Shakespeare

Edited by Stanley Wells.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Arranged by topic (such as Shakespeare in Performance, Hamlet or The Early Comedies), this book consists of 19 bibliographic essays covering all of Shakespeare’s work, each followed by lists of relevant books, essays and journal articles. The lists are organized into different printings of Shakespeare’s works, general studies and—most useful of all—criticism.

Compiled by David Bevington.
Arlington Heights, Ill.: AHM Publishing, 1978.
The advantage of this bibliography over its rival by Stanley Wells is its breadth: the book is crammed with far more books, essays, and journal articles. Like the Wells guide, the Bevington bibliography is organized by general topic in the first half (such as Shakespeare’s life and the Principles of Tragedy) and into Shakespeare’s works in the second half. What this bibliography lacks are the short introductory essays that accompany the lists of sources in Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide.

By Larry S. Champion.
Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993.
In this work, Larry Champion attempts to identify the most important works of Shakespeare scholarship produced in the 20th century. Annotating more than 1,800 studies of the playwright and his works, the book is broken down into such categories as sonnets, history plays and tragedies: each of these subdivides into bibliographic types like reference works, criticism and stage history. The Essential Shakespeare includes author, title, and subject indexes.

By Lewis Walker.
New York: Routledge, 2002.
This bibliography has collected 3,210 works in English published between 1961 and 1991 that treat the classical influence in Shakespeare’s work. The citations are organized into: general bibliographies, surveys and reference works; general works; and sections on individual works. Entries consist of books, articles, chapters, essays, dissertations, other bibliographies, and reference works. Many have been annotated in such detail that just scanning them will give you a quick grasp of the scholarship available.