No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of "Julius Caesar" on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right. Each No Fear Shakespeare contains

• The complete text of the original play
• A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday language
• A complete list of characters with descriptions
• Plenty of helpful commentary

This edition of Shakespeare's King Lear is based on the first (1608) quarto and represents a significantly different version from that published in the folio of 1623, which forms the basis of the standard New Cambridge Shakespeare edition. Each has numerous unique passages and hundreds of variant readings, creating differences that affect the structure, characterization and overall impact of the play. This volume contains a substantial introduction, the text of the first quarto, a collation of variant readings and an appendix of passages unique to the Folio.

"Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain" examines the work of two of the most important English Renaissance authors in terms of the cultural, social and political contexts of early modern Britain. Andrew Hadfield demonstrates that the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the plays of William Shakespeare demand to be read in terms of an expanding Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in which a dominant English identity had to come to terms with the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were now also subjects of the crown.

This is a detailed account of the theatrical fortunes of A Midsummer Night's Dream on the British stage, from the 1590s to the 1990s. The substantial, illustrated introduction traces the rise of the play from theatrical neglect in the eighteenth century through the spectacular productions of the nineteenth century to its current high status. The authoritative New Cambridge Shakespeare text of the play is accompanied by notes on actors' interpretations, settings and textual alterations. The author considers the cultural changes which have affected the play's popularity as well as the conceptions of individual directors from David Garrick and George Colman, via Madame Vestris and Beerbohm Tree, Granville Barker and W. Bridges Adams to Peter Brook, Robert Lepage and Adrian Noble. The book shows theatre history as cultural history. It will be invaluable to students of Shakespeare in performance at graduate level, working in departments of English or drama/theatre and to those intrigued by the changing reputation of Shakespeare.

There are 2,000 verbal differences between the text of the First Quarto of Shakespeare's Richard III (1597) and the version in the First Folio (1623). In this Quarto edition the text is accompanied by a collation of variant readings and substantial textual notes. Peter Davison argues 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. The result is a breakthrough in textual studies.

This volume describes the theatrical fortunes of A Midsummer Night's Dream on the British stage, from the 1590s to the 1990s. A substantial introduction traces the rise of the play from theatrical neglect in the eighteenth century through the spectacular productions of the nineteenth century to its current high status. The authoritative Cambridge text of the play is accompanied by detailed notes on actors' interpretations, settings, textual alterations, and the conceptions of individual directors from David Garrick to Robert Lepage. It will be invaluable to students of Shakespeare in performance.

The quintessential Shakespearean tragedy, whose highly charged confrontations and anguished soliloquies probe depths of human feeling rarely sounded in any art. Reprinted from an authoritative British edition complete with illuminating footnotes.

Shakespeare: A Playgoer's & Reader's Guide is your essential companion to all Shakespeare's extant works (as well as those known to be lost). Two of our most eminent Shakespeare scholars guide us through his sonnets, his poems, and his plays, providing the reader with detailed scene-by-scene plot synopses, cast lists, notes on the texts and sources, discussions of artistic features, and accounts of significant productions on stage and screen. Derived from the acclaimed Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, and fully updated to reflect the latest scholarship and most recent notable productions, it is the ideal compact guide for students and theatre-goers needing a helpful plot summary, or readers wishing to browse on fascinating background information.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and widely performed across the world, is now available as a Norton Critical Edition. Included are a preface, critical essay and explanatory annotations by Grace Iopollo, along with essays by acclaimed Shakespeare scholars, and reviews and interpretative essays spanning over four centuries.

Tragicomedy of Venetian moneylender's bargain with a young merchant for "a pound of flesh."

Application of the Michael Chekhov Technique to Shakespeare's Sonnets, Soliloquies, and Monologues illustrates how to apply the Michael Chekhov Technique, through exercises and rehearsal techniques, to a wide range of Shakespeare's works. The book begins with a comprehensive chapter on the definitions of the various aspects of the Technique, followed by five chapters covering Shakespeare's sonnets, comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances. This volume offers a very specific path, via Michael Chekhov, on how to put theory into practice and bring one's own artistic life into the work of Shakespeare. Offering a wide range of pieces that can be used as audition material, Application of the Michael Chekhov Technique to Shakespeare's Sonnets, Soliloquies, and Monologues is an excellent resource for acting teachers, directors, and actors specializing in the work of William Shakespeare. The book also includes access to a video on Psychological Gesture to facilitate the application of this acting tool to Shakespeare's scenes.

Throughout his plays, Shakespeare placed an extraordinary emphasis on the power of the face to reveal or conceal moral character and emotion, repeatedly inviting the audience to attend carefully to facial features and expressions. The essays collected here disclose that an attention to the power of the face in Shakespeare's England helps explain moments when Shakespeare's language of the self becomes intertwined with his language of the face. As the range of these essays demonstrates, an attention to Shakespeare's treatment of faces has implications for our understanding of the historical and cultural context in which he wrote, as well as the significance of the face for the ongoing interpretation and production of the plays. Engaging with a variety of critical strands that have emerged from the so-called turn to the body, the contributors to this volume argue that Shakespeare's invitation to look to the face for clues to inner character is not an invitation to seek a static text beneath an external image, but rather to experience the power of the face to initiate reflection, judgment, and action. The evidence of the plays suggests that Shakespeare understood that this experience was extremely complex and mysterious. By turning attention to the face, the collection offers important new analyses of a key feature of Shakespeare's dramatic attention to the part of the body that garnered the most commentary in early modern England. By bringing together critics interested in material culture studies with those focused on philosophies of self and other and historians and theorists of performance, Shakespeare and the Power of the Face constitutes a significant contribution to our growing understanding of attitudes towards embodiment in Shakespeare's England.

Controversial and sexually charged, The Taming of the Shrew is possibly Shakespeare's first play, and certainly among the most performed. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is illustrated throughout by Sir John Gilbert, and includes an introduction by Ned Halley. Petruchio's courtship of the unwilling 'shrew' Katherina poses the question: is it an examination of brute male domination or a passionate love story with a powerful moral message? To read it is to gain unique insight into a portrait of a marriage as created by a true master.

A series of outstanding productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company and others have recently demonstrated the theatrical vitality of Shakespeare's plays about the reign of Henry VI. In the Third Part Shakespeare extends his essay on monarchical politics by contrasting two kings, the good but ineffective Henry VI with his rival, the sensual and victorious Edward IV. He also offers more evidence of the perils of aristocratic factionalism in a series of scenes that display the grievous wounds caused by the Wars of the Roses. Here we watch the savage death of the Duke of York at the hands of Queen Margaret, the moving lament of King Henry as he witnesses the slaughter of the battle of Towton where the Lancastrians were defeated, and finally, Henry's death at the hands of Richard of Gloucester, later King Richard III.

Choreographing Shakespeare presents a hitherto unexplored history of the choreographers and performers who have created dance adaptations of Shakespeare. This book investigates forty dance works in genres such as ballet, modern dance, and hip-hop, produced between 1940 and 2016 by choreographers in Britain, America, and Europe, all of which use Shakespeare's plays and Sonnets as their source material. By combining scholarly analysis of these productions with practice-based conversations from six contemporary choreographers, Klett offers both breadth of coverage and in-depth analysis of how Shakespeare's poetic language is translated into the usually wordless medium of dance, and shows exactly how these dance adaptations move beyond the Shakespearean texts to engage with musical and choreographic influences. Ideal for students of Shakespeare and Dance Studies, Choreographing Shakespeare explores how dance adaptations strive to design legible and intelligible stories, while ultimately celebrating the beauty of pure movement.

Shakespeare's famous play finds new life with a translation into contemporary American English. "For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo." In this new version of Romeo and Juliet, written in accessible modern English, Hansol Jung breathes new life into Shakespeare's famous tragedy. By closely examining the familiar language and focusing on the subtleties of the text, Jung illuminates a surprising and more nuanced world than many of us have come to expect from the well-known tale of star-crossed lovers. This translation of Romeo and Juliet was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

It takes account of recent discoveries concerning Shakespeare's early career, and pays particular attention to recent theatrical history, relating readings generated by modern performances to new ideologically positioned accounts of the history and politics of Shakespeare's age. Part II offers a searing account of aristocratic sedition and a portrait of a relationship between the King and his Protector, Good Duke Humphrey, which is as complex as that between Prince Hal and his father Bolingbrook. It concerns itself with the nature of history, the role of conscience, and the relation between law and equity. It also contains a complex reading of the kind of event that the Tudor regime had cause to fear, a popular uprising, led in this instance by Jack Cade.

The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? Vienna is corrupt. The Duke, who has let the city fall to vice, hands control to his Deputy, a hardline, puritan reformer. The Deputy uses ancient laws to sentence citizens to death for sexual misconduct. But when a religious Novice pleads for clemency, their heady encounter leaves the Deputy guilty of the very crime that the law condemns. Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse Josie Rourke's adaptation of Measure for Measure imagines the play in its original year of performance, 1604, and also in 2018.

Edward III is a major new addition to the Shakespearean canon. Melchiori claims that Shakespeare is the author of a significant part of the play, the extent of which is discussed in detail. The introduction explores the play's historical background and its relationship to the early cycle of history plays. The commentary examines in depth the play's linguistic and poetic features, while an extensive appendix on the use of sources explains the stages of its composition.

King John had a distinguished life on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage, and this edition presents the fullest account of its stage history. The play's political importance, its rich and varied language, and its skillful design suggest that King John deserves a high place among Shakespeare's historical tragedies. The textual analysis includes examination of several disputed emendations to the text. In the appendix, Beaurline surveys the arguments about the dating of Shakespeare's King John and the anonymous Troublesome Reign of King John, presenting new evidence for the possibility that Shakespeare's play was written first.

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.

Lillian Groag presents a new version of Troilus and Cressida that will resonate with contemporary audiences. One of the most obscure plays in Shakespeare's canon, Troilus and Cressida may also be the Bard's darkest comedy. Exploring some of the events of Homer's Iliad, the play juxtaposes the carnage of the Trojan War with a love story between its two titular characters. Lillian Groag's translation brings this ancient world to modern audiences. Replacing the archaisms with new and accessible phrasing, Shakespeare's lines regain their meaning and humor in the twenty-first century. This translation illuminates Troilus and Cressida as one of Shakespeare's funniest, saddest, and most bitterly modern plays. This translation of Troilus and Cressida was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

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 King Henry V, Shakespeare's most celebrated war play, Andrew Gurr has added a new section to his introduction in which he considers recent criticism and important contemporary productions of the play. Concentrating in particular on 'secret' versus 'official' readings of the work, he analyses Shakespeare's double vision of Henry as both military hero and self-seeking individual, and shows how the patriotic declarations of the Chorus are contradicted by the play's dramatic action. Controversial sequences are placed in the context of Elizabethan thought while the exceptional variety of language and dialect in the text is also studied. An updated reading list completes the edition.

Rather than treating the plays as objects to be studied, described and interpreted, Engagements with Shakespearean Drama examines precisely what about Shakespeare's plays is so special - why they continue to be discussed and performed all around the world. This book highlights the importance of our experience as readers and audiences and argues that what makes the plays great is that they cause a wide range of intense, pleasurable and valuable experiences. This highly personal and emotive approach allows students to engage with the plays on a new level, taking their own responses seriously as grounds for assessing the plays' success and quality. The book also engages with the essential criticism of the plays from Shakespeare's time to our own, equipping students to engage in contemporary debates about the nature and achievement of Shakespearean drama.