Within the past few years, scholarship on Shakespearean culture in the Victorian and Edwardian periods has gained surprising momentum, with contributions by, among others, Jane Moody and Russell Jackson. Palgrave's decision to publish a two-volume collection of papers from the conference “Victorian Shakespeare” (London: Institute for English Studies, 2002) indicates that a critical mass of scholars is now profitably working at the intersection of performance criticism, literary history, and cultural studies. In the midst of what has been mostly specialist activity, Richard Foulkes has written the first general account of Shakespeare in performance from 1832 to 1916, that is, from the passage of the Great Reform Bill (and the meeting of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Select Committee on Dramatic Literature) to the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death.