The Merry Wives of Windsor (1601) is a comedy by William Shakespeare. Following the success of Henry IV Part I, it is rumored that Queen Elizabeth requested that the bard write a play featuring the character Falstaff in love. Falstaff, a clownish character notable for his bravery and loyalty to King Henry V, remains one of Shakespeare's most beloved characters. Despite this prominence, it has earned a reputation as one of the playwright's least staged works. "Come, we have a hot venison pasty to dinner: come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness." For his wit and wordplay alone, William Shakespeare is often considered the greatest writer to ever work in the English language. Where he truly triumphs, however, is in his ability to portray complex human emotions, how these emotions contribute to relationships, and how these relationships interact with politics, culture, and religion. Arriving in Windsor with an empty stomach and even emptier pockets, Falstaff comes up with a plan to seduce a wealthy woman. When his servants refuse to deliver his letters to Mistresses Ford and Page-both of them married-he fires Pistol and Nym, who subsequently inform the ladies' husbands. Eventually, the Mistresses get their hands on Falstaff's letters and, upon discovering they are exactly the same, conspire to embarrass the aging, overweight bachelor. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

First published in 1982, this volume responds to the attribution of numerous plays to Shakespeare which were not his own and selects four plays which have been ascribed in whole or in part to Shakespeare by responsible, talented scholars: The Reign of King Edward III, Sir Thomas More, The History of Cardenio and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Included in the bibliography are all the books, chapters and appendices of books, articles, review articles, reviews and notices of stage productions and a limited number of the more substantial discussions dealing with the four plays and published since 1930. The bibliography is organized by play with an initial section listing items dealing with two or more plays.

The marriage between a duke and Amazon queen sparks a massive celebration, which leads to a congregation of woodland residents, Fairyland creatures and surprising lovers. Set in Athens, A Midsummer Night's Dream follows unsuspecting couples as they fall prey to a supernatural ploy. Four plots simultaneously take place during the wedding preparations for Theseus, the duke of Athens and Hippolyta, the Amazon queen. Four young people, Hermia, Demetrius, Helena and Lysander, are struggling under the weight of unrequited love and politics. A performance troupe, led by the overhearing Nick Bottom, is rehearsing for the reception. Meanwhile, Oberon, king of the fairies and his queen, Titania have a disagreement that leads to a fantastical error. Oberon commands Puck, a sprite, to apply a magical juice to the eyelids of Titania in hopes that she will fall in love with the first thing she sees. He also applies it to Hermia, Demetrius, Helena and Lysander. Unfortunately, it forces both men to fall in love with Helena, leaving Hermia further isolated. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of William Shakespeare's most popular and aesthetically pleasing plays. The woodland backdrop and the unexpected romance makes for a delightfully entertaining read. The emotionally charged characters are the driving force behind this multifaceted story. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream is both modern and readable.

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing an introduction to:
* the contexts of the play, through a concise, accessible overview, a chronology and reprinted documents from the period
* the range of critical responses to the play, through a brief critical history and reprinted critical texts, accompanied by explanatory headnotes; and
* the play in performance, through a selection of clearly introduced readings on this topic, along with illustrations.
The sourcebook then examines key passages of the play in detail. Each passage is reprinted in full, along with a headnote and annotations offering crucial guidance to Shakespeare's language and the critical issues which surround the text. Throughout the volume, cross-references link together the contextual materials, critical responses and the play's text.
If you are beginning to study Othello, this Routledge Literary Sourcebook is the one guide you cannot afford to be without.

This volume is a collection of all-new original essays covering everything from feminist to postcolonial readings of the play as well as source queries and analyses of historical performances of the play. The Merchant of Venice is a collection of seventeen new essays that explore the concepts of anti-Semitism, the work of Christopher Marlowe, the politics of commerce and making the play palatable to a modern audience. The characters, Portia and Shylock, are examined in fascinating detail. With in-depth analyses of the text, the play in performance and individual characters, this book promises to be the essential resource on the play for all Shakespeare enthusiasts.

Including twenty-one groundbreaking chapters that examine one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies. Othello:Critical Essays explores issues of friendship and fealty, love and betrayal, race and gender issues, and much more.

One of the most intense and painful of our human passions, shame is typically seen in contemporary culture as a disability or a disease to be cured. Shakespeare's ultimately positive portrayal of the emotion challenges this view. Drawing on philosophers and theorists of shame, Shame in Shakespeare analyses the shame and humiliation suffered by the tragic hero, providing not only a new approach to Shakespeare but a committed and provocative argument for reclaiming shame.
The volume provides:
· an account of previous traditions of shame and of the Renaissance context
· a thematic map of the rich manifestations of both masculine and feminine shame in Shakespeare
· detailed readings of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear
· an analysis of the limitations of Roman shame in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus
· a polemical discussion of the fortunes of shame in modern literature after Shakespeare.
The book presents a Shakespearean vision of shame as the way to the world outside the self. It establishes the continued vitality and relevance of Shakespeare and offers a fresh and exciting way of seeing his tragedies.

How do performances of Shakespeare change the meanings of the plays?
In this controversial new book, Sarah Werner argues that the text of a Shakespeare play is only one of the many factors that give a performance its meaning. By focusing on The Royal Shakespeare Company, Werner demonstrates how actor training, company management and gender politics fundamentally affect both how a production is created and the interpretations it can suggest.
Werner concentrates particularly on:
The influential training methods of Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg
The history of the RSC Women's Group
Gale Edwards' production of The Taming of the Shrew
She reveals that no performance of Shakespeare is able to bring the plays to life or to realise the playwright's intentions without shaping them to mirror our own assumptions.
By examining the ideological implications of performance practices, this book will help all interested in Shakespeare's plays to explore what it means to study them in performance.

One of the most intense and painful of our human passions, shame is typically seen in contemporary culture as a disability or a disease to be cured. Shakespeare's ultimately positive portrayal of the emotion challenges this view. Drawing on philosophers and theorists of shame, Shame in Shakespeare analyzes the shame and humiliation suffered by the tragic hero, providing not only a new approach to Shakespeare but a committed and provocative argument for reclaiming shame.
The volume provides:
· an account of previous traditions of shame and of the Renaissance context
· a thematic map of the rich manifestations of both masculine and feminine shame in Shakespeare
· detailed readings of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear
· an analysis of the limitations of Roman shame in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus
· a polemical discussion of the fortunes of shame in modern literature after Shakespeare.
The book presents a Shakespearean vision of shame as the way to the world outside the self. It establishes the continued vitality and relevance of Shakespeare and offers a fresh and exciting way of seeing his tragedies.

The link between psychoanalysis as a mode of interpretation and Shakespeare's works is well known. But rather than merely putting Shakespeare on the couch, Philip Armstrong focuses on the complex and fascinatingly fruitful mutual relationship between Shakespeare's texts and psychoanalytic theory. He shows how the theories of Freud, Rank, Jones, Lacan, Erikson, and others are themselves in a large part the product of reading Shakespeare.
Armstrong provides an introductory cultural history of the relationship between psychoanalytic concepts and Shakespearean texts. This is played out in a variety of expected and unexpected contexts, including:
*the early modern stage
*Hamlet and The Tempest *Freud's analytic session
*the Parisian intellectual scene
*Hollywood
*the virtual space of the PC

'It reads as freshly today as it did fifty years ago, when it surprised everyone with its originality and daring, an intriguing blend of personal insight and solid detective-work. If ever a word-book deserved to be called a classic, it is this.' - David Crystal

The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most perfectly realized tragicomedy, as notable for its tragic intensity as for its comic grace and, throughout, for the richness and complexity of its poetry. It concludes, moreover, with the most daring and moving reconciliation scene in all Shakespeare's plays. Though the title may suggest an escapist fantasy, recent criticism has seen in the play a profoundly realistic psychology and a powerful commentary on the violence implicit in family relationships and deep, longlasting friendships. Stephen Orgel's edition considers the play in relation to Renaissance conceptions of both dramatic genre and the family, traced the changing critical and theatrical attitudes towards it, and places its psychological and dramatic conflicts within the Jacobean cultural and political context. The commentary pays special attention to the play's linguistic complexity, and the edition also includes a complete reprint of Shakespeare's source, Pandosto, by Robert Greene.

Shakespeare's works are now performed for an increasingly diversified cultural market. At the start of the twenty-first century, film, video and live performance have overtaken the printed book as the main ways in which people are introduced to Shakespeare. Therefore, is there any reason to ask people to read Shakespeare's plays anymore?
The essays in this volume explore this question and the institutional practices that shape contemporary performances of Shakespeare's plays. The book gathers together a particularly strong line-up of contributors from across the literary-performative divide to examine the relationship between Shakespeare, the 'culture industries', modernism and live performance.

One of Shakespeare's later plays, best described as a tragic-comedy, the play falls into two distinct parts. In the first Leontes is thrown into a jealous rage by his suspicions of his wife Hermione and his best-friend, and imprisons her and orders that her new born daughter be left to perish. The second half is a pastoral comedy with the "lost" daughter Perdita having been rescued by shepherds and now in love with a young prince. The play ends with former lovers and friends reunited after the apparently miraculous resurrection of Hermione. John Pitcher's lively introduction and commentary explores the extraordinary merging of theatrical forms in the play and its success in performance. As the recent Sam Mendes production at the Old Vic shows, this is a play that can work a kind of magic in the theatre. 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.
The Third Series editions' added emphasis on all aspects of Shakespeare performance extended the Arden editions readership to also become the preferred text for theatre professionals.

The link between psychoanalysis as a mode of interpretation and Shakespeare's works is well known. But rather than merely putting Shakespeare on the couch, Philip Armstrong focuses on the complex and fascinatingly fruitful mutual relationship between Shakespeare's texts and psychoanalytic theory. He shows how the theories of Freud, Rank, Jones, Lacan, Erikson, and others are themselves in a large part the product of reading Shakespeare.
Armstrong provides an introductory cultural history of the relationship between psychoanalytic concepts and Shakespearean texts.
This is played out in a variety of expected and unexpected contexts, including:
*the early modern stage
*Hamlet and The Tempest
*Freud's analytic session
*the Parisian intellectual scene
*Hollywood
*the virtual space of the PC.

Shakespeare's works are now performed for an increasingly diversified cultural market. At the start of the twenty-first century film, video and live performance have overtaken the printed book as the main ways in which people are introduced to Shakespeare. Therefore, is there any reason to ask people to read Shakespeare's plays anymore?
The essays in this volume explore this question and the institutional practices that shape contemporary performances of Shakespeare's plays. The book gathers together a particularly strong line-up of contributors from across the literary-performative divide to examine the relationship between Shakespeare, the 'culture industries', modernism and live performance.

Published in 1979: This is a play based on the reign of King John with notes.

"Much Ado About Nothing "presents a battle of the sexes in more ways than one: as both a lightning-fast skirmish of wits between two famously disputatious lovers, and a near-deadly conflict built on conventions of gender and male rivalry. Claire McEachern's new introduction brings this best-seller right up to date, analysing recent developments in criticism and the latest productions of this comedy.

Published in 1908, this book considers the work of William Shakespeare. Providing notes and commentaries on some of his poems and plays, as well as context from English history, and analysis from his contemporaries and successors, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger, this book will be an interesting read for those interested in his work.

Written by a team of leading international scholars, this Companion is designed to illuminate Shakespeare's works through discussion of the key topics of Shakespeare studies. Twenty-one essays provide lively and authoritative approaches to recent scholarship and criticism for readers keen to expand their knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare. The book contains stimulating chapters on traditional topics such as Shakespeare's biography and the transmission of his texts. Individual readings of the plays are given in the context of genre as well as through the cultural and historical perspectives of race, sexuality and gender, and politics and religion. Essays on performance survey the latest digital media as well as stage and film. Throughout the volume, contributors discuss Shakespeare in a global as well as a national context, a dramatist with a long and constantly mutating history of reception and performance.

Shakespeare's dextrous comedy of two twin masters and two twin servants continually mistaken for one another is both farce and more than farce. The Comedy of Errors examines the interplay between personal and commercial relationships, and the breakdown of social order that follows the disruption of identity. As well as detailed on-page commentary notes, this new edition has a long, illustrated introduction exploring the play's performance and crtitical history, as well as its place in the comic tradition from Classical to modern times.

A fresh look at a play usually regarded as the first component of a three-part historical epic, this edition argues that Henry VI Part 1 is a 'prequel', a freestanding piece that returns for ironic and dramatic effect to a story already familiar to its audience. The play's ingenious use of stage space is closely analysed, as is its manipulation of a series of setpiece combats to give a coherent syntax of action. Discussion of the dramatic structure created by the opposing figures of Talbot and Jeanne la Pucelle, and exploration of the critical controversies surrounding the figure of Jeanne, lead to a reflection on the nature of the history play as genre in the 1590s.

The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts--and ghost writing. In "Shakespeare's Ghost Writers, " Marjorie Garber begins with an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghostwritten. Garber asks what is at stake in the imputation that "Shakespeare" did not write the plays and argues that the plays themselves both thematize and theorize that controversy.

Shakespeare has made the big time. No less than the Beatles or Liberace, Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger, Shakespeare is big-time in the idiomatic sense of cultural success and widespread notoriety. Not only has he achieved canonical status, Shakespeare is a contemporary celebrity. His artistic distinction and aptitude for controversy constantly keeps his name in the public eye.
Bristol debates Shakespeare's cultural authority, and clarifies the semantics of his name in our culture. Big-Time Shakespeare suggests his plays represent the pathos of our civilisation with extraordinary force and clarity. Shakespeare's contradictory understanding of the social and cultural past is also examined with close analysis of The Winter's Tale, Othello, and Hamlet.

One of Shakespeare's later plays, best described as a tragic-comedy, the play falls into two distinct parts. In the first Leontes is thrown into a jealous rage by his suspicions of his wife Hermione and his best-friend, and imprisons her and orders that her new born daughter be left to perish. The second half is a pastoral comedy with the "lost" daughter Perdita having been rescued by shepherds and now in love with a young prince. The play ends with former lovers and friends reunited after the apparently miraculous resurrection of Hermione. John Pitcher's lively introduction and commentary explores the extraordinary merging of theatrical forms in the play and its success in performance. As the recent Sam Mendes production at the Old Vic shows, this is a play that can work a kind of magic in the theatre. 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.
The Third Series editions' added emphasis on all aspects of Shakespeare performance extended the Arden editions readership to also become the preferred text for theatre professionals.