Drakakis, John, and Dale Townshend, eds. Gothic Shakespeares. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2008. Accent on Shakespeare Series. 243 pp. Paperback. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-42067-9. $39.95. Routledge's Accent on Shakespeare series provides scholars with "committed and contentious" critical contexts geared toward supplying the serious student of Shakespeare with entrées into the latest theories and research opportunities in this crowded and ever-developing field (xv). The majority of the essays collected in Gothic Shakespeares focus on the influence of Shakespeare's plays, characters, setting, and imagery on the emergence and development of the Gothic genre. As such, this festschrift in honor of the late Julia Briggs (an early champion of scholarly interest in folk and popular genres) will be of interest to a very broad range of students and scholars, not only of literature but of history, media and cultural studies, and gender studies. In fact, editor John Drakakis observes that the eighteenth/nineteenth-century practice (shared by literary, political, moral, and historical commentators alike) of appropriating out-ofcontext samples of Shakespearean text requires any study of the Gothic to be interdisciplinary, intertextual, and always dialectical. The precise nature ofthat intertextuality is the main concern of Drakakis's introduction. He notes that the allusions to Shakespeare in various examples from the nineteenth-century Gothic genre (most notably the work of the Brontes, Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley) seem sourced in a range of intentions: while some works forge a link to Shakespeare to lend weight to a "minor" genre, others actively adapt, revise, and criticize both the cultural content and the literary status of the plays to which they refer. A collection dedicated to investigating the "particular species of heteroglossia" that is Gothic Shakespeare will of necessity have a wide target audience (18). The first two articles, by Elisabeth Bronfen ("Shakespeare's Nocturnal World") and Steven Craig ("Shakespeare Among the Goths"), identify Gothic elements present in Shakespeare's plays, ranging from the uncanny moods of his nocturnal scenes in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice, to his explicit depictions of Goths and Gothic culture in Titus Andronicus. Bronfen performs a Bakhtinian reading of transgressive Shakespearean night scenes, stipulating that the characters involved in such scenes are self-consciously seeking, via such transgression, "to transform themselves into literary characters" (22). Such scenes "privilegie] the...