Sophie Chiari's edited volume, The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature, collects sixteen essays on a wide variety of issues and texts. One of the volume's great virtues is that it provides a forum for the work of European Shakespeareans whose contributions to the field may be insufficiently familiar to scholars in North America, Australia, and elsewhere. Of the nineteen contributors, twelve are based in France, one in Norway, one in Denmark, one in Israel, and four in England. Many of the contributors are junior faculty, and so the volume is not only international in scope but also features the work of a new generation of scholars of early modern English.

The collection's organizing principle of the “circulation of knowledge” is interpreted broadly, encompassing a reevaluation of Foucauldian interpretations of Shakespeare, articles on the representation of apprentices and courtesans in city comedy, the concept of excellence in Shakespeare's plays, the origin of the term “syphilis,” Shakespeare's understanding of churches as spaces of sanctuary, and much else besides. The volume had its genesis in a conference on transmission and transgression in early modern England at Aix-Marseilles University in 2012, and at times it reads like a collection of conference proceedings. The chapters are relatively brief, with an average length of thirteen pages, and several end somewhat abruptly. Taken as a whole, the volume is more diffuse than it might be, and one often wishes that ideas in individual essays had been developed at greater length or placed in clearer relationship to each other. There is much of interest here, but overall the collection lacks a strong focus.

In her introduction to the volume, Chiari makes an argument that the papers are linked by their exploration of the connections between initiation, transmission, and transgression. Some of the papers make this connection explicit, others do not. In any case, these terms are used quite loosely, and their definition tends shift from one essay to another. Transgression, in particular, becomes something of a catchall category, including everything from witchcraft to writing tragicomedy. Although the notion of transgression might carry some weight within the context of particular essays, in the volume as a whole it is so broad as to be almost empty of significance. It is hard to see, for example, how witches and authors of tragicomedy are meaningfully similar in a society where those accused of witchcraft were put to death and authors of tragicomedies were popular at court. Abstract theoretical notions, such as Foucault's statement that transgression “[measures] the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit and [traces] the flashing line that causes the limit to arise” (4) are not much help in this context.

Most of the essays in the collection deal with transmission of knowledge in some sense, but again, when one takes the volume as a whole both “knowledge” and “transmission” are understood very broadly. Some essays deal with intertextuality, or what used to be called “influence.” Jonathan Pollock argues that Shakespeare read Lucretius; Noam Reisner reads the Revenger's Tragedy as a parody of Hamlet; Pierre Kapitaniak explores textual connections between Macbeth and Middleton's The Witch; Laetitia Sansonetti explores the Ovidian roots of Venus and Adonis. Others deal with the transmission of craft skills, such as Christopher Hausermann's essay on apprentices in city comedies, or Chantal Schütz’ chapter on courtesans in Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters. Anne-Valérie Dulac explores the relation between Sir Philip Sidney and the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard. Claire Guéron discusses the role of rumor in Much Ado About Nothing. All of these are interesting instances of “transmission,” but the relation between them is not made clear. After all, almost any written text is an attempt to transmit some form of information, however important or trivial, simple or complex.

Some of the essays in the volume seem out of place. Almost all the essays deal with texts from the period 1590–1620, but towards the end of the collection there is a short piece by Denis Lagae-Devoldère on George Villier's 1671 play The Rehearsal. Besides suggesting some relation between this work and Ben Jonson's Poetaster (1602), despite the essay's merits, there is little connection here with the period focus of the volume. Similarly, the final essay in the volume, by Livia Seguardo, is an analysis of a Brazilian adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that traveled to the Globe Theater in London in 2000. It is a fascinating piece, but its focus on contemporary cross-cultural performance issues is not shared by any of the other fifteen essays in the collection.

In addition to the sixteen essays, the volume opens with a foreword by Gordon McMullan and an afterword by Ewan Fernie. Both offer intriguing readings of Shakespearean texts: McMullan focuses on the relation between transmission and transgression in the various versions of Taming of the Shrew, whereas Fernie suggests the disturbing degree to which audiences might be attracted to the transgressive and disturbing self-destructive jealousy of Leontes in The Winter's Tale. Both the foreword and afterword are engaging and insightful, but like most of the essays here, they tend to open the volume's subject out, rather than giving it limit and structure.