BOOK REVIEWS
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“Shakespeare on the Tourist Trail,” W.B. Worthen’s “Performing Shakespeare
in Digital Culture,” and Carol Chillington Rutter’s “Shakespeare’s Popular Face:
From the Playbill to the Poster.” Many of the chapters in The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture feature pertinent illustrations,
while all of them present notes at the end of each entry, rather than their being
collected into a whole at the back of the text. A bibliography of further reading
(broken into the categories “Shakespeare and Cultural History,” “Appropriations
and Adaptations,” “Theatre and Performance,” “Film, Television, and Radio,”
and “Music and the Visual Arts”) and an extensive index usefully complement
Shaughnessy’s volume.
Without question, when such venerable publishing entities as Arden
Shakespeare and Cambridge University Press offer titles like Shakespeare and
Elizabethan Popular Culture and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare
and Popular Culture, scholars of Shakespeare and popular culture ought to take
notice. These indispensable volumes more than suggest the cachet and respect
this expansive and inviting field of inquiry continues to acquire in the 21st
century. By themselves, and as a pair, these texts provide a phenomenal
introduction to, as well as a broad overview of, the field of Shakespeare and
popular culture studies. Indeed, both are recommended highly not only for
Shakespeareans, but also historians of popular culture in all disciplines.
Anthony Guy Patricia, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
William Le Queux: Master of Mystery
Chris Patrick and Stephen Baister
Privately published by the authors, 2006
In William Le Queux: Master o f Mystery>,Chris Patrick and Stephen Baister
have produced an impressively researched and highly informative account of
almost certainly the most prolific mystery and spy-story writer of the first thirty
years of the twentieth century. The authors list well over 200 novels and short
story collections published between 1899 and his death in 1927, not to mention
dozens of uncollected short stories and journalistic and other periodical writings,
and in 1917 alone a prodigious 14 novels. Many of his works were best-sellers
and went through numerous reprintings. One of them sold over a million copies
and was translated into 27 languages. Not for nothing did William Le Queux’s
only biographer describe him as “the master of mystery.” And as the authors
note, in The Ministry o f Fear (1943), Graham Greene has one of his characters
observe that “the world has been remade by William Le Queux.” All the more
remarkable, then, aside from one or two passing references, Le Queux has been
largely overlooked in the more recent scholarship in the crime and mystery