After Shakespeare, edited by John Gross

In love with Shakespeare

It's hard to think of another writer who has been such an inspiration to other writers as Shakespeare.

In John Gross's anthology, the bard's more general influence – in the plots of West Side Story or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, for example – is ignored in favour of "specifically Shakespearean" material that "builds on characters and plays, or on the life and personality of Shakespeare himself".

So we find not only novelists, poets and playwrights, but philosophers, politicians and film-makers. Big names such as Goethe and Proust, Emily Dickinson and Wole Soyinka, Cole Porter and Duke Ellington, Alfred Dreyfus and Nelson Mandela, jostle for space with obscure Edwardian professors and Georgian authors.

Since one of Gross's "guiding principles" has been to "avoid overlapping" with previous anthologies, he omits much illuminating academic criticism as well as more familiar work by figures such as Dryden, Johnson and Coleridge. This has two effects. By far the greater part of the anthology is refreshingly new. But some extracts should perhaps have been left in obscurity.

There are some gems. John Ruskin's Brantwood Diary shows Ruskin on the brink of mental collapse, able to face ideas about sex and virginity only by using the bard's words. Some of the best extracts cover plays in performance. We find DH Lawrence watching Amleto in northern Italy in 1913 and Ben Okri seeing Othello at the Barbican ("I was the only black person in the audience").

Gross does mention Shakespeare in Love, but it's sad that he can't find room for a mention of the way Shakespearean tradition manifests itself in such in-yer-face plays as Sarah Kane's Blasted (echoes of King Lear) and Cleansed (a reworking of Twelfth Night).

Interestingly, some of the most perceptive commentators on Shakespeare's politics come from central and eastern Europe. Brecht may have turned Coriolanus into a tract, but he also parodies Richard III in Arturo Ui, his allegory of Nazism. Miroslav Holub's poem Polonius attacks all time-servers and police spies while Marina Tsvetayeva defends Ophelia and calls Hamlet "a bony scandalmonger".

There is plenty to savour. Lovers of parody will chuckle at Beyond the Fringe's "O saucy Worcester". Dogg's Hamlet by Tom Stoppard races through the plot in two minutes, and Kurosawa and Kozintsev make revealing comments on filming the plays. I particularly liked a list of titles taken or adapted from Shakespeare – from All Our Yesterdays (Macbeth) to Without My Cloak (sonnet 34).