Shakespearean supplements

There are rather a lot of supplemental materials out there purporting to explain Shakespeare to beginning readers -- doubtlessly, Cliff, Spark and Monarch make a tidy profit every fall as students wade through another semester's densely-packed syllabus. These guides have their place as memory aids, but Heather's own study guides (linked on the right) do this work just as well, and for free. The real danger of Cliff and Spark is that their readings are flat and finite.

Good supplemental texts help you see how the uncertainties of Shakespeare explode off the page, and they give you the tools you need not to "understand" a text -- as though understanding that could be achieved for you via a $6, 96-page pamphlet -- but to read it, and read it well.

When I took my first introductory collegiate Shakespeare course, I found a few supplemental resources especially useful:

• The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951), by Harold C. Goddard. (In two volumes.) Goddard writes lengthy, reflective considerations of Shakespeare's plays and only rarely offers a conclusive interpretation; he generally prefers to roll the plays around his mind until he has found just enough new ways of thinking about them, and then he moves along.
• Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986), by Northrop Frye. (Of our texts this semester his book covers only MSND and The Tempest.) Frye was a gifted critic, and these short essays on Shakespeare are excellent introductions to the analytical tools critics bring to Shakespeare's plays.
• Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), by Harold Bloom. Bloom is generally considered a popular critic rather than an academic one. This is good in that he writes specifically for readers who are coming to Shakespeare as nonexperts; this is bad in that he occasionally oversimplifies Shakespeare. Read any supplemental guide to Shakespeare skeptically, but read Bloom's guide with an extra dose of skepticism.