The greatest tragic plays of William Shakespeare--including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. What is tragedy? The Elizabethans defined it as a "lofty" play showing "personages of great state" caught up in a "lamentable" action that "beginneth prosperously and endeth unfortunately." Whether judged by this or any other standard, the plays selected for this collection are considered to be the four central works of Shakespearean tragedy and must be included in any list of the world's finest tragic literature. And to make these plays more accessible for the modern reader, this edition includes the following special features: - Reliable texts by noted Shakespeare scholars - Texts printed in the clearest, most readable type - Names of each speaker given in full - Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page keyed to the numbered lines of the text - Textual notes - Updated bibliography

Boldly moves criticism of Shakespeare's history plays beyond anti-humanist theoretical approaches This important intervention in the critical and theoretical discourse of Shakespeare studies summarises, evaluates and ultimately calls time on the mode of criticism that has prevailed in Shakespeare studies over the past thirty years. It heralds a new, more dynamic way of reading Shakespeare as a supremely intelligent and creative political thinker, whose history plays address and illuminate the very questions with which cultural historicists have been so preoccupied since the 1980s. In providing bold and original readings of the first and second tetralogies ( Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2), the book reignites old debates and re-energises recent bids to humanise Shakespeare and to restore agency to the individual in the critical readings of his plays. Key Features * Re-evaluates the legacy of new historicism and cultural materialism and intervenes in vital theoretical debates about human nature, the relationship between the individual and society, and the scope for individual political agency * Questions the anti-essentialist, anti-humanist theoretical framework that has held sway in Shakespeare studies since the 1980s and develops a critical practice which appreciates Shakespeare's startling insights into personal agency in history and ideology * Provides original new readings of the first and second tetralogies that demonstrate Shakespeare's unique and radical take on the workings of power, history, and individual agency Keywords Shakespeare, History Plays, Anti-humanism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Critical Theory

'Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York' Shakespeare's final drama of the Wars of the Roses cycle begins as the dust settles on England after bloody civil war, and the bitter hunchback Richard, brother of the king, secretly plots to seize the throne. Charming and duplicitous, powerfully eloquent and viciously cruel, he is prepared to go to any lengths to achieve his goal. Richard III shows a man who, in his skilful manipulation of events and people, is a chilling incarnation of the temptations of power in a land shocked by war. Used and Recommended by the National Theatre General Editor Stanley Wells Edited by E. A. J. Honigmann Introduction by Michael Taylor

This is an invaluable introductory guide for the English student who needs to decipher a page from a play, or a facsimile equivalent, from the Shakespearean period. The original quartos and folios of early play texts are increasingly subject to editorial and critical scrutiny, and electronic facsimiles are making the originals accessible to undergraduate and graduate students. Giddens provides a practical 'how to' guide to the original printed texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He explains how the features of the play text came about, what the different elements mean, and who created them. The book provides that important first step towards bibliography and critical editing, presenting a detailed account of how to read these early texts and how they have been turned into the modern editions we are accustomed to.

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. For this second edition of Measure for Measure Angela Stock has written a new introductory section that takes account of recent scholarly criticism and important contemporary productions on stage and film. The edition retains the text prepared by Brian Gibbons together with his comprehensive introduction, in which he shows how the play's critical reception and stage history varies from one period to the next according to the prevailing social, moral and religious issues of the day. Gibbons explores the thrilling experience of watching the play in performance, with its shocking reversals and surprises, great tragic poetry and exuberant comic prose. An updated reading list completes the edition.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's great tragedy of love and war. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Troilus and Cressida in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with two leading directors - Trevor Nunn and Michael Boyd - 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.

This is a modernized edition of an anonymous play, long known to scholars, which appears to be an alternative version of Shakespeare's popular comedy, The Taming of the Shrew. Stephen Miller suggests that an anonymous person rewrote Shakespeare's more complicated version, making it shorter, simpler and different in some ways. The main difference between the two plays concerns the framing story of Christopher Sly, the drunk, who disappears early on in Shakespeare's version. A Shrew, as it is usually known, contains additional material for Sly which is familiar to playgoers because it is often included in productions of Shakespeare's play. The Taming of a Shrew, The 1594 Quarto, provides a modernized text based upon a re-examination of the quarto and extensive commentary. Miller's introduction establishes a direct link between A Shrew and The Shrew and includes an illustrated stage history.

Shakespeare's Richard III presents difficult textual problems. There are 2,000 verbal differences between the text of the first quarto (1597) and the version in the First Folio (1623). Although the narrative of the two plays is virtually identical, each has lines which are not found in the other, parts of the play are arranged differently, and the quarto deploys fewer characters. The text of the quarto is accompanied by a collation of variant readings and substantial textual notes. In a lengthy introduction Peter Davison proposes that Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, used a memorially reconstructed text of Richard III during a touring performance of the play, and that text provided the manuscript for the 1597 quarto. Using examples of touring practice of the past 400 years, Davison shows how the actors' involvement helped to produce the text we have.

Two different versions of Romeo and Juliet were published during Shakespeare's lifetime: the second quarto of 1599, on which modern editions are usually based, and the first quarto of 1597. The latter version was long denigrated as a 'bad' quarto', but recent scholarship sees in it a crucial witness for the theatrical practices of Shakespeare and his company. The shorter of the two versions by about one quarter, the first quarto has high-paced action, fuller stage directions than the second quarto, and fascinating alternatives to the famous speeches in the longer version. The introduction to this edition provides a full discussion of the origins of the first quarto, before analysing its distinguishing features and presenting a concise history of the 1597 version. The text is provided with a full collation and commentary which alert the reader to crucial differences between the first and the second quartos.

Das Buch setzt sich umfassend mit der Evaluation der Logistik auseinander. Es werden zahlreiche Vorgehensweisen und Checklisten vorgestellt, welche auf detaillierter Ebene eine systematische Analyse und Bewertung von Unternehmen bzw. Organisationseinheiten erlauben. Konsequenterweise wird zwischen verschiedenen Anlassen (z.B. Mergers und Acquisitions, Outsourcing, Kontraktlogistik, Restrukturierung, Rating etc.) und Perspektiven (verladende Industrie- und Handelsunternehmen sowie Logistikdienstleister) unterschieden. Das Buch bietet ferner einen Ansatz, die entwickelten Checklisten zu aggregieren, um mehrere Untersuchungsobjekte miteinander vergleichen zu koennen.

The Quarto text of Henry V is of unique importance. It is the first and probably the only text of a Shakespeare play which provides the playscript corresponding to the version that was actually performed by Shakespeare's own company. It has the authority of being transcribed by actors in the company as a record of their original staging at the Globe in 1599. The quarto version differs radically from the First Folio text which is used as the source for all other editions. Half as long as the Folio, it represents a practical staging text that streamlined the script supplied by Shakespeare. This edition of the Henry V quarto provides a modernized text alongside the extensive commentary. Andrew Gurr examines each variant from the Folio text in detail, shedding new light on what happened to scripts that the Shakespeare company bought from their resident playwright.

George Lyman Kittredge's insightful editions of Shakespeare have endured in part because of his eclecticism, his diversity of interests, and his wide-ranging accomplishments, all of which are reflected in the valuable notes in each volume.

These new editions have specific emphasis on the performance histories of the plays (on stage and screen).

Features of each edition include:

- The original introduction to the Kittredge Edition

- Editor's Introduction to the Focus Edition. An overview on major themes of the plays, and sections on the play's performance history on stage and screen.

- Explanatory Notes. The explanatory notes either expand on Kittredge's superb glosses, or, in the case of plays for which he did not write notes, give the needed explanations for Shakespeare's sometimes demanding language.

- Performance notes. These appear separately and immediately below the textual footnotes and include discussions of noteworthy stagings of the plays, issues of interpretation, and film and stage choices.

- How to read the play as Performance Section. A discussion of the written play vs. the play as performed and the various ways in which Shakespeare's words allow the reader to envision the work "off the page."

- Comprehensive Timeline. Covering major historical events (with brief annotations) as well as relevant details from Shakespeare's life. Some of the Chronologies include time chronologies within the plays.

- Topics for Discussion and Further Study Section. Critical Issues: Dealing with the text in a larger context and considerations of character, genre, language, and interpretative problems. Performance Issues: Problems and intricacies of staging the play connected to chief issues discussed in the Focus Editions' Introduction.

- Select Bibliography & Filmography

Each New Kittredge edition also includes screen grabs from major productions, for comparison and scene study.

This book considers and illustrates the stage history of the play, and provides an account of the authorship controversy from the mid-nineteenth century, when John Fletcher's name was first put forward as a collaborator, to recent scholarship, which has not yet reached a consensus. The introduction considers the political and religious background of the play, its pageant-like structure and visual effects, and its varied ironies. The commentary is detailed but concise, explaining difficult passages and contemporary references, and suggesting how the play might have been staged in an Elizabethan theater, or might still be staged for a modern audience.

'Language is his power. His characters are precisely the words they speak' A. S. Byatt A young man is condemned to death for breaking a law forbidding sex outside marriage. When his sister pleads with the Lord Angelo to save him, he offers her a bargain - her brother's life in exchange for her virginity. One of Shakespeare's most enigmatic plays, Measure for Measure is a morally complex drama of intricate moves and countermoves that explores falsehood, justice and humanity's best and basest instincts. Used and Recommended by the National Theatre General Editor Stanley Wells Edited by J. M. Nosworthy Introduction by Julia Briggs

Act I SCENE I. London. KING RICHARD II's palace. Enter KING RICHARD II, JOHN OF GAUNT, with other Nobles and Attendants KING RICHARD II Old John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster, Hast thou, according to thy oath and band, Brought hither Henry Hereford thy bold son, Here to make good the boisterous late appeal, Which then our leisure would not let us hear, Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray? JOHN OF GAUNT I have, my liege. KING RICHARD II Tell me, moreover, hast thou sounded him, If he appeal the duke on ancient malice; Or worthily, as a good subject should, On some known ground of treachery in him? JOHN OF GAUNT As near as I could sift him on that argument, On some apparent danger seen in him Aim'd at your highness, no inveterate malice. ...]

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. For this second edition of Antony and Cleopatra, David Bevington has included in his introductory section a thorough consideration of recent critical and stage interpretations, demonstrating how the theatrical design and imagination of this play make it one of Shakespeare's most remarkable tragedies. The edition is attentive throughout to the play as theatre: a detailed, illustrated account of the stage history is followed, in the commentary, by discussion of staging options offered by the text. The commentary is especially full and helpful, untangling many obscure words and phrases, illuminating sexual puns, and alerting the reader to Shakespeare's shaping of his source material in Plutarch's Lives.

This second edition of Othello updates the first (Bristol Classical Press, 1987), both chronologically and conceptually. It includes consideration of productions from the last seventeen years, and reconsiders earlier material in the light of more recent critical attitudes. Post-colonial and feminist studies have had an impact on the way Othello is perceived and interpreted. The question of blacked-up/black/colour-blind casting and the significance of white and/or black audiences in different political and racial contexts have recently become much more clearly articulated. In the process, Shakespeare himself has not escaped the charge of racism. Equally, the position of Desdemona has received more focussed attention, both as the forbidden object of desire within a racial framework, and as a woman in her own right. This edition takes account of these developments in criticism, in the theatre, on film, and in the adaptations which set out to interrogate Shakespeare's text.

This second edition of Othello updates the first (Bristol Classical Press, 1987), both chronologically and conceptually. It includes consideration of productions from the last seventeen years, and reconsiders earlier material in the light of more recent critical attitudes. Post-colonial and feminist studies have had an impact on the way Othello is perceived and interpreted. The question of blacked-up/black/colour-blind casting and the significance of white and/or black audiences in different political and racial contexts have recently become much more clearly articulated. In the process, Shakespeare himself has not escaped the charge of racism. Equally, the position of Desdemona has received more focussed attention, both as the forbidden object of desire within a racial framework, and as a woman in her own right. This edition takes account of these developments in criticism, in the theatre, on film, and in the adaptations which set out to interrogate Shakespeare's text.

This 2001 book presents the first modernized and edited version of the 1622 Othello. By taking this earliest published version of Othello as a book in its own right, Scott McMillin accounts for the mystery of its thousands of differences from the Folio version by arguing that the Quarto was printed from a theatre script reflecting cuts and actors' interpolations made in the playhouse. McMillin explains that the playhouse script was apparently taken from dictation by a scribe listening to the actors themselves, and thus reveals how Othello was spoken in seventeenth-century performance. This edition, which consists of a detailed introduction, quarto text, select collation and textual notes, is an important book for scholars in Shakespeare and Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, with wide ramifications for other Shakespeare textual studies and for students of early theatre history.

The drama of Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous of all tragedies. It tells the story of two 'star-crossed' lovers whose young lives are cruelly cut short because of a bitter feud between their families. Since it was published in 1597, Romeo and Juliet has been performed all round the world, made into box office recordbreaking films, ballets and adapted by Leonard Bernstein for his world-famous musical, West Side Story. Shakespeare was young when he wrote the play, and the exquisite language captures his sympathy for the lovers. This new edition includes the complete text with explanatory notes and a full introduction that describes the setting, summarises the plot and profiles the main characters. It discusses Shakespeare's language and the play's themes, and it gives typical essay and test questions to help students prepare for exams. Includes: Introduction The Story of Romeo and Juliet The Play's Characters Themes and Language Examining the Play The Play Notes