Recently I engaged in an act of bad faith as a teacher. I set my second-year Shakespeare students a ‘research essay’ as a final piece of assessment, and insisted that they engage with primary scholarship – hardcover monographs and scholarly articles – if they wanted to do well. The problem is that industrial-strength literary criticism is almost unintelligible to undergraduates, and that is not entirely their fault. I knew this, but went ahead and set a criterion I knew would benefit only the tiny minority who might go on to a higher degree. The bulk of my students, who will be teaching adolescent South Australians Romeo + Juliet for decades to come, may never get around to thanking me.

My unease is confirmed by reading Penny Gay’s excellent new Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Comedies. According to the rules I set for the essay, this book is a textbook, a work of synthesis rather than of serious academic literary criticism. This is true, but not for good reasons. The latest work of new historicism tends to read like a rebarbative coded message to the inmates of other North American graduate schools, whereas Gay’s book strikes me as a balanced voice of experience and wisdom. Gay’s is a book you might read without being compelled to, for the pleasure of learning more about plays that continue to work on the stage and on the page. It is the sort of book that would have helped my students. Serious academic criticism, by contrast, seems to exist exclusively for people who want to publish more serious academic criticism.