Bibliographies

The reader who wants a more or less complete list of writings on Shakespeare up to 1958 will have to work through four volumes that attempt to provide a comprehensive and systematic record of everything written on the poet and his works. William Jaggard's Shakespeare Bibliography (1911) is not very reliable or systematic, but still useful for the information it contains on early Shakespeare criticism. Its continuation by W. Ebisch and L. L. Schücking, A Shakespeare Bibliography (1931) and Supplement for the Years 1930-35 (1937), is more professional and easier to use, whereas the fourth volume, Gordon Ross Smith's A Classified Shakespeare-Bibliography, 1936-1958 (1963), is rather too complicated in its classification.

An intelligently discriminating list is given in volume one of The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, edited by George Watson (1974), and there are a number of helpful shorter bibliographies. A survey of important titles is provided by A Selective Bibliography of Shakespeare: Editions, Textual Studies, edited by James G. McManaway and Jeanne Addison Roberts (1975); published for the Folger Shakespeare Library, it lists 4,519 items, mainly from 1930 to about 1973.