Michael Dobson, 18 November 1993
‘Hamlet’ versus ‘Lear’: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art by R.A. Foakes.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £30, March 1993, 0 521 34292 9Show More Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels by Brian Vickers.
Yale, 508 pp., £35, April 1993, 0 300 05415 7Show More Shakespeare, Poet and Citizen by Victor Kieran.
Verso, 261 pp., £18.95, March 1993, 0 86091 392 9Show More Show More“... It were a delicate stratagem,’ muses King Lear at one point during his great mad scene: to shoe A troop of horse with felt: I’ll put’t in proof; And when I have stol’n upon these sons-in-law. Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! R.A. Foakes and Brian Vickers, both approaching retirement after reigning for nearly thirty years in the upper reaches of Shakespeare studies, aren’t feeling entirely charitable towards their heirs either, although on the evidence of their new reflections on the state of that divided kingdom, Foakes is rather less malicious than his Shakespearean avatar, and Vickers rather less stealthy ...”