David Hillman's new book focuses on a vital area of contemporary Renaissance scholarship - that of Early Modern notions of embodiment and selfhood. The book imagines the Shakespearean corpus from the inside out: it explores the preoccupation with the body's interior spaces in several of Shakespeare's plays, focussing on how these plays address questions of knowledge and acknowledgement: on the ways characters imagine being within the body of the other, or having one's own body inhabited or possessed by another.

Although psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare is a prominent and prolific field of scholarship, the analytic methods and tools, theories, and critics who apply the theories have not been adequately assessed. This book fills that gap. It surveys the psychoanalytic theorists who have had the most impact on studies of Shakespeare, clearly explaining the fundamental developments and concepts of their theories, providing concise definitions of key terminology, describing the inception and evolution of different schools of psychoanalysis, and discussing the relationship of psychoanalytic theory (especially in Shakespeare) to other critical theories. It chronologically surveys the major critics who have applied psychoanalysis to their readings of Shakespeare, clarifying the theories they are enlisting; charting the inception, evolution, and interaction of their approaches; and highlighting new meanings that have resulted from such readings. It assesses the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to Shakespeare studies and the significance and value of the resulting readings.

Shakespeare in China provides English language readers with a comprehensive sense of China's past and on-going encounter with Shakespeare. It offers a detailed history of twentieth-century Sino-Shakespeare from the beginnings to 1949, followed by more recent accounts of the playwright in the People's Republic, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The study pays particular attention to translation, criticism and theatrical productions and highlights Shakespeare's fate during the turbulent political times of modern China. Chapters on Shakespeare and Confucius and The Paradox of Shakespeare in the New China consider the playwright in the context of 'old' and 'new' Chinese ideologies. Bringing together hard to find materials in both English and Chinese, it builds upon and extends past research on its subject.

Contents:
Martin Brunkhorst, Bergische Universitat (Germany); Anthony B Dawson, University of British Columbia (Canada); Mary Judith Dunbar, University of Santa Clara (USA); Juilet Dusinberre, Girton College, Cambridge; Barbara Hodgdon, Drake University (USA); Dennis Kennedy, University of Pittsburgh (USA); Richard Paul Knowles, University of Guelph (Canada); Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire (USA); Philip C McGuire, Michigan State University (USA); Cary Mazer, University of Pennsylvania (USA); Denis Salter, McGill University (Canada); William B Worthen, Northwestern University (USA)

This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context. Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.

Hamlet's father's Ghost asks his son to 'Remember me!', but how did people remember around 1600? And how do we remember now? Shakespeare and Memory brings together classical and early modern sources, theatre history, performance, material culture, and cognitive psychology and neuroscience in order to explore ideas about memory in Shakespeare's plays and poems. It argues that, when Shakespeare was writing, ideas about memory were undergoing a kind of crisis, as both the technologies of memory (print, the theatre itself) and the belief structures underpinning ideas about memory underwent rapid change. And it suggests that this crisis might be mirrored in our own time, when, despite all the increasing gadgetry at our disposal, memory can still be recovered, falsified, corrupted, or wiped: only we ourselves can remember, but the workings of memory remain mysterious. Shakespeare and Memory draws on works from all stages of Shakespeare's career, with a particular focus on Hamlet, the Sonnets, Twelfth Night, and The Winter's Tale. It considers some little things: what's Hamlet writing on? And why does Orsino think he smells violets? And it asks some big questions: how should the dead be remembered? What's the relationship between memory and identity? And is it art, above all, that enables love and beauty, memory and identity, to endure in the face of loss, time, and death?

In the thirty years since the
publication of Stephen Greenblatt's "Renaissance Self-Fashioning"
overthrew traditional modes of Shakespeare criticism, New Historicism and Cultural
Materialism have rapidly become the dominant modes for studying and writing
about the Bard. This comprehensive guide introduces students to the key
writers, texts and ideas of contemporary Shakespeare criticism and alternatives
to new historicist and cultural materialist approaches suggested by a range of
dissenters including evolutionary critics, historical formalists and advocates
of 'the new aestheticism', and the more politically active presentists.
"Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory" covers such topics as:
The key theoretical
influences on new historicism including Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser.
The major critics, from Stephen Greenblatt to Jonathan Dollimore and Alan
Sinfield.
Dissenting views from traditional critics and contemporary theorists.
Chapter summaries and questions for discussion throughout encourage students to
critically engage with contemporary Shakespeare theory for themselves. The book
includes a 'Who's Who' of major critics, a timeline of key publications and a
glossary of essential critical terms to give students and teachers easy access
to essential information.

This major new interdisciplinary study argues that Shakespeare exploited long-established connections between vision, space and language in order to construct rhetorical equivalents for visual perspective. Through a detailed comparison of art and poetic theory in Italy and England, Thorne shows how perspective was appropriated by English writers, who reinterpreted it to suit their own literary concerns and cultural context. Focusing on five Shakespearean plays, she situates their preoccupation with issues of viewpoint in relation to a range of artistic forms and topics from miniatures to masques.

Shakespeare lived his professional life amid the London streets and died a prominent figure in the town of Stratford. The language of his plays is shot through with the concerns of London "freemen" and their wives, the diverse commercial class that nevertheless excluded adult immigrants from country towns and northern Europe alike. This book combines London historiography, close reading, and recent theories of citizen subjectivity to demonstrate for the first time that Shakespeare's plays embody citizen and alien identities despite their aristocratic settings. The book points out where the city shadows the country scenes of the major comedies, shows how London's trades animate the "civil butchery" of the history plays, and explains why England's metropolis becomes the fractured Rome of tragedy.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's most loved comedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of A Midsummer Night's Dream in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors Michael Boyd, Gregory Doran and Tim Supple, providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

Part of the Heinemenn Advanced Shakespeare series of plays for A Level students, this version of Hamlet includes notes which should bridge the gap between GCSE and A Level, and space for students' own annotation. The text includes activities and assignments after each act.

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.

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.

After Robert Armin joined the Chamberlain's Men, singing in Shakespeare's dramas catapulted from 1.25 songs and 9.95 lines of singing per play to 3.44 songs and 29.75 lines of singing, a virtually unnoticed phenomenon. In addition, many of the songs became seemingly improvisatory-similar to Armin's personal style as an author and solo comedian. In order to study Armin's collaborative impact, this interdisciplinary book investigates the songs that have Renaissance music that could have been heard on Shakespeare's stage. They occur in some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and The Tempest. In fact, Shakespeare's plays, as we have them, are not complete. They are missing the music that could have accompanied the plays' songs. Significantly, Renaissance vocal music, far beyond just providing entertainment, was believed to alter the bodies and souls of both performers and auditors to agree with its characteristics, directly inciting passions from love to melancholy. By collaborating with early modern music editor and performing artist Lawrence Lipnik, Catherine Henze is able to provide new performance editions of seventeen songs, including spoken interruptions and cuts and rearrangement of the music to accommodate the dramatist's words. Next, Henze analyzes the complete songs, words and music, according to Renaissance literary and music primary sources, and applies the new information to interpretations of characters and scenes, frequently challenging commonly held literary assessments. The book is organized according to Armin's involvement with the plays, before, during, and after the comic actor joined Shakespeare's company. It offers readers the tools to interpret not only these songs, but also vocal music in dramas by other Renaissance playwrights. Moreover, Robert Armin and Shakespeare's Performed Songs, written with non-specialized terminology, provides a gateway to new areas of research and interpretation in an increasingly significant interdisciplinary field for all interested in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

In this book, Derek Cohen studies the relationship of Shakespearean drama to the Western culture of violence. He argues that violence is an inherent feature and form of patriarchy and that its production and control is one of the dominant motives of the political system. Shakespeare's plays supply examples of the way in which the patriarchy of his plays - and hence, perhaps, of modern Western culture - absorbs, naturalizes, and legitimizes violence in its attempts to maintain political control over its subjects.

Focusing on Shakespeare and race, this book addresses the status of Othello in our culture. Erickson shows that contemporary writers' revisions of Shakespeare can have a political impact on our vision of America.

The five volumes of "A Shakespeare Music Catalogue" provide documentation of all music, published and unpublished, from Shakespeare's day to the 20th century, relating to Shakespeare's life and work. The music includes operas, ballets, overtures, tone-poems, songs and various types of incidental music for stage, radio, film and television productions. Each composition is cited with information on its vocal and instrumental requirements, its publication history and, when known, its first performance. The first three deal with music and musical stage-directions for the plays and settings of the sonnets and narrative poems. The fourth volume contains indices of Shakespeare's titles and lines, the titles of musical works, composers, arrangers, editors and librettists. The final volume provides an annotated bilbiography of writings, in all language, on the subject of Shakespeare and music.

Shakespeare has been misread for centuries as having modern ideas about sex and gender. This book shows how in the Restoration and Eighteenth century, Shakespeare's plays and other Renaissance texts were adapted to make them conform to these modern ideas. Through readings of Shakespearean texts, including "King Lear," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Othello," and other Renaissance drama, the book reveals a sexual world before heterosexuality. "Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality" shows how revisions and criticism of Renaissance drama contributed to the emergence of heterosexuality. It also shows how changing ideas about status, adultery, friendship, and race were factors in that emergence.

A thorough and scholarly study of Spenser and Shakespeare and their contrary artistry, covering themes of theology, psychology, the depictions of passion and intellect, moral counsel, family hierarchy, self-love, temptation, folly, allegory, female heroism, the supernatural and much more. Renaissance psychologies examines the distinct and polarised emphasis of these two towering intellects and writers of the early modern period. It demonstrates how pervasive was the influence of Spenser on Shakespeare, as in the "playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania" in A Midsummer Night's Dream and its return from Spenser's moralizing allegory to the Ovidian spirit of Shakespeare's comedy. It will appeal to students and lecturers in Spenser studies, Renaissance poetry and the wider fields of British literature, social and cultural history, ethics and theology. -- .

This book shows that William Shakespeare was a more personal writer than any of his innumerable commentators have realised. It asserts that numerous characters and events were drawn from the author's life, and puts faces to the names of Jaques, Touchstone, Feste, Jessica, the 'Dark Lady' and others. Steven Sohmer explores aspects of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets that have been hitherto overlooked or misinterpreted in an effort to better understand the man and his work. If you've ever wondered who Pigrogromitus was, or why Jaques spies on Touchstone and Audrey - or what the famous riddle M.O.A.I. stands for - this is the book for you. -- .

The book presents a systematic method of interpreting Shakespeare film adaptations based on their cinematic genres. Its approach is both scholarly and reader-friendly, and its subject is fundamentally interdisciplinary, combining the findings of Shakespeare scholarship with film and media studies, particularly genre theory. The book is organised into six large chapters, discussing films that form broad generic groups. Part I looks at three genres from the classical Hollywood era (western, melodrama and gangster-noir), while Part II deals with three contemporary blockbuster genres (teen film, undead horror and biopic). Beside a few better-known examples of mainstream cinema, the volume also highlights the Shakespearean elements in several nearly forgotten films, bringing them back to critical attention. -- .

Wonder is a highly ambivalent word and idea which can denote woe, horror, or terror on one hand and delight, jubilation, or ecstasy on the other. In the first part of this book, Adam Max Cohen embraces the many meanings of wonder in order to challenge the generic divides between comedy, tragedy, history, and romance to suggest that Shakespeare's primary goal in crafting each of his play worlds was the evocation of one or more varieties of wonder. In the second part of this book, seven esteemed scholars respond to Cohen's exploration and pay homage to his legacy.

This lively gathering of materials about Shakespeare's Julius Caesar will enrich students' understanding of the historical context of the play and encourage interpretations of its cultural meaning. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar reflects perennial cultural concerns about order and freedom, particularly as they clash in the figures of Caesar and Brutus. This innovative experiment in Shakespeare literacy features a wide variety of materials--from a modernized text of Plutarch's lives of Caesar and Brutus set on facing pages for easy comparison, to historical and contemporary parodies, to a rap version of the play. Most of the materials presented here are available in no other printed form. Study questions, project ideas, and bibliographies provide additional sources for examining the cultural and historical context of the play. Following a literary interpretation of the play, Derrick presents a wide variety of materials, including: a modernized version of Plutarch's lives of Caesar and Brutus, set side-by-side to aid in the comparison of their characters; dramatic sequels to the play in the Elizabethan theater; a comparison of Julius Caesar to the Lincoln assassination, with reprints of 19th-century newspaper accounts, John Wilkes Booth's obsessions about Brutus, and the desperate notes he left after the assassination; excerpts from popular culture, including a rap version of the play that is perfect for student performances, parodies from Mad Magazine, James Baldwin's little-known appeal to African American consciousness, "Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare," and John Housman's reflections on making the film version that starred Marlon Brando; popular allusions to the play and its verse fromthe 18th century to the present; and a chapter on teaching the play that includes commentary by noted teachers and a parallel layout of a rendering in Basic English alongside Shakespeare's edited play.