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Title: Shakespeare criticism - a historical survey and sampler
Review: Halliday's excellent introduction makes a historical survey of Shakespeare criticism . Halliday claims that new perceptions of Shakespeare were developed at fifty year intervals starting with his his contemporaries, then with Dryden in the Restoration, Pope in the Augustan Age, Johnson in the Age of Reason, and Coleridge in the Romantic Age. One of the surprising revelations is that it is only with Coleridge that Shakespeare is written and thought about primarily as a poet. It is Coleridge who too lays waste the conception that Shakespeare was a wild , careless genius with little concern for the artistic construction of his work.The second part of the work contains brief selections of criticisms about the individual plays.I found this work provides a sense of the overall development of Shakespeare criticism from its inception to the mid- twentieth century.A valuable work.
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