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Book review of Andrew Murphy: Shakespeare for the People: Working-class Readers, 1800-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
journal contribution
posted on 2011-10-10, 12:50 authored by Gabriel EganFor his account of the entire history of Shakespeare publication (Shakespeare in Print, 2003), Andrew Murphy made detailed study of the nineteenth-century explosion in cheap editions. His new book puts that explosion within the context of the working class readers newly enabled to enjoy Shakespeare. Murphy begins with celebrations of the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, of which working men’s groups made a better fist than the official committee. To explain how this came about, Murphy offers chapters on ‘The Educational Context’ and ‘The Publishing Context’ as preparation for excerpts from working-class autobiographies (some hitherto unpublished) that convey individual readers’ responses to Shakespeare. He is particularly interested in how political radicals understood Shakespeare (mainly as one of their own, it turns out), and the role that the drama played in the struggle for intellectual and political freedom.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- English and Drama
Citation
EGAN, G., 2010. Andrew Murphy: Shakespeare for the People: Working-class Readers, 1800-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 247 (162), pp. 423-425.Publisher
© Erich Schmidt VerlagVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publication date
2010Notes
This article is Closed Access. It is a book review of Andrew Murphy: Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800– 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 and was published in the journal, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen [© Erich Schmidt Verlag]. The definitive version is available at: http://www.archivdigital.info/ARCHIV.02.2010.423ISSN
0003-8970eISSN
1866-5381Publisher version
Language
- en