 May 2011
Format:Hardcover
I know the book is a bit pricey ($40), but it is well worth the investment for anyone who teaches Shakespeare. Besides a good biography of the Bard, I think Tanner's "Prefaces" is essential to deepening one's understanding and teaching of Shakespeare's works. Unless you are a college professor, most readers won't read "Prefaces" from cover to cover (I didn't); but for that core of plays we all encounter in our high school and college years (About 10 or so, right?), the money will be well spent. I mean, if I could give a Sixth Star to this review, I would.
Tanner's prefaces are not pedantic, but enlightening, enriching. He never says "This is what this passage MEANS"; he says "This is what OTHERS have said it could possibly mean; this is what I think it means", allowing the reader room to reach his/her own conclusions about the text. As mentioned in the Foreword, Tanner didn't think of himself as a critic, but rather as an "appreciator", of literature, and that love of the written word comes across in his essays. He made me think of plays and characters and the inter-relatedness of the works in ways I hadn't thought about, but I never felt "talked down to." Rather, reading the prefaces (about 7 of them, so far) and the genre intros (Comedies/ Tragedies/ Histories/ Greek and Roman Plays) made me feel like I was in the company of a mentor who was allowing me into the conversation of great minds as they wrestle with ascribing meaning to Shakespeare's words.
Tanner's prefaces are not pedantic, but enlightening, enriching. He never says "This is what this passage MEANS"; he says "This is what OTHERS have said it could possibly mean; this is what I think it means", allowing the reader room to reach his/her own conclusions about the text. As mentioned in the Foreword, Tanner didn't think of himself as a critic, but rather as an "appreciator", of literature, and that love of the written word comes across in his essays. He made me think of plays and characters and the inter-relatedness of the works in ways I hadn't thought about, but I never felt "talked down to." Rather, reading the prefaces (about 7 of them, so far) and the genre intros (Comedies/ Tragedies/ Histories/ Greek and Roman Plays) made me feel like I was in the company of a mentor who was allowing me into the conversation of great minds as they wrestle with ascribing meaning to Shakespeare's words.
12 of 19 people found the following review helpful
wonderful explanations, introductions, temptations
4 May 2010
Format:Hardcover
Tanner does a great job finding all the fun in the plays, the logic of the characters, the beauty of the stories and language. A great companion for the plays.
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