Originally published in 1991. Essays here are arranged chronologically within sections: 'The Play as Text', 'Shylock' and 'The Play in the Theatre.' Collecting previously published important commentaries and scholarly articles, this volume in the Shakespearean Criticism set looks at one of the Bard's most disturbing plays. These historical critical pieces give witness to the changing attitudes to the play and the characters and provide readers with a wide range of material relating both to performances and to textual readings.

A comparative reference guide to Shakespeare's grammar, based on a complete revision of an extremely elderly but still much-cited volume, Abbott's Shakespearean Grammar, first published in 1869 and still regarded by default as an essential component of Shakespeare research. This volume meets the identified need for an authoritative and systematic grammar of Shakespeare which takes account both of current linguistic developments and of the current state of knowledge about Early Modern English and enable editors and readers both to understand and to contextualise Shakespeare's use and manipulation of language, i.e. to locate it in the context of other writings in Early Modern English.'Should be an essential reference tool not only for Shakespeare editors but for university and school teachers' ' Professor Ernst Honigmann, editor of Arden 3 Othello'...should become part of every reader's, and certainly every teacher's, arsenal of central reference books' - Ruth Morse, Shakespeare Survey

Professor Hussey looks at the vocabulary, syntax and register of Renaissance English, following this with a more detailed analysis of particular kinds of language in the plays such as prose, verse, rhetoric and the soliloquy. For this new edition, the text has been revised throughout with, in particular, a completely new chapter providing detailed readings of selected plays, illustrating the ways particular aspects of language can be studied in practice.

Shakespeare Left and Right brings together critics, strikingly different in their politics and methodologies, who are acutely aware of the importance of politics on literary practice and theory. Should, for example, feminist criticism be subjected to a critique by voices it construes as hostile to its political agenda? Is it possible to present a critique of feminist criticism without implicitly impeding its politics? And, in the light of recent political events should the Right pronounce the demise of Marxism as a social science and interpretive tool? The essays in Shakespeare Left and Right, first published in 1991, present a tug of war about ideology, acted out over the body of Shakespeare. Part One focuses on the challenge thrown down by Richard Levin's widely discussed "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy". Part Two considers these issues in relation to critical practice and the reading of specific plays. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics interested in Shakespeare studies.

This book charts the personal and professional journey of Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2012 until 2022 and "one of the great Shakespearians of his generation" (Sunday Times). During his illustrious career, Doran has directed or produced all of the plays within Shakespeare's First Folio -- a milestone reached in the same year that the world celebrates the 400th anniversary of its original publication. Each chapter looks at a different play, considering the choices made and weaving in both autobiographical detail and background on the RSC, as well as giving insights into key collaborations, including those with actors such as Judi Dench, David Tennant, Harriet Walter, Patrick Stewart, Simon Russell Beale, Paterson Joseph and Doran's husband, the late Antony Sher, as well as seminal practitioners such as Cicely Berry, John Barton and Terry Hands. The book also includes 16 striking pages with stills from some of the RSC plays. Through Doran's account of this extraordinary journey, we see how Henry VIII, initially regarded as a poisoned chalice, became his lucky break; how the tragedy of 9/11 unfolded during a matinee of King John and how the language of the play went some way in helping to articulate the unfathomable; how a RSC supporter bequeathed their skull to the company to be used as Yorick in Hamlet; how meeting Nelson Mandela inspired the production of Julius Caesar; how Falstaff was introduced to China for the very first time; and how arachnophobia informed the production of Macbeth. This book uniquely captures the excitement, energy, surprises, joys and agonies of working on these greatest of plays; sheds new light on these plays through Doran's own research and discoveries made in the rehearsal room; and gives unprecedented access into the craft, life and loves of this exceptional director.

This book is a concise single volume guide to studying Shakespeare, covering practical as well as theoretical issues. The text deals with the major topics on a chapter-by-chapter basis, starting with why we study Shakespeare, through Shakespeare and multimedia, to a final chapter on Shakespeare and Theory. Current trends and recent developments in Shakespearean studies are also discussed, with an emphasis on the contextualisation of Shakespeare, historical appropriations of his work and the debate concerning his place in the literary canon. Extensive reference is made to a variety of developing media, e.g. film, audio cassette, video, CD-Rom and global digital networks, bringing the study of Shakespeare into the twentieth century.

"The Death of the Actor" reveals the tragicomic impotence of the actor confronting Shakespeare's dramatic text. Because actors are absent from the site of Shakespeare's meaning, Martin Buzacott argues, the illusion of their centrality is sustained only by a rhetoric of heroism, violence, and imperialism. This book examines those myths through which Shakespearean actors sustain their authority, and launches an all out attack on contemporary theatre practice and performance theory which identify the actor, rather than the director, as the key creative force in the performance of Shakespeare.
Contemporary studies of Shakespeare in performance are influenced, Buzacott suggests, by the current vogue for identifying actors as respectable social and political figures, rather than thieves and vagabonds, as they were viewed in Shakespeare's time. In contrast, he defends Romantic critics like Lamb and Coleridge for their presumed preference for reading Shakespeare's plays rather than seeing them performed.

An original reading of Shakespeare's plays illuminating his negotiations with mothers, present and absent, and tracing the genesis of Shakespearean tragedy and romance to a psychologized version of the Fall.

The genius of Shakespeare is not always accessible or easily understandable to readers and audiences. Leon Kellner points out that sometimes Shakespeare's languages does not make sense at all but this is not necessarily because his metaphors are too complex. Rather, the printing of his works is often filled with errors. Originally published in 1925, Kellner's work explores the reasons and potential mistakes which may account for the unintelligible passages in Shakespeare such as handwriting, abbreviations, and the confusing of pronouns. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature and Linguistics.

Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.

The problem of justice seems to have haunted Shakespeare as it haunted Renaissance Christendom. In this book, first published in 1963, four aspects of the problems of justice in action in Shakespeare's great tragedies are explored. This study is based on the lifetime's research of Elizabethan habits of mind by one of the most distinguished Shakespearean scholars, and will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.

In this fascinating book, Leah S. Marcus argues that the colonial context in which Shakespeare was edited and disseminated during the heyday of the British Empire has left a mark on Shakespeare's texts to the present day. How Shakespeare Became Colonial offers a unique and engaging argument, including: A brief history of the colonial importance of editing Shakespeare; The colonially inflected racism that hides behind the editing of Othello; The editing of female characters - colonization as sexual conquest; The significance of editions that were specifically created for schools in India during British colonial rule. Marcus traces important ways in which the colonial enterprise of setting forth the best possible Shakespeare for world consumption has continued to be visible in the recent treatment of his playtexts today, despite our belief that we are global or postcolonial in approach.

This book is a study of four of Shakespeare's major tragedies - "Hamlet", "Othello", "King Lear" and "Macbeth". It looks at these plays in a variety of contexts - both in isolation and in relation to each other and to the cultural, ideological, social and political contexts which produced them.

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina Leon Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female sexuality that recur in the form of a slander narrative throughout William Shakespeare's work. She argues that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. While men's accusations are built on a foundation of political, religious, legal, and domestic discourses about men's superiority to, and rule over, women, whose weaker natures render them perpetually suspect, women's bonds with other women animate defenses of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of patrilineal power that undergirds masculine privileges in marriage, and signify a discursive shift that constitutes the site of agency within a system of oppression that ought to prohibit such agency. That women's agency in the early modern period must be tied to the formations of power that officially demand their subjection need not undermine their acts. In what Alfar calls Shakespeare's cuckoldry plays, women's rhetoric of defense is both subject to the discourse of sexual honor and finds a ground on which to "shift it" as women take control of and replace sexual slander with their own narratives of marital betrayal.

The question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays has been the subject of furious debate among scholars for over 150 years. Everything known about the facts of William Shakespeare's life seems incompatible with the extraordinary genius of his writing. How could a man who left school at the age of 13, and apparently never travelled abroad have authored the incomparable Sonnets or so intricately described Renaissance Venice? Shakespeare 'candidates' abound, among them Sir Francis Bacon, The Earl of Oxford, even Queen Elizabeth I herself, but none have stood up to serious scrutiny. Until now.... This remarkable, intriguing, and provocative book offers a completely plausible new candidate; Sir Henry Neville.

The twenty-eight essays of this collection, first published in 1962, are the work of distinguished British, Canadian, and American scholars. The essays range widely over the field of Elizabethan drama, concentrating attention on Shakespeare and Marlowe but not neglecting earlier dramatists such as Kyd and Greene or later ones such as Heywood and Massinger. Among the general topics treated are the staging of the interludes, intrigue in Elizabethan tragedy, and Jacobean stage pastoralism. This title will be of interest to students of English literature.

In this illuminating study Matt Simpson discusses the importance of honour and ritual in the lives of the characters, their need to be seen to be doing what is deemed right and virtuous, but which sometimes causes them to do wrong things for what they think are the right reasons. At the same time he asks us to guard against wanting to interpret the play too readily as if it were a realist text by emphasising its structural features, its patterning of parallels and contrasts, and the skill with which Shakespeare manipulates audience expectations. Ultimately he sees the play to be about redemption and renewal.

A new source for Shakespeare's plays, only recently uncovered, is investigated here with a full edition and facsimile of the text. New sources for Shakespeare do not turn up every day... This is a truly significant one that has not heretofore been studied or published. The list of passages now traced back to this source is impressive. - David Bevington, Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago "A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels" is the only uniquely existent, unpublished manuscript that can be shown to have been a source for Shakespeare's plays. George North wrote the treatise in 1576 while at Kirtling Hall, the North family estate in Cambridgeshire. His manuscript, newly uncovered by the authors at the British Library, has many implications for our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. for example, not only does it bring clarity to the Fool's mysterious reference to Merlin in King Lear, but also upsets the prevailing opinion that Shakespeare invented the final hours of Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI. Linguistic and thematic correspondences between the North manuscript and Shakespeare's plays make it clear that the playwright borrowed from this document in other plays as well, including Richard III, 3 Henry VI, Henry V, King John, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. The opening chapters of the book investigate such connections; the volume also contains both a transcript and a facsimile of "A Brief Discourse", making this previously unknown document readily available. DENNIS MCCARTHY is an independent scholar; JUNE SCHLUETER is Charles A. Dana Professor Emerita of English at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania.

In 1600, after a decade spent establishing himself as the most popular and successful playwright of his generation, Shakespeare found himself having to compete with new and younger writers. At the same time he had to face the challenge of new theatres designed for a better class of audience, which looked as though they might cream off some of his most valued customers. Difficult as it may be to believe that Shakespeare faced such commercial and artistic pressures, common sense and hard historical fact tell us that he did not work in isolation from the theatrical world in which he was so spectacular a success. In "Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights" David Farley-Hills gives an interpretation of seven of Shakespeare's plays from 1600 to 1606 in the light of pressures exerted by his major stage rivals. He argues that Shakespeare responded to the problem with a double strategy; attempting to compete with the new fashions of the covered theatres with plays such as "Troilus and Cressida", "All's Well That Ends Well", and "Measure for Measure"; and rivalling the work of the open theatres with the tragedies "Hamlet", "Othello", and "King Lear".

Originally published in 1995. In three parts - introduction, criticism and reviews - this volume examines the goriest of Shakespeare's works. The editor's exhaustive introduction runs through the pattern of changing scholarship and commentary, introducing the key interests in the play, from its authorship to its language, rhetoric and performance. Early commentaries focused on arguing about whether the play was truly Shakespeare's. A selection of the most important of these are included here followed by later investigations looking at myriad topics and characters - revenge, violence, race, Aaron, women, tragedy and Tamora. The large section of reviews of stage performances, arranged chronologically, ranges from 1857 to 1990. Two final pieces interestingly survey stage history of Titus in Japan and in Germany.

Originally published in 1995. Providing the most influential historical criticism, but also some contemporary pieces written for the volume, this collection includes the most essential study and reviews of this tragic play. The first part contains critical articles arranged chronologically while the second part presents reviews of stage performances from 1901 to 1988 from a variety of sources. Chapters chosen are representative of their given age and critical approach and therefore show the changing responses and the topics that interested critics in the play through the years. Coriolanus is an unsympathetic character and the play has been traditionally less popular than other tragedies - a comprehensive introduction by the editor discusses these attitudes to the play and the reasons behind them.

Originally published in 1984. The four parts of this collection of articles, from 1601 to the 1970s, look at the historical and political dynamics of the play, the play in the theatre, the psychology of its characters, and its poetry and rhetoric. Bringing together the best that was written about Richard II, this volume represents the collective wisdom of Shakespeare scholars and provides the most insightful criticism in one place. An unpopular play for many years due to the perceived weak main character and the theme of deposition, the play later gained popularity and interest in its psychology and political investigation. The poetry in particular has garnered enthusiastic response and is mentioned in most of the pieces included here.

Originally published in 1988. Selections here are organised chronologically looking at both theatrical commentary and literary criticism. The organisation brings out the shifts in emphasis as each generation reinvents Shakespeare, and Othello, by the questions asked, those not asked, and the answers given. Chapters cover the theme of heroic action, Iago's motivation, guilt and jealousy, and obsession. Some entries from the world of theatre delve into the portrayal of the Moor, Desdemona and Iago from the 1940s on. Authors include A. C. Bradley, William Hazlitt, Ellen Terry, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Helen Gardner and Edward A. Snow.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203359046

Originally published in 1988. Arranged by play, the essays presented here focus first on production and then on a range of other issues such as characters, imagery, textual problems and themes. Both plays were more popular in earlier centuries and most later essayists focused on small issues rather than view the plays in wider perspective. More recent pieces included here seek organising principles for King John and look in more detail at Henry VIII. Beginning with the in-depth introduction by the editor, this collection shows the reception of the play by its Elizabethan audience compared to twentieth century audiences and looks at the history portrayed by Shakespeare. Some chapters review very varied stage productions while others are character analysis or individual focuses.