“The Shakespeare Miscellany”, by David Crystal & Ben Crystal

224 pages, The Overlook Press, ISBN-13: 978-1585677160

A pastiche of linguistic and theatrical knowledge and experience, The Shakespeare Miscellany by David & Ben Crystal is a precious resource sure to be treasured by all fans of The Bard. This thin tome contains all kinds of useful information, nuances and details that shed light on the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean world in which Shakespeare live and wrote, all neatly presented in the Miscellany. The book consists of a series of clear, semantically independent entries, so you can start reading from any page. This is not to give the impression that the book is randomly comprised; rather, there is an overall logic and regularity through the whole book for one to navigate easily and logically (the timeline at the end of the book and maps of British locations and play settings are very helpful and accurate, as well). Of special interest to me was the entry Did Shakespeare write his plays?, a representative and, indeed, exhaustively accurate treatment of the frivolous debates over Shakespeare’s authorship. No doubt, anyone – an Oxfordian or Baconian or others – once they read the remarkable entry they will suddenly become converts, given the objective, learned and convincing facts introduced. The merit of the book is the multidimensional perspective applied by the authors: Shakespeare is appropriately introduced as a playwright-pragmatist and an actor, a linguist (given his amazing metalinguistic instinct and language creativity), a 16^th Century citizen, and a human being (as far as letters or written memories of others can tell about) – everything displayed in an objective, factual and entertaining manner. And all in a mere 200+ pages, to boot.