This remarkable volume challenges scholars and students to look beyond a dominant European and North American "metropolitan bank" of Shakespeare knowledge. As well as revealing the potential for a new understanding of Shakespeare's plays, Martin Orkin explores a fresh approach to issues of power, where "proximations" emerge from a process of dialogue and challenge traditional notions of authority.
Since their first performances, Shakespeare's plays and their audiences or readers have journeyed to one another across time and space, to and from countless and always different historical, geographical and ideological locations. Engagement with a Shakespeare text always entails in part, then, cultural encounter or clash, and readings are shaped by a reader's particular location and knowledge. Part I of this book challenges us to recognize the way in which "local" or "non-metropolitan" knowledges and experiences might extend understanding of Shakespeare's texts and their locations. Part II demonstrates the use of local as well as metropolitan knowledges in exploring the presentation of masculinity in Shakespeare's late plays. These plays themselves dramatize encounters with different cultures and, crucially, challenges to established authority.
Challenging the authority of metropolitan scholarship, twenty-first-century global capitalism and the masculinist imperatives that drive it, Orkin's daring, powerful work will have reverberations throughout but also well beyond the field of Shakespeare studies.

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of Troilus and Cressida, a play that has long been considered difficult but is now popular both on the stage and in criticism, features an expanded and updated introduction and reading list. The first edition has been praised for its careful rethinking of the text, excellent annotation, lively attention to performance and extensive coverage of the play's major concerns. This updated edition retains these characteristics. In addition, Gretchen Minton and Anthony B. Dawson have provided a new account of the critical and theatrical treatment of Troilus and Cressida over the last fifteen years, showing how modern audiences have become attuned to the play's sardonic undercutting of both the medieval romance of the title characters and the Homeric tale of the Trojan War. Recent performance history is placed against a broader background of social change, including shifting attitudes towards war, political decision-making, gender politics, and fear of disease and contagion.

Read HAMLET in graphic-novel form--with NO FEAR! NOW IN COLOR! Based on the No Fear Shakespeare translations, this dynamic graphic novel--now with color added--is impossible to put down. The illustrations are distinctively offbeat, slightly funky, and appealing to teens. Includes: - An illustrated cast of characters - A helpful plot summary - Illustrations that show the reader exactly what's happening in each scene--making the plot and characters clear and easy to follow

This book explores traditional approaches to the play, which includes an examination of the play in light of current history, in the context of Renaissance England, and in relation to Shakespeare's other Roman plays as well as structural examination of plot, language, character, and source material. Julius Caesar: Critical Essays also examines the current debates concerning the play in Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, queer, and gender contexts.

This eye-opening study draws attention to the largely neglected form of the early modern prologue. Reading the prologue in performed as well as printed contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann take us beyond concepts of stability and autonomy in dramatic beginnings to reveal the crucial cultural functions performed by the prologue in Elizabethan England. While its most basic task is to seize the attention of a noisy audience, the prologue's more significant threshold position is used to usher spectators and actors through a rite of passage. Engaging competing claims, expectations and offerings, the prologue introduces, authorizes and, critically, straddles the worlds of the actual theatrical event and the 'counterfeit' world on stage. In this way, prologues occupy a unique and powerful position between two orders of cultural practice and perception. Close readings of prologues by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Peele and Lyly, demonstrate the prologue's role in representing both the world in the play and playing in the world. Through their detailed examination of this remarkable form and its functions, the authors provide a fascinating perspective on early modern drama, a perspective that enriches our knowledge of the plays' socio-cultural context and their mode of theatrical address and action.

In the 1590s, Shakespeare was working with and writing for the Lord Chamberlain's Men at The Theatre, Shoreditch while he was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate Street. Living with Shakespeare examines his parish, church, locale, neighbours and their potential influences on his writing--from the radical 'Paracelsian' doctors, musicians and public figures--to the international merchants who lived nearby. Packed with new discoveries from difficult-to-access manuscript records this book reveals the parish's complex social, religious, political and neighbourly intersections and influences. Taking a section of Shakespeare's life, (c. 1593-1598), as he evolved from new 'arriviste' in London to established theatre professional, the book examines the 100 or so families who lived in his parish and demonstrates how their interests, work and connections formed part of the background environment that Shakespeare probably borrowed from as he reworked existing stories. These people form a fascinating story, which sheds new light on the influences that shaped a great writer as he finished Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice and began to re-establish his family name, status and reputation. Marsh's ability to weave primary research and discoveries together with historical narratives, transports readers into Shakespeare's world and allows them a real glimpse into his daily life.

In the past two decades, Othello has tried out for the basketball team, Macbeth has taken over a fast food joint, and King Lear has moved to an lowa farm - Shakespeare is everywhere in popular culture. This collection of essays addresses the use of Shakespearean narratives, themes, imagery, and characterizations in non-Shakespearian cinema. The essays explore how Shakespeare and his work are manipulated within the popular media and explore topics such as racism, jealousy, misogyny and nationality. The question of whether a contemporary production is influenced by Shakespeare or by an earlier piece that influenced Shakespeare is also addressed. The submissions concentrate on film and television programs that are adaptations of Shakespearean plays, including My Own Private Idaho, CSI-Miami, A Thousand Acres, Prospero's Books, O, 10 Things I Hate About You, Withnail and I, Get Over It, and The West Wing. Each chapter includes notes and a list of works cited. A full bibliography completes the work; it is divided into bibliographies and filmographies, general studies and essays, derivatives based on a single play, derivatives based on several, and derivatives based on Shakespeare as a character.

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

Although he is considered to be the world's greatest dramatist, Shakespeare seems to have escaped the detection of thinkers on politics and the philosophic tradition of thought on man. Shakespeare's 'King Lear' with 'The Tempest' is Mark McDonald's inquiry into the political philosophy of William Shakespeare through a reading of King Lear with reference to The Tempest. McDonald follows an argument connecting King Lear to the question of natural right and to changes in the orders of the western world at the beginnings of modernity.

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.

"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.

The gods have much to tell us about performance. When human actors portray deities onstage, such divine epiphanies reveal not only the complexities of mortals playing gods but also the nature of theatrical spectacle itself. The very impossibility of rendering the gods in all their divine splendor in a truly convincing way lies at the intersection of divine power and the power of the theater. This book pursues these dynamics on the stages of ancient Athens and Rome as well on those of Renaissance England to shed new light on theatrical performance. The authors reveal how gods appear onstage both to astound and to dramatize the very machinations by which theatrical performance operates. Offering an array of case studies featuring both canonical and lesser-studied texts, this volume discusses work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Plautus as well as Beaumont, Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. This book uniquely brings together the joint perspectives of two experts on classical and Renaissance drama. This volume will appeal to students and enthusiasts of literature, classics, theater, and performance studies.

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.

The Soul of Athens: Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' studies Shakespeare's portrayal of the founding of Athens through a close reading of one of the Bard's most memorable comedies. Through a painstakingly close reading of the play, author Jan H. Blits shows how Shakespeare's portrayal of this legendary first democracy illuminates the natural doubleness of the human soul by emphasizing the lure of both beauty and wisdom.A Midsummer Night's Dream is thus Shakespeare's examination not only of a particular city at a particular time, but of the essential duality of the human soul. Coupling careful attention to detail with interpretive breadth, The Soul of Athens examines the nature of love, the natural doubleness of human thinking and the ambiguous relation of image and reality, as well as patriarchy and democracy, and heroic and moral virtue.

The Soul of Athens: Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" studies Shakespeare's portrayal of the founding of Athens through a close reading of one of the Bard's most memorable comedies. Through a painstakingly close reading of the play, author Jan H. Blits shows how Shakespeare's portrayal of this legendary first democracy illuminates the natural doubleness of the human soul by emphasizing the lure of both beauty and wisdom.A Midsummer Night's Dream is thus Shakespeare's examination not only of a particular city at a particular time, but of the essential duality of the human soul. Coupling careful attention to detail with interpretive breadth, The Soul of Athens examines the nature of love, the natural doubleness of human thinking and the ambiguous relation of image and reality, as well as patriarchy and democracy, and heroic and moral virtue.

The aesthetics of frame theory form the basis of "Framing Shakespeare on Film." This groundbreaking work expands on the discussion of film constructivists in its claim that the spectacle of Shakespeare on film is a problem-solving activity.
Kathy Howlett demonstrates convincingly how viewers' expectations for understanding Shakespeare on film can be manipulated by the director's cinematic technique. Emphasizing that the successful film can transform Shakespeare's text while remaining rooted in Shakespearean conceptions, Howlett raises the question of how directors and audiences understand the genre of Shakespeare on film and reveals how the medium alters the patterns through which the audience views Shakespeare.

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.

This volume bears potent testimony, not only to the dense complexity of Hamlet's emotional dynamics, but also to the enduring fascination that audiences, adaptors, and academics have with what may well be Shakespeare's moodiest play. Its chapters explore emotion in Hamlet, as well as the myriad emotions surrounding Hamlet's debts to the medieval past, its relationship to the cultural milieu in which it was produced, its celebrated performance history, and its profound impact beyond the early modern era. Its component chapters are not unified by a single methodological approach. Some deal with a single emotion in Hamlet, while others analyse the emotional trajectory of a single character, and still others focus on a given emotional expression (e.g., sighing or crying). Some bring modern methodologies for studying emotion to bear on Hamlet, others explore how Hamlet anticipates modern discourses on emotion, and still others ask how Hamlet itself can complicate and contribute to our current understanding of emotion.

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.

Even the most explicitly political contemporary approaches to Shakespeare have been uninterested by his tyrants as such. But for Shakespeare, rather than a historical curiosity or psychological aberration, tyranny is a perpetual political and human problem. Mary Ann McGrail's recovery of the playwright's perspective challenges the grounds of this modern critical silence. She locates Shakespeare's expansive definition of tyranny between the definitions accepted by classical and modern political philosophy. Is tyranny always the worst of all possible political regimes, as Aristotle argues in his Politics? Or is disguised tyranny, as Machiavelli proposes, potentially the best regime possible? These competing conceptions were practiced and debated in Renaissance thought, given expression by such political actors and thinkers as Elizabeth I, James I, Henrie Bullinger, Bodin, and others. McGrail focuses on Shakespeare's exploration of the conflicting and contradictory passions that make up the tyrant and finds that Shakespeare's dramas of tyranny rest somewhere between Aristotle's reticence and Machiavelli's forthrightness. Literature and politics intersect in Tyranny in Shakespeare, which will fascinate students and scholars of both.

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'.

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'.