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Shakespeare, Music and Performance ed. by Bill Barclay, David Lindley (review)

instances of the allusions mentioned, especially for those readers unfamiliar with the particular works of fiction. The same might be said too for the treatment of poetry here. While ranging widely across the century and offering fascinating readings of the influence of the Shakespearean iambic pentameter and the sonnet series, this section necessitates a relatively high level of knowledge about Victorian poetry, as well as the Shakespeare texts on which it draws. The work as a whole contributes a range of answers to the significantly contorted question of exactly how the Victorians experienced their Shakespeare, how they actually got to know his words and the texture of his mind, and Sillars is properly attentive to the social and economic considerations that determine the answer to this question. Underpinning Shakespeare and the Victorians is a suggestion offered in the first chapter: that Shakespeare is a compulsory part of what makes up the elusive quality of “cultural maturity.” “A knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays was essential for the possession of any kind of cultural maturity” (16)—the acquisition of which might be experienced as a birthright or entitlement, or might be acquired by the hard graft of autodidacticism as advocated by Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, whose “project of self-advancement” (15) is something of a touchstone for this work. The Shakespeare written by Sillars is one who has been read, appropriated, and exploited (18) by the cultural ruling classes, though we do get hints of a messier story, of the political and sexual radicals for whom Shakespeare was also an important anti-establishment voice. Sillars’s extremely useful tips for “Further Reading” point the way for those seeking that Shakespeare. In “Shakespeare beyond Shakespeare,” Sillars offers an alternative to the scholarly, editorial approach in a series of accounts of Shakespeare’s characters’ independent lives, drawing on the burgeoning psychological practices of the Victorian novel to demonstrate both how Shakespeare informs concepts of character for the Victorians, but also how the Victorians’ sense of narrative possibility shapes cultural memories of Shakespeare’s characters. Sillars suggests that “it is possible to study Shakespeare without the Victorians, [but] it is impossible to study the Victorians without being aware of their reading, appropriation, and exploitation of Shakespeare” (18). However, on the basis of this book it seems that the former contention is in doubt too, given how convincingly the case is made here for the ways in which the Victorians have shaped subsequent approaches to Shakespeare.