Shakespeare's characterization of Cleopatra may dominate the collective consciousness, but he was only one of several 16th-century writers fascinated by the enigmatic queen of Egypt. Early modern conceptions of Cleopatra offer a rich, complex, and variable set of models for understanding the period's responses to race, female sovereignty, and classical antiquity. This interdisciplinary study investigates images of Cleopatra in the early modern period and examines how her story was mediated and used - from drawing lessons from history to being a symbol of female heroism. It draws on early historiographical works, political and philosophical treatises, coterie dramatic productions, and gender, race and performance studies, as well as evidence from material culture, to consider what was known and thought about Cleopatra in the period This book provides a new literary and cultural history of one of the world's most contested and politically-charged iconic female figures. It combines a close reading of literary and dramatic works with historical and political contexts, paying particular attention to the three major early modern Cleopatra plays: Mary Sidney's translation of Robert Garnier's Marc Antoine, Samuel Daniel's The Tragedie of Cleopatra, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. By examining these conflicting historical and fictional identities, Yasmin Arshad offers a diverse and ground-breaking study of Cleopatra's 'infinite variety'.

In this engaging text, Arthur F. Kinney introduces students to Shakespeare's plays in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. He focuses on the material conditions of playing and of playgoing in order to show how they both inspired and restricted Shakespeare's art. Subjects treated range from the venues where Shakespeare's plays were first performed and the practicalities of the acting profession to the composition of audiences and the cultural and regulatory contexts in which companies of players operated. Each topic is discussed in relation to a diverse selection of Shakespeare's plays as well as contemporary documents, so that the plays and the theatrical world in which they were produced constantly illuminate one another. A core of 22 plays is considered in total.

New Shakespeare biographies are published every year, though very little new documentary evidence has come to light. Inevitably speculative, these biographies straddle the line between fact and fiction. Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives explores the relationship between fiction and non-fiction within Shakespeare's biography, across a range of subjects including feminism, class politics, wartime propaganda, children's fiction, and religion, expanding beyond the Anglophone world to include countries such as Germany and Spain, from the seventeenth century to present day.

Author Biography:
Colin Chambers is Senior Research Fellow in Theatre at De Montfort University. A former journalist and critic, he was Literary Manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1981-1997. His books include the award-winning Peggy: The Life of Margaret Ramsay, Play Agent (1997) and he is the editor of The Continuum Guide to Twentieth Century Theatre (2002).

Explores the overlapping, hotly disputed borderlands of literature, theater and film. Concerned with the creative possibilities of rendering Shakespeare on film, the book studies the rich interpretations of Shakespeare by such major directors as Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, Peter Brook, Franco Zeffirelli, the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and one of Russia's greatest filmmakers, Grigori Kozintsev. It provides a detailed analyses of sixteen major films, illuminating the relations between Renaissance visions and modern re-visions, the parallels of poetic and cinematic imagery, and the quests of directors for significant cinematic style. Dramatically illustrated by over one hundred film photographs. Originally published by Indiana University Press in 1977.

Critically acclaimed as one of Shakespeare's most complex and intriguing plays, "Twelfth Night" is a classic romantic comedy of mistaken identities. In recent years it has returned to the center of critical debate surrounding gender and sexuality. The Introduction explores the multiple factors that make up the play's rich textual, theatrical, critical and cultural history. Keir Elam surveys the play's production and reception, emphasizing the role of the spectator both within the comedy and the playhouse.

"Making Shakespeare" gives a lively introduction to the major issues of the stage and print history of the plays, and discusses what a Shakespeare play actually is. Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, the book reveals how the plays were written and printed, and how they have been influenced by London, the theatres where they played and the actors who played in them. It describes how the texts evolved between composition, performance and printing, and how they retain clues to their original productions. It presents a variety of background material and tools to allow readers to contextualise Shakespeare's plays for themselves.

With Shylock's pound of flesh and Portia's golden ring, The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's most controversial, disturbing and unforgettable plays.
Combining accessible commentary with a range of reprinted materials, S. P. Cerasano:
*explores the contexts of the play, including early modern images of Venice, the commercialism of the play, Shakespeare's theatre and London, and images of Jewishness
*samples modern criticism of Shakespeare's Merchant, grouped into sections on The Economic Framework, Choosing and Risking, and Shylock and Other Strangers
*offers an invaluable discussion of the play in performance, considering crucial staging issues and changing interpretations of the roles of Portia and Shylock
*closely examines key passages of the work, providing both commentary and extensively annotated sections of play text
*prepares readers for additional study of the play with a useful guide to further reading.
Assuming no prior knowledge of the play, this Routledge Literary Sourcebook is the essential guide to one of the most haunting works of English drama.

Drawing upon a vast literature in psychoanalytic journals and either upon Shakespeare's characters themselves or alluding to those characters in the course of other topics, this book discusses eight of Shakespeare's plays and the relationships between the main characters in them. Psychoanalytic and literary approaches sometimes diverge, but they ca

Coriolanus has always attracted strong interest, whether seen as the last of Shakespeare's tragedies, or as his most political play. In performance it has been constantly reinterpreted and has often strayed far from Shakespeare's text. The Royal Shakespeare Company production, mounted by Terry Hands with Alan Howard in the title role, was acclaimed by audiences and critics in Stratford and London for its forcefulness and fidelity to Shakespeare's play. David Daniell accompanied the Company on its subsequent tour in Europe where audiences were stimulated by this powerful production of a play that has a startling European history of heavy political adaptation. Living closely with the Company, David Daniell gained a remarkable standpoint for approaching the play and its performance as well as for drawing a fascinating account of a great theatre company on the move. His interpretation of the play and theatrical technique draws extensively on the experiences of the actors, other members of the company and its European hosts, audiences and critics. Coriolanus in Europe provides some penetrating insights into the problems and achievements of present-day theatre in general and of one outstanding Company in particular.

Fiona Ritchie analyses the significant role played by women in the construction of Shakespeare's reputation which took place in the eighteenth century. The period's perception of Shakespeare as unlearned allowed many women to identify with him and in doing so they seized an opportunity to enter public life by writing about and performing his works. Actresses (such as Hannah Pritchard, Kitty Clive, Susannah Cibber, Dorothy Jordan and Sarah Siddons), female playgoers (including the Shakespeare Ladies Club) and women critics (like Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith and Elizabeth Inchbald), had a profound effect on Shakespeare's reception. Interdisciplinary in approach and employing a broad range of sources, this book's analysis of criticism, performance and audience response shows that in constructing Shakespeare's significance for themselves and for society, women were instrumental in the establishment of Shakespeare at the forefront of English literature, theatre, culture and society in the eighteenth century and beyond.

Shakespeare's Catholic context was the most important literary discovery of the last century. No biography of the Bard is now complete without chapters on the paranoia and persecution in which he was educated, or the treason which engulfed his family. Whether to suffer outrageous fortune or take up arms in suicidal resistance was, as Hamlet says, 'the question' that fired Shakespeare's stage. In 'Secret Shakespeare' Richard Wilson asks why the dramatist remained so enigmatic about his own beliefs, and so silent on the atrocities he survived. Shakespeare constructed a drama not of discovery, like his rivals, but of darkness, deferral, evasion and disguise, where, for all his hopes of a 'golden time' of future toleration, 'What's to come' is always unsure. Whether or not 'He died a papist', it is because we can never 'pluck out the heart' of his mystery that Shakespeare's plays retain their unique potential to resist. This is a fascinating work, which will be essential reading for all scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies. -- .

This dip-in, flick-through, quick-fire resource book, part of the bestselling Drama Games series, offers dozens of games to help bring Shakespeare's plays to life in the classroom or rehearsal room - making them fun and accessible to actors, students, directors and teachers. Inspired by the work of leading cultural education charity Coram Shakespeare Schools Foundation, this book offers a wide range of activities to tackle every aspect of the plays, including: Warm-ups and General Games to establish an atmosphere of focus, connection, support and fun - all the conditions you need for a successful session Story and World-building to explore the events, environments and societies of Shakespeare's plays Introducing Shakespeare's Language to help break down the text and allow participants to uncover the meaning through play and creative discovery Activating Shakespeare's Language to liberate actors from the script through movement and voice-work Character to help develop compelling, believable performances by investigating motivations and relationships, circumstances and emotions Staging to help empower every member of the ensemble in moments that might be challenging to stage - such as big movement sequences, fights and battles and intimate love scenes Whatever your reason for exploring Shakespeare - whether you're directing a production, teaching a set text, or introducing his work to a drama club for the first time - this essential resource will give you the tools you need to demystify the language, take ownership of the plays, and find a connection to the words that resonates in our own time.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen provides a lively guide to film and television productions adapted from Shakespeare's plays. Offering an essential resource for students of Shakespeare, the companion considers topics such as the early history of Shakespeare films, the development of 'live' broadcasts from theatre to cinema, the influence of promotion and marketing, and the range of versions available in 'world cinema'. Chapters on the contexts, genres and critical issues of Shakespeare on screen offer a diverse range of close analyses, from 'Classical Hollywood' films to the BBC's Hollow Crown series. The companion also features sections on the work of individual directors Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Vishal Bhardwaj, and is supplemented by a guide to further reading and a filmography.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies, and of the year's major British performances. The books are illustrated with a variety of Shakespearean images and production photographs. The virtues of accessible scholarship and a keen interest in performance, from Shakespeare's time to our own, have characterised the journal from the start. Most volumes of Survey have long been out of print. Back numbers are gradually being reissued in paperback. The theme for Shakespeare Survey 60 is 'Theatres for Shakespeare'.

Timon of Athens has struck many readers as rough and unpolished, perhaps even unfinished, though to others it has appeared as Shakespeare's most profound tragic allegory. Described by Coleridge as 'the stillborn twin of King Lear', the play has nevertheless proved brilliantly effective in performance over the past thirty or forty years.This edition accepts and contributes to the growing scholarly consensus that the play is not Shakespeare's solo work, but is the result of his collaboration with Thomas Middleton, who wrote about a third of it. The editors offer an account of the process of collaboration and discuss the different ways that each author contributes to the play's relentless look at the corruption and greed of society. They provide, as well, detailed annotation of the text and explore the wide range of critical and theatrical interpretations that the play has engendered. Tracing both its satirical and tragic strains, their introduction presents a perspective on the play's meanings that combines careful elucidation of historical context with analysis of its relevance to modern-day society. An extensive and well-illustrated account of the play's production history generates a rich sense of how the play can speak to different historical moments in specific and rewarding ways.

The standard analytical approach to teaching Shakespeare does not tend to help students understand the theatricality of the Bard's plays and can leave them with an overly dry, disconnected view of Shakespeare. Designed to address this problem, Holistic Shakespeare combines analysis with creative learning methods. Holistic Shakespeare acts as a guide for teachers as well as enabling students to feel as if they are in the stands of the Globe Theatre actually watching the play. This book is designed to explain the methodologies and values of the holistic educational model, which is directed toward whole-brain, integrated and experiential learning that motivates students to think deeply about the interlinks between what they learn in the classroom and the significant moral and ethical questions that impact their everyday lives. Further, in the holistic Shakespeare classroom, application of these foundational concepts opens up a fertile pathway that leads students toward a more intimate understanding of how Shakespeare thought - about himself, his relationships and his environment. In holistic education, WHOLENESS (or holism) describes an integrated curricular approach that places value on the complete learner and cultivates every student's unique potential to become active, thinking and caring contributors to the larger world. Holistic Shakespeare embraces the text's definitive status as a theatrical script, making performance-based activities an indispensable instructional tool. Like the exciting creative buzz that pervades the rehearsal room, the holistic learning environment is active, process-oriented, cooperative and exploratory, which restores true ownership of the educational journey to the place where it belongs - in the hands of the student. Performance-based teaching has reinvigorated the Shakespeare classroom in recent decades.

In How and Why We Teach Shakespeare, 19 distinguished college teachers and directors draw from their personal experiences and share their methods and the reasons why they teach Shakespeare. The collection is divided into four sections: studying the text as a script for performance; exploring Shakespeare by performing; implementing specific techniques for getting into the plays; and working in different classrooms and settings. The contributors offer a rich variety of topics, including: working with cues in Shakespeare, such as line and mid-line endings that lead to questions of interpretation seeing Shakespeare's stage directions and the Elizabethan playhouse itself as contributing to a play's meaning using the "gamified" learning model or cue-cards to get into the text thinking of the classroom as a rehearsal playing the Friar to a student's Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet teaching Shakespeare to inner-city students or in a country torn by political and social upheavals. For fellow instructors of Shakespeare, the contributors address their own philosophies of teaching, the relation between scholarship and performance, and-perhaps most of all-why in this age the study of Shakespeare is so important. Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780367190798_oachapter10.pdf

This volume draws together thirteen important essays on the concept of race in Shakespeare's drama. The authors, who themselves reflect racial and geographical diversity, explore issues of ethnography, politics, religion, identity, nationalism, and the distribution of power in Shakespeare's plays. They write from a variety of perspectives, drawing on Elizabethan and Jacobean historical studies and recent critical theory, attending to performances of the plays, as well as to the text. An introductory essay sets the context for the ensuing chapters, most of which are reprinted from volumes of Shakespeare Survey.

This is a collection of original essays about how Shakespeare and his plays are increasingly being used as a means of furthering literacy, language arts, creative and dramatic learning for children in and out of the classroom. It is divided into three sections comprising essays by well-known children's book authors, literary scholars and teachers, who approach the subject from a wide range of perspectives.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Stephen Orgel brings together essays that have changed the way we think about the age of Shakespeare. Topics include the theatre as social phenomenon, the development of the stage as an architectural presence and a cultural institution, the changing use of setting and costume, the changing status of the acting profession, the complex relation of theatre to the political life of the age. Most of all, The Authentic Shakespeare is about how the modern constructs the past, how the texts that were performed on the Elizabethan stage became the books and editions that are, for our time, Renaissance drama.
Many essays in The Authentic Shakespeare have become classics. Collected here for the first time, they essential reading for students of the Renaissance stage and the history of the book.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Stephen Orgel brings together essays that have changed the way we think about the age of Shakespeare. Topics include the theatre as social phenomenon, the development of the stage as an architectural presence and a cultural institution, the changing use of setting and costume, the changing status of the acting profession, the complex relation of theatre to the political life of the age. Most of all, The Authentic Shakespeare is about how the modern constructs the past, how the texts that were performed on the Elizabethan stage became the books and editions that are, for our time, Renaissance drama.
Many essays in The Authentic Shakespeare have become classics. Collected here for the first time, they essential reading for students of the Renaissance stage and the history of the book.

Published in 1999. Shakespeare is 'the great author of America' declared James Fenimore Cooper in 1828. The ambiguous resonance of this claim is fully borne out in this collection of writings on Shakespeare by over forty prominent Americans, spanning the period between the War of independence and the outbreak of the First World War. Featured writers include: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. The essays, many of which are reprinted here for the first time, are arranged in chronological order and provide a fascinating conspectus of American attitudes to Shakespeare, from Revolutionary and Transcendentalist approaches through to the influential interventions of professional American critics in the early twentieth century. The extraordinary and bizarre contribution to the Shakespeare debut by Delia Bacon is exemplified by the inclusion of her 1856 article which is reprinted in its entirety. Americans on Shakespeare charts the emergence of an American literary tradition, and the gradual appropriation of Shakespeare as part of the American search for cultural identity; an identity whose domination is set to continue into the twenty-first century.

Shakespeare in the Present is a stunning collection of essays by Terence Hawkes, which engage with, explain, and explore 'presentism'. Presentism is a critical manoeuvre which uses relevant aspects of the contemporary as a crucial trigger for its investigations. It deliberately begins with the material present and lets that set the interrogative agenda. This book suggests ways in which its principles may be applied to aspects of Shakespeare's plays.
Hawkes concentrates on two main areas in which Presentism impacts on the study of Shakespeare. The first is the concept of 'devolution' in British politics. The second is presentism's commitment to a reversal of conceptual hierarchies such as primary/secondary and past/present, and the interaction between performance and reference. The result is to sophisticate and expand our notion of performing and to refocus interest on what the early modern theatre meant by the activity it termed 'playing'.