First published in 1986. 'Impressively open to the complexity of cultural discourses, to the ways in which one discursive form may function as a screen for another above all to the political entailment of genre.'Stephen Greenblatt. What is the relation between literary and political power? How do the symbolic dimensions of social practice and the social dimensions of artistic practice relate to one another? Power on Display considers Shakespeare's progression from romantic comedies and history plays to tragedy and romance in the light of the general process of cultural change in the period.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Shakespeare's Sonnets are universally loved and much-quoted throughout the world, while debates still rage as to the identity of the Dark Lady and how autobiographical the sonnets really are. This revised edition has been updated in the light of new scholarship and critical analysis since its first publication which won a wide range of critical acclaim. Author Katherine Duncan Jones tackles the controversies and mysteries surrounding these beautiful poems head on, and explores the issues of sexuality to be found in them, making this a truly modern edition for today's readers and students.

For more than a century educators, students and general readers have relied on The Arden Shakespeare to provide the very best scholarship and most authoritative texts available.

Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing volumes offer a new type of study aid that combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the writing skills you need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's complex dramatic language, and expanding your own critical vocabulary, as you respond to his plays. Each guide in the series will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm. A notoriously disturbing play, The Merchant of Venice explores how the discourses of racial and religious prejudice and of business intertwine and shape how characters understand themselves and their relationships with one another. The intersections between religious, racial and economic language in The Merchant of Venice can be challenging to grasp, but in this guide Douglas Lanier showcases a range of approaches to understanding its language, all based on close reading and attention to Shakespeare's style. The volume will equip you to analyze Shakespeare's troubling portrayal of anti-Semitism for yourself and to articulate your views on The Merchant of Venice with greater insight and confidence.

Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, Othello, with its issues of racism, jealousy and sexual stereotyping seems most immediate to contemporary audiences. Traces Othello's acting tradition as it has affected the roles of Othello, Desdemona and Iago - demonstrating the emphasis placed on different characters in different countries. Examines various stage and screen versions of the play which reflect or challenge current views about race and gender. In depth study of famous Othello actor Paul Robeson, comparing his career to that of Ira Aldridge. The range of productions examined means that the book will appeal to all students and enthusiasts of the theatre, as well as those in the field of ethnic and cultural approaches to Shakespeare -- .

New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity documents and analyses the different ways in which a range of innovative projects take Shakespeare out into the world beyond education and the theatre. Mixing critical reflection on the social value of Shakespeare with new creative work in different forms and idioms, the volume triumphantly shows that Shakespeare can make a real contribution to contemporary civic life. Highlights include: Garrick's 1769 Shakespeare ode, its revival in 2016, and a devised performance interpretation of it; the full text of Carol Ann Duffy's A Shakespeare Masque (set to music by Sally Beamish); a new Shakespearean libretto inspired by Wagner; an exploration of the civic potential of new Shakespeare opera and ballet; a fresh Shakespeare-inspired poetic liturgy, including commissions by major British poets; a production of The Merchant of Venice marking the 500th anniversary of the Venetian Jewish Ghetto; and a remaking of Pericles as a response to the global migrant crisis.

Features actors who were significant in their development of new and innovative ways of performing Shakespeare. This title contains extracts from diaries, memoirs, private letters, and obituaries that present a contemporary account of their acting achievements and personal lives.

Shakespeare on Record is a unique guide to major Shakespeare discoveries and the archival insight that made them possible. With contributions from experts at The National Archives, the Folger Shakespeare Library and leading universities, the book explores and explains the bureaucratic processes and governmental practices that shaped life and records in Renaissance England - making it a key resource for both Shakespeare scholars and researchers of early modern lives. Chapters examine key documents concerning property, the law, coats of arms and investments, which relate to Shakespeare's lives in both Stratford and London. Several of The National Archives' collection of over 120 documents which illuminate Shakespeare's life are profiled here for the first time. Richly illustrated throughout, this is a key resource for both Shakespeare scholars and researchers of early modern lives.

This book examines Shakespeare's fascination with the art of narrative and the visuality of language. Richard Meek complicates our conception of Shakespeare as either a 'man of the theatre' or a 'literary dramatist', suggesting ways in which his works themselves debate the question of text versus performance. Beginning with an exploration of the pictorialism of Shakespeare's narrative poems, the book goes on to examine several moments in Shakespeare's dramatic works when characters break off the action to describe an absent, 'offstage' event, place or work of art. Meek argues that Shakespeare does not simply prioritise drama over other forms of representation, but rather that he repeatedly exploits the interplay between different types of mimesis - narrative, dramatic and pictorial - in order to beguile his audiences and readers. Setting Shakespeare's works in their literary and rhetorical contexts, and engaging with contemporary literary theory, the book offers new readings of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale. The book will be of particular relevance to readers interested in the relationship between verbal and visual art, theories of representation and mimesis, Renaissance literary and rhetorical culture, and debates regarding Shakespeare's status as a literary dramatist.

A lively, concise introduction to film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays from the silent era to the present, Shakespeare and Film pays particular attention to the most influential directors' cinematic portrayals of the plays, offering insightful close readings of the elements of film camera work, editing, music, acting, montage, among others that students can use as models for their own writing and analysis.

King Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play, revealing it as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation which sees English life since Henry VIII's day as a series of bewildering changes in national and personal allegiance and represents 'history' as the product of varied and contradictory testimony. McMullan makes a powerful claim for the rehabilitation of Henry VIII, providing the fullest performance history of any edition to date and reading the work not as a marginal 'late' Shakespeare play but as a play which is paradigmatic of the achievement of Renaissance drama as a whole.

Focusing on a period (c.1577-1594) that is often neglected in Elizabethan theater histories, this study considers Shakespeare's involvement with the various London acting companies before his membership in the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594. Locating Shakespeare in the confusing records of the early London theater scene has long been one of the many unresolved problems in Shakespeare studies and is a key issue in theatre history, Shakespeare biography, and historiography. The aim in this book is to explain, analyze, and assess the competing claims about Shakespeare's pre-1594 acting company affiliations. Schoone-Jongen does not demonstrate that one particular claim is correct but provides a possible framework for Shakespeare's activities in the 1570s and 1580s, an overview of both London and provincial playing, and then offers a detailed analysis of the historical plausibility and probability of the warring claims made by biographers, ranging from the earliest sixteenth-century references to contemporary arguments. Full chapters are devoted to four specific acting companies, their activities, and a summary and critique of the arguments for Shakespeare's involvement in them (The Queen's Men, Strange's Men, Pembroke's Men, and Sussex's Men), a further chapter is dedicated to the proposition Shakespeare's first theatrical involvement was in a recusant Lancashire household, and a final chapter focuses on arguments for Shakespeare's membership in a half dozen other companies (most prominently Leicester's Men). Shakespeare's Companies simultaneously opens up twenty years of theatrical activity to inquiry and investigation while providing a critique of Shakespearean biographers and their historical methodologies.

During the eighteenth century, theatrical writing developed as a genre. The publishing market responded to a seemingly insatiable appetite for accounts of the personalities, social lives and performances of celebrated entertainers. This series features actors who were significant in their development of new ways of performing Shakespeare.

Drawing upon a vast literature in psychoanalytic journals 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 maincharacters within them. Psychoanalytic and literary approaches sometimes diverge, but they can also concur in seeing characters either as true examples of different psychological states and types of relating or as symbolic of aspects of the personality. The chapters contain many references to psychoanalytic interpretations from Freud onwards.The importance of this book lies in its drawing together from a large number of disparate sources, many of which will be inaccessible to those who do not have access to the journals or psychoanalytic databases. It is relevant for counselors and therapists, as well as for those interested in literature, particularly in Shakespearean studies. It is written for the thinking lay reader, and does not blind the ordinary reader with psychoanalytic terminology and concepts. Readers who are therapists may gain some insights into aspects of some of their clients; everyone should be encouraged through these ideas and theories to muse upon aspects of his or her own personality, thoughts, fantasies and behaviors.

Women reading Shakespeare, 1660-1900 comprehensively rediscovers a lost tradition of women's writing on Shakespeare. Since Margaret Cavendish published the first critical essay on Shakespeare in 1664, women have written as scholars, critics, editors, performers and popularisers of Shakespeare. Many found in Shakespeare criticism the opportunity to raise a wide variety of issues, ranging from the use of women in society, family life, social relations and ethnic difference. In their different ways, women appropriated Shakespeare to their own ends - not always in step with their male contemporaries. Virtually none of this work is available today; it is unread and unknown. This fascinating anthology draws upon extensive new research to collect for the first time in one volume the Shakespeare criticism of some fifty British and American women writing before 1900. It includes the work of both familiar and unknown names and represents the diversity of literary genres used by women: the scholarly article, the periodical essay, book-length studies, personal memoirs, books for children, school editions. The volume also includes previously unknown Shakespeare illustrations by women, and a general introduction to the development of women's criticism of Shakespeare before 1900. -- .

Theatrical performance, suggest the contributors to this volume, can be an unpredictable, individual experience as well as a communal, institutional or cultural event. The essays collected here use the tools of theatre history in their investigation into the phenomenology of the performance experience, yet they are also careful to consider the social, ideological and institutional contingencies that determine the production and reception of the living spectacle. Thus contributors combine a formalist interest in the affective and aesthetic dimensions of language and spectacle with an investment in the material cultures that both produced and received Shakespeare's plays. Six of the chapters focus on early modern cultures of performance, looking specifically at such topics as the performance of rusticity; the culture of credit; contract and performance; the cultivation of Englishness; religious ritual; and mourning and memory. Building upon and interrelating with the preceding essays, the last three chapters deal with Shakespeare and performance culture in modernity. They focus on themes including literary and theatrical performance anxiety; cultural iconicity; and the performance of Shakespearean lateness. This collection strives to bring better understanding to Shakespeare's imaginative investment in the relationship between theatrical production and the emotional, intellectual and cultural effects of performance broadly defined in social terms.

Kimberly Rhodes's interdisciplinary book is the first to explore fully the complicated representational history of Shakespeare's Ophelia during the Victorian period. In nineteenth-century Britain, the shape, function and representation of women's bodies were typically regulated and interpreted by public and private institutions, while emblematic fictional female figures like Ophelia functioned as idealized templates of Victorian womanhood. Rhodes examines the widely disseminated representations of Ophelia, from works by visual artists and writers, to interpretations of her character in contemporary productions of Hamlet, revealing her as a nexus of the struggle for the female body's subjugation. By considering a broad range of materials, including works by Anna Lea Merritt, Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais, and paying special attention to images women produced, Rhodes illuminates Ophelia as a figure whose importance crossed class and national boundaries. Her analysis yields fascinating insights into 'high' and mass culture and enables transnational comparisons that reveal the compelling associations among Ophelia, gender roles, body image and national identity.

This ground-breaking book provides an abundance of fresh insights into Shakespeare's life in relation to his lost family home, New Place. The findings of a major archaeological excavation encourage us to think again about what New Place meant to Shakespeare and, in so doing, challenge some of the long-held assumptions of Shakespearian biography. New Place was the largest house in the borough and the only one with a courtyard. Shakespeare was only ever an intermittent lodger in London. His impressive home gave Shakespeare significant social status and was crucial to his relationship with Stratford-upon-Avon. Archaeology helps to inform biography in this innovative and refreshing study which presents an overview of the site from prehistoric times through to a richly nuanced reconstruction of New Place when Shakespeare and his family lived there, and beyond. This attractively illustrated book is for anyone with a passion for archaeology or Shakespeare. -- .

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.

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.

Focuses on David Garrick and the leading actors of his company at Drury Lane. This book tells how, in their time, Garrick, Macklin and Woffington were as famous for their achievements on the stage as they were infamous for their activities off it. It draws a selection of the actors' own words with those of their contemporaries and critics.

Applying recent developments in new historicism and cultural materialism - along with the new perspectives opened up by the current debate on intertextuality and the construction of the theatrical text - the essays collected here reconsider the pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on early modern English drama. The volume focuses strongly on Shakespeare but also includes contributions on Marston, Middleton, Ford, Brome, Aretino, and other early modern dramatists. The pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on the European Renaissance, it is argued here, offers a valuable opportunity to study the intertextual dynamics that contributed to the construction of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical canon. In the specific area of theatrical discourse, the drama of the early modern period is characterized by the systematic appropriation of a complex Italian iconology, exploited both as the origin of poetry and art and as the site of intrigue, vice, and political corruption. Focusing on the construction and the political implications of the dramatic text, this collection analyses early modern English drama within the context of three categories of cultural and ideological appropriation: the rewriting, remaking, and refashioning of the English theatrical tradition in its iconic, thematic, historical, and literary aspects.

A study of common and exotic food in Shakespeare's plays, this is the first book to explore early modern English dietary literature to understand better the significance of food in Shakespearean drama. Food in Shakespeare provides for modern readers and audiences an historically accurate account of the range of, and conflicts between, contemporary ideas that informed the representations of food in the plays. It also focuses on the social and moral implications of familiar and strange foodstuff in Shakespeare's works. This new approach provides substantial fresh readings of Hamlet, Macbeth, As you Like It, The Winter's Tale, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, Pericles, Timon of Athens, and the co-authored Sir Thomas More. Among the dietaries explored are Andrew Boorde's A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Healthe (1547), William Bullein's The Gouernement of Healthe (1595), Thomas Elyot's The Castle of Helthe (1595) and Thomas Cogan's The Hauen of Health (1636). These dieteries were republished several times in the early modern period; together they typify the genre's condemnation of surfeit and the tendency to blame human disease on feeding practices. This study directs scholarly attention to the importance of early modern dietaries, analyzing their role in wider culture as well as their intersection with dramatic art. In the dietaries food and drink are indices of one's position in relation to complex ideas about rank, nationality, and spiritual well-being; careful consumption might correct moral as well as physical shortcomings. The dietaries are an eclectic genre: some contain recipes for the reader to try, others give tips on more general lifestyle choices, but all offer advice on how to maintain good health via diet. Although some are more stern and humourless than others, the overwhelming impression is that of food as an ally in the battle against disease and ill-health as well as a potential enemy.

You may be a student, or just starting out in the theatre profession, or an actor contemplating a switch to directing, or anyone dreaming of a life in the theatre. Know this: by developing and sharpening your skills on a Shakespeare text, you will be preparing yourself for your next production whatever or wherever that might be. Practical, inspirational and steeped in the wisdom and expertise of one of the great Shakespearean directors of our age, How to Direct Shakespeare guides you through each step of a production, from conception to final presentation to an audience. It includes close analysis of the text and provides strategies for focusing on the main action and structure; it considers dramatic energy and the world of the play, and illuminates these with examples drawn from a variety of Shakespeare's plays. It will assist you with creating your vision for the production as you collaborate with the design team, cast the play and work with actors in rehearsal. And it walks you through the encounter with the audience as you open your production. Drawing on examples from his work as artistic director of The Royal Shakespeare Company and subsequent directing work that has taken him all over the world, Noble shows how every production is shaped by a vision of the world - the interplay of the writer's vision and the director's interpretation of it. How to Direct Shakespeare will inspire and equip you as you develop your vision for your next production.

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.