This latest production from Oxford's valuable handbook series proclaims that it is a collection written primarily by historians to help literature scholars (principally undergraduates) connect recent research on English history to Shakespeare's life, drama, and poetry. Smuts argues in his introduction that history can enrich our understanding of literature not only by providing the data to “contextualise” texts but also, more importantly, by “unearthing features embedded within well-known texts that have gone unrecognized because readers have overlooked ways in which authors incorporated material from their environment into the fabric of their writing” (1).

With this brief in mind, the collection of forty-one essays is divided into five overlapping sections: politics; intellectual culture and political thought; religious culture; social beliefs and practices; and architecture, visual culture, and music. These cover a wide range of subjects; some, perhaps, more inclined toward providing “contextual background,” others engaging with issues such as modes of writing practice, performative rituals that loom large in specific plays, and the microworlds of Shakespeare's London: Blackfriars and St. Paul's precinct. Thus there are analyses of major political figures (Burghley by Norman Jones; Robert Cecil by Pauline Croft; the Earl of Essex by Paul Hammer); political and intellectual cultures (including military culture, republicanism, and the public sphere); religious belief and practices; and social practices and problems, from Krista Kesselring and Paul Griffiths on crime to Vanessa Harding on family and household. The section of visual and aural culture ranges from civic art and architecture and gardens to music. Smuts notes that the collection is not comprehensive in coverage, lamenting particularly the lack of recent explorations of Shakespeare's response to contemporary economic conditions. It is a little surprising, however, that the sections on the vibrant areas of religious belief and practice and on visual cultures are relatively short, though one should note a variety of essays relating to religion in other sections.

It is impossible to do justice to such a large and varied volume, with so many excellent essays, in a short review. Some of the most successful contributions are those that integrate historical and literary study and engage with (or challenge) the substance of Shakespeare's works. Two essays in particular stood out to this reviewer: Dan Beaver's on English forests and Brendan Kane and Malcolm Smuts's on race. Beaver's essay underlines how history or historical data cannot be used simply as “context” to explain the Bard's focus or meaning. There is very little sense in his plays, for instance, of the huge social and economic pressures that the land, including forests, was under in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather, Beaver shows how, on the one hand, forests acted as “microcosms of the English body politic” that enabled Shakespeare to explore the nature of political societies and, on the other, how Shakespeare's depiction of conflict over forest rights was both conventional and fast becoming a “political fantasy” (143, 153). Conversely, Kane and Smuts shift modern emphasis on race in Shakespeare from the “exotic” Other to the contemporary understanding of race as family or lineage. This enables them to explore what they call “social racism”: how different sections of societies (what we might think of as class) in the Stuart realms judged other sections. In doing so, they propose interesting insights into some central political issues. They suggest that racial arguments about the natural superiority of the nobility, both physical and in terms of virtue, lay behind the second Earl of Essex's championing of the old aristocracy over parvenu challengers and explain his lavish distribution of knighthoods in 1596 and 1599. The emulation of noble virtue and courage in battle by “base men” elevated their condition, while rewarding it with a knighthood propagated it further. James VI/I's support of divine-right monarchy and the nobility in political office, as well as his “acute preoccupation” with sexual purity, were all legacies of the importance of lineage in Scottish politics. Social racism also explains, they argue, not only Gaelic elites’ responses to English governance of Ireland, but also their dealings with fellow Irish countrymen.

Overall, while the remit may have been to provide an advanced resource for literature scholars, the volume contains much that will be of interest to historians, theologians, and visual studies scholars. It is good to see that this hefty but expensive volume was published in paperback in the spring of 2018.