Description

Published 1939: First Pelican Edition / Softcover / Very Good Condition / Illustrated throughout

Original pictorial stiff card covers. 184 + very clean and bright slightly age-toned pages. Slight shelf wear on covers consistent with age. (HQ68)

Postage €4.00.
An Post prepaid postage envelopes within the Republic of Ireland, with no weight restrictions from €6.95.

Dr. Harrison does precisely what the book advertises: he introduces Shakespeare. That said, I've continued to study more and more criticism of Shakespeare as part of running a book club focused on the Bard, and I learned quite a few things from this slim volume. The language used definitely dates it from the 1930s but the knowledge put forward still stands up even against more recent trends of Shakespearean criticism. While the book is also ostensibly an introduction to the Penguin edition of Shakespeare, only a little bit of the text is reserved to how the editors decided to treat the manuscripts for modern publication. That choice made the text much more valuable as a general introduction to Shakespeare rather than as an introduction to the Penguin editions.

George Bagshawe Harrison was a British scholar and critic, educated at Queens' College, Cambridge. In 1924 he began lecturing at King's College, University of London, subsequently holding professorships at Queen's University, Ontario, and the University of Michigan. Among his many works on Shakespeare and his period were Shakespeare's Fellows (1923), Elizabethan Plays and Players (1940), and Shakespeare's Critics: From Jonson to Auden (1964); England in Shakespeare's Day (1928) and Shakespeare at Work (1933) are highly regarded as introductions to the social and cultural contexts of Shakespeare's work. He also produced numerous editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean documents, notably Thomas Nashe's Pierce Pennilesse, His Supplication to the Divell, 1592 (1924), An Elizabethan Journal (three volumes, 1928, 1931, 1933), A Jacobean Journal (two volumes, 1941, 1950), and The Letters of Queen Elizabeth I (1935). Harrison was general editor of the Penguin Shakespeare between 1937 and 1959. His other publications included The Day Before Yesterday (1938), a journal for the year 1936; Julius Caesar in Shakespeare, Shaw, and the Ancients (1960); and Profession of English (1962), which reflects on the objectives and procedures of literary studies. '

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3129313