A DISAPPOINTING LOOK AT SHAKESPEARE'S AFTERLIFE.

Becoming Shakespeare: How a Dead Poet Became the World's Foremost Literary Genius. Jack Lynch. Constable. [pounds sterling]14.99. ix + 306 + i. ISBN 978-1-84529-823-4.

The professional eye lights upon the Acknowledgments, which lists twenty-two libraries, from the Folger to the National Library of Scotland, where John T Lynch (identified as such in the publication details) carried out his copious researches. This could be considered a heroic feat of grant-getting which belongs to a David Lodge novel. One's admiration wanes as the book proceeds. Mr Lynch could as well have stayed at home, writing up his book from a single university library and Samuel Schoenbaum's magisterial Shakespeare's Lives because Mr Lynch's book covers the same ground, Shakespeare's afterlife. It stops, curiously, in 1864, at the Tercentenary celebrations. No mention is made of the great Phelps-Fechter controversy, with its huge question: should a Frenchman be allowed to usurp the role of Hamlet in Stratford? Surely one at least of the twenty-two libraries would have had a copy of Richard Foulkes's The Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864 (1984), unmentioned here. Save for a forward cast towards Jan Kott and 'Shakespeare Our Contemporary', the rest is silence. Mr Lynch has handed the baton over to Gary Taylor (Reinventing Shakespeare), and leaves the twentieth century to other annalists of the genre.

So Shakespeare's afterlife extends here for three centuries. Theatre stories are re-told, including the occasion when Charles II had to wait for Hamlet to begin: he was told that the Queen was still shaving. Shakespearean adaptations are an oft-told but still beguiling topic. As Mr Lynch remarks, the shifts of taste in the Restoration look forward to the manoeuvres of contemporary theatre directors. My favourite change comes in the Dryden-Davenant Macbeth, when 'The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon! Where got'st thou that goose look?' becomes 'How now, friend! What means thy change of countenance?' It is the beginning of the line that leads to Fascist Caesars and chauvinist-beast Petruchios.

For Voltaire, Shakespeare was baffling. How could a genius so disregard the Rules? How could he mix together comedy and tragedy? Yet Shakespeare showed, in The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest, that he was perfectly capable of observing the unities when he felt like it. Voltaire missed a great truth, as said of the English language: it has no rules, only exceptions. For the British, it was enough that the French derided Shakespeare as irregular and barbaric. That meant that Shakespeare was ideologically anti-French, and thus a true patriot. 'Literary squabbles became a proxy for political squabbles' (p. 146). Shakespeare got on to the right side of the times, and stayed there.

Current taste governs Shakespeare, and always has. In the eighteenth century, taste made him an icon of Britishness and liberal values. For the Americans, Julius Caesar was a paean to Republicanism and tyrannicide. Garrick, star of his stage, founded his European reputation on Shakespeare. At the height of his fame, he invented the Stratford Festival. Taste nurtured and was shaped by the editorial and lexicographical work of Dr Johnson ('the alpha male of the critical establishment'). Shakespeare ended the century as the general ancestor of English literature, a status confirmed in his citations in Johnson's Dictionary.

'Shakespeare was shown to be on the side of the righteous' (p.145). For much of the nineteenth century, the righteous was located in the family, hence the Family Shakespeare. Bowdler comes in for some good-natured heckling. But Mr Lynch misses the real fun, the passages that Bowdler (or his sister) left in. You would not expect Antony's 'Ride on the pants triumphing' to survive. It is left intact, and so, astonishingly, is William's Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor. This is schoolboy Latin at its most scurrilous, and 'focative case' should not have passed an alert censor. Lynch is right to see Bowdler as the harbinger of today's political correctness. The mission to apply carbolic soap to the great texts never ends, though our sense of the grimy bits does tend to shift. Nowadays it is race, not sex that comes in for cleaning.

Jack Lynch has written an easy read for the general reader. There are perfectly sound accounts of editing, improving, domesticating, and forging Shakespeare. Becoming Shakespeare is not a bad book. It is largely a precis of a good book, Shakespeare's Lives. The reader is advised to stay with Sam.