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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Drama texts, plays > 16th to 18th centuries
The Shakespearean Originals Series takes as its point of departure the question: "What is it that we read Shakespeare?" The answer may seem self-evident: we read the words that Shakespeare wrote. But do we? In the case of all the major editions of Shakespeare available in the market, the fact of the matter is that many of the words that we read in an edition of, say, Hamlet, never appeared in the text as it was printed during or shortly after Shakespeare's own lifetime. They are the interpetations and interpolations of a series of editors who have been systematically changing Shakespeare's text from the eighteenth century onwards. This volume offers the text of Macbeth, as printed in the 1623 First Folio.
Reading Shakespeare Historically is a passionate, provocative book by one of the most renowned and popular Renaissance scholars writing today. Charting ten years of critical development, these challenging, witty essays shed new light on Renaissance studies. It also raises intriguing questions about how the culture and history of the past illuminates the key social and political issues of today. Lisa Jardine re-reads Renaissance drama in its historical and cultural context, from laws of defamation in Othello to the competing loyalties of companionate marriage and male friendship in The Changeling. In doing so she reveals a wealth of new insights, sometimes surprising but always original and engrossing. At the same time, these essays also provide a fascinating account of the rise of feminist scholarship since the 1980s and the diversifying of new historicist' approaches over the same period. Reading Shakespeare Historically will fascinate and provoke students of shakespeare and his historical age, and general readers with an urge to understand how the culture and history of our past illuminates the key scoial and political issues of today.
The basic history of the Shakespearean editorial tradition is familiar and well-established. For nearly three centuries, men - most of them white and financially privileged - ensconced themselves in private and hard-to-access libraries, hammering out 'their' versions of Shakespeare's text. They produced enormous, learned tomes: monuments to their author's greatness and their own reputations. What if this is not the whole story? A bold, revisionist and alternative version of Shakespearean editorial history, this book recovers the lives and labours of almost seventy women editors. It challenges the received wisdom that, when it came to Shakespeare, the editorial profession was entirely male-dominated until the late twentieth century. In doing so, it demonstrates that taking these women's work seriously can transform our understanding of the history of editing, of the nature of editing as an enterprise, and of how we read Shakespeare in history.
Casual Shakespeare is the first full-length study of the thousands of quotations both in and of Shakespeare's works which represent intertextuality outside of what is conventionally appreciated as literary value. Drawing on the insights gained as a result of a major, ongoing Digital Humanities project, this study posits a historical continuum of casual quotation which informs Shakespeare's own works as well as their afterlives. In this groudbreaking, rigorous analysis, Dr. Regula Trillini offers readers a new approach and understanding of the use and impact quotes like the infamous, 'To be or not to be,' have had througout literary history.
The "Shakespearean Originals" series aims to provide readers of modern drama with 16th- and 17th-century playtexts which have been treated as historical documents, and are reproduced as closely to their original printed forms as the conditions of modern publication will permit. Each volume in the series comprises a general series introduction, an introduction to the play, the original text, a select bibliography, full annotations and some sample facsimile pages from the text itself.
This volume presents a contrastive study of the overlapping careers of Shakespeare and Caravaggio through the comparison of their strikingly similar conventional belief in symbol and the centrality of the subject, only to gradually open it up in an exaltation of multiplicity and the "indistinct regard" (Othello). Utilizing a methodological premise on the notions of early modern indistinction and multiplicity, Shakespeare, Caravaggio, and the Indistinct Regard analyses the survival of English art after iconoclasm and the circulation of Italian art and motifs, methodologically reassessing the conventional comparison between painting and literature. The book examines Caravaggio's and Shakespeare's works in the perspective of the gradual waning of symbolism, the emergence of chiaroscuro and mirror imagery underneath their radically new concepts of representation, and the triumph of multiplicity and indistinction. Furthermore, this work assesses the validity of the twin concepts of multiplicity and indistinction as an interpretive tool in a dialectical interplay with much recent work on indeterminacy in literary criticism and the sciences.
"Post-Hamlet: Shakespeare in an Era of Textual Exhaustion" examines how postmodern audiences continue to reengage with Hamlet in spite of our culture's oversaturation with this most canonical of texts. Combining adaptation theory and performance theory with examinations of avant-garde performances and other unconventional appropriations of Shakespeare's play, Post-Hamlet examines Shakespeare's Hamlet as a central symbol of our era's "textual exhaustion," an era in which the reader/viewer is bombarded by text-printed, digital, and otherwise. The essays in this edited collection, divided into four sections, focus on the radical employment of Hamlet as a cultural artifact that adaptors and readers use to depart from textual "authority" in, for instance, radical English-language performance, international film and stage performance, pop-culture and multi-media appropriation, and pedagogy.
Shakespeare everyone can understand--now in this new EXPANDED edition of JULIUS CAESAR! Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, this popular guide makes Shakespeare accessible to everyone. And now it features expanded literature guide sections that help students study smarter. The expanded sections include: Five Key Questions: Five frequently asked questions about major moments and characters in the play. What Does the Ending Mean?: Is the ending sad, celebratory, ironic . . . or ambivalent? Plot Analysis: What is the play about? How is the story told, and what are the main themes? Why do the characters behave as they do? Study Questions: Questions that guide students as they study for a test or write a paper. Quotes by Theme: Quotes organized by Shakespeare's main themes, such as love, death, tyranny, honor, and fate. Quotes by Character: Quotes organized by the play's main characters, along with interpretations of their meaning.
A knowledge of the history and evolution of the tales on which Shakespeare drew in the composition of his plays is essential for the understanding of his work. In re-telling a particular story, a Renaissance writer was not simply reshaping the structure of the narrative but participating in a species of debate with earlier writers and the meanings their tales had accrued. The stories upon which Shakespeare's plays are constructed did not descend to him as innocent collections of incidents, but brought with them considerable cultural baggage, substantially lost to the modern spectator but an essential component, for a contemporary audience, of the meaning of the work.Shakespeare's Alternative Tales explores this literary dialogue, focusing on those plays in which the expectations generated by an inherited story are in some way overthrown, setting up a tension for a Renaissance spectator between 'received' and 'alternative' readings of the text. Each chapter opens with a familiar story, supplying a context for the subsequent discussion, and exhibits the way in which the dramatist's reworking of a traditional motif interrogates the assumptions implicit in his source.While offering the twentieth-century reader a fresh perspective from which to view the plays, the approach also supplies an introduction to contemporary readings of the Shakespearean canon. The tales Leah Scragg considers may be seen as 'alternative' in more than one sense: they radically rework conventional situations, while lending themselves to analysis in terms of new critical methodologies.The text will be of interest to both students of Shakespeare and the general reader. In conjunction with the author's companion volume, Shakespeare's Mouldy Tales, it provides an ideal introduction to contemporary developments in source studies.
The first in a series on Shakespeare's original texts, including facsimile pages, this version of "Hamlet" is claimed to be, in some ways, the most authentic version of the play that we have. Included are an introduction, notes, and a theoretical, historical and contextual critique. This text has been rejected by scholars as a "bad Quarto" - corrupt and pirated text printed without the permission of the playwright or his company. Nonetheless, it was the first version of the play to be published and it has been produced in the modern theatre with success. This new edition of that Quarto seeks to acknowledge the play's distinctive poetic and dramatic qualities, instead of comparing them unfavourably to one of the other versions.
Focused content, layout and price - Routledge competes and wins in relation to all of these factors - Craig Lind, University of Sussex, UK The best value and best format books on the market. - Ed Bates, Southampton University, UK Routledge Student Statutes present all the legislation students need in one easy-to-use volume. Developed in response to feedback from lecturers and students, this book offer a fully up-to-date, comprehensive, and clearly presented collection of legislation - ideal for LLB and GDL course and exam use. Routledge Student Statutes are: Exam Friendly: un-annotated and conforming to exam regulations Tailored to fit your course: 80% of lecturers we surveyed agree that Routledge Student Statutes match their course and cover the relevant legislation Trustworthy: Routledge Student Statutes are compiled by subject experts, updated annually and have been developed to meet student needs through extensive market research Easy to use: a clear text design, comprehensive table of contents, multiple indexes and highlighted amendments to the law make these books the most student-friendly Statutes on the market Competitively Priced: Routledge Student Statutes offer content and usability rated as good or better than our major competitor, but at a more competitive price Supported by a Companion Website: presenting scenario questions for interpreting Statutes, annotated web links, and multiple-choice questions, these resources are designed to help students to be confident and prepared.
Originally published in 1984. The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a time of considerable change in the English theatre. Victorian attitudes were shocked or shattered by the new drama of Ibsen; the major figure of George Bernard Shaw dominated the period; theatre censorship was the subject of a long and furious contest; and staging conventions changed from the spectacular stylings of Irving and Beerbohm Tree to the masking and statuesque styles of Isadora Duncan and the inner realism of Stanislavsky. This book traces the activities of the leading figures in the English theatre, notably William Archer who introduced Ibsen to this country and who became one of the main promoters of the idea of a National Theatre. Other personalities discussed include Harley Granville Barker, particularly his association with Shaw at the Court Theatre and his part in campaigns against censorship and for changes in the staging of Shakespeare, and Edward Gordon Craig, whose rebellion against the Victorian theatre took and anti-realist direction. This is a stimulating account of the background to the modern English theatre which can only increase appreciation of its standard and variety.
Originally published in 1978. Henry Irving achieved an astounding success in Britain and America as an actor; yet he lacked good looks, had spindly legs, and did not have a good voice. He said so himself. Today Irving is regarded as the archetype of the old-time actor, but in his own time he was regarded as a great theatrical innovator. Even Bernard Shaw, who attacked him pitilessly, even unto death, called him 'modern' when he first saw him act. Irving, the man, with his tenacious, obsessive talent, his human limitations and weaknesses, and his ephemeral glory is brought most sympathetically to life in this biography. It is written from contemporary sources, and from criticisms, lampoons, caricatures and gossip columns. If Irving reflected certain aspects of his age, this book underlines the Victorian ethic to which he appealed and the backcloths against which it was set - the extraordinary lavishness of the Lyceum productions and the incredible extravagance of social entertaining. Not the least absorbing aspect of this biography is the fascinating account of the long partnership between Irving and Ellen Terry, still in many respects an enigmatic one, but here portrayed with lively insight into character combined with understanding and deep knowledge of the social and theatrical context of the Victorian age.
Originally published in 1971. Nineteenth-century theatre in England has been greatly neglected, although serious study would reveal that the roots of much modern drama are to be found in the experiments and extravagancies of the nineteenth-century stage. The essays collected here cover a range of topics within the world of Victorian theatre, from particular actors to particular theatres; from farce to Byron's tragedies, plus a separate section about Shakespearean productions.
Though representations of alien languages on the early modern stage have usually been read as mocking, xenophobic, or at the very least extremely anxious, listening closely to these languages in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Marianne Montgomery discerns a more complex reality. She argues instead that the drama of the early modern period holds up linguistic variety as a source of strength and offers playgoers a cosmopolitan engagement with the foreign that, while still sometimes anxious, complicates easy national distinctions. The study surveys six of the European languages heard on London's commercial stages during the three decades between 1590 and 1620-Welsh, French, Dutch, Spanish, Irish and Latin-and the distinct sets of cultural issues that they made audible. Exploring issues of culture and performance raised by representations of European languages on the stage, this book joins and advances two critical conversations on early modern drama. It both works to recover English relations with alien cultures in the period by looking at how such encounters were staged, and treats sound and performance as essential to understanding what Europe's languages meant in the theater. Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 contributes to our emerging sense of how local identities and global knowledge in early modern England were necessarily shaped by encounters with nearby lands, particularly encounters staged for aural consumption.
Dark and violent, Macbeth is also the most theatrically spectacular of Shakespeare's tragedies. 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 Dr Robert Mighall. Promised a golden future as ruler of Scotland by three sinister witches, Macbeth murders the king to ensure his ambitions are realized. But he soon learns the meaning of terror - killing once, he must kill again and again, and the dead return to haunt him. A story of war and witchcraft, Macbeth also explores the relationship between husband and wife, and the risks they are prepared to take to achieve their desires.
At the intersections of early modern literature and history, Shakespeare and Women's Studies, Midwiving Subjects explores how Shakespearean drama and contemporary medical, religious and popular texts figured the midwife as a central producer of the body's cultural markers. In addition to attending most Englishwomen's births and testifying to their in extremis confessions about paternity, the midwife allegedly controlled the size of one's tongue and genitals at birth and was obligated to perform virginity exams, impotence tests and emergency baptisms. The signs of purity and masculinity, paternity and salvation were inherently open to interpretation, yet early modern culture authorized midwives to generate and announce them. Midwiving Subjects, then, challenges recent studies that read the midwife as a woman whose power was limited to a marginal and unruly birthroom community and instead uncovers the midwife's foundational role, not only in the rituals of reproduction, but in the process of cultural production itself. As a result of recent changes in managed healthcare and of increased attention to uncovering histories of women's experiences, midwives - past and present - are currently a subject of great interest. This book will appeal to readers interested in Shakespeare as well as the history of women and medicine.
'If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it' Separated from her twin brother Sebastian after a shipwreck, Viola disguises herself as a boy to serve the Duke Orsino. Wooing a countess on his behalf, she is stunned to find herself the object of her affections. Amorous intrigues, practical jokes, sexual confusion and riotous disorder ensue in this lyrical, hugely popular romantic comedy, which shows both the delights and the perils of desire. Used and Recommended by the National Theatre General Editor Stanley Wells Edited by M. M. Mahood Introduction by Michael Dobson
"Sources" helps readers navigate King Lear's rich history and includes the nine essential primary sources from which Shakespeare borrowed significantly in creating his play, along with two additional likely sources. "Criticism"provides thirteen major critical interpretations and three provocative adaptations and responses to King Lear. Critical interpretation is provided by Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, Peter Brook, Michael Warren, Lynda E. Boose, Janet Adelman, and R. A. Foakes, among others. The adaptations and responses are by Nahum Tate, John Keats, and Edward Bond. A Selected Bibliography is also included.
The relation between procreation and authorship, between reproduction and publication, has a long history - indeed, that relationship may well be the very foundation of history itself. The essays in this volume bring into focus a remarkably important and complex phase of this long history. In this volume, some of the most renowned scholars in the field persuasively demonstrate that during the early modern period, the awkward, incomplete transition from manuscript to print brought on by the invention of the printing press temporarily exposed and disturbed the epistemic foundations of English culture. As a result of this cultural upheaval, the discursive field of parenting was profoundly transformed. Through an examination of the literature of the period, this volume illuminates how many important conceptual systems related to gender, sexuality, human reproduction, legitimacy, maternity, kinship, paternity, dynasty, inheritance, and patriarchal authority came to be grounded in a range of anxieties and concerns directly linked to an emergent publishing industry and book trade. In exploring a wide spectrum of historical and cultural artifacts produced during the convergence of human and mechanical reproduction, of parenting and printing, these essays necessarily bring together two of the most vital critical paradigms available to scholars today: gender studies and the history of the book. Not only does this rare interdisciplinary coupling generate fresh and exciting insights into the literary and cultural production of the early modern period but it also greatly enriches the two critical paradigms themselves.
Jack Sharkey Full Length, Comedy Characters: 2 male, 2 female Interior Set Take a husband, wife, lover and friend, add a strange lamp, a gun and a rubber chicken plus a party that begins at 8 p.m., then again at 8 p.m. and then again at 8 p.m. and you have this nightmare comedy." Four people find themselves reliving one horrible hour over and over as themselves, as Japanese, as British aristocrats, as gangsters, and almost anything else you can think of. Camille is giving the party. Don shows up in a jealous funk about his wife, Alice, whom he suspects of seeing another man. When Alice and Ben have arrived, it turns out their relationship is innocent. But by the time Don realizes this he has already shot Ben, Alice and even Camille. Camille wishes that things might have turned out differently and that is what happens. All concerned find themselves back at the party's beginning again and again doomed to live that same hour over and over again until they get it right. Is it all an accident? Or is their dilemma part of someone's fiendish plan? A labyrinth of hilarity exits to a shocker of an ending.
This study commences with a simple question: how did Russia matter to England in the age of William Shakespeare? In order to answer the question, the author studies stories of Lapland survival, diplomatic envoys, merchant transactions, and plays for the public theaters of London. At the heart of every chapter, Shakespeare and his contemporaries are seen questioning the status of writing in English, what it can and cannot accomplish under the influence of humanism, capitalism, and early modern science. The phrase 'Writing Russia' stands for the way these English writers attempted to advance themselves by conjuring up versions of Russian life. Each man wrote out of a joint-stock arrangement, and each man's relative success and failure tells us much about the way Russia mattered to England. |
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