No Hamlets is the first critical account of the role of Shakespeare in the intellectual tradition of the political right in Germany from the founding of the Empire in 1871 to the 'Bonn Republic' of the Cold War era. In this sustained study, Andreas Hoefele begins with Friedrich Nietzsche and follows the rightist engagement with Shakespeare to the poet Stefan George and his circle, including Ernst Kantorowicz, and the literary efforts of the young Joseph Goebbels during the Weimar Republic, continuing with the Shakespeare debate in the Third Reich and its aftermath in the controversy over 'inner emigration' and concluding with Carl Schmitt's Shakespeare writings of the 1950s. Central to this enquiry is the identification of Germany and, more specifically, German intellectuals with Hamlet. The special relationship of Germany with Shakespeare found highly personal and at the same time highIy political expression in this recurring identification, and in its denial. But Hamlet is not the only Shakespearean character with strong appeal: Carl Schmitt's largely still unpublished diaries of the 1920s reveal an obsessive engagement with Othello which has never before been examined. Interest in German philosophy and political thought has increased in recent Shakespeare studies. No Hamlets brings historical depth to this international discussion. Illuminating the constellations that shaped and were shaped by specific appropriations of Shakespeare, Hoefele shows how individual engagements with Shakespeare and a whole strand of Shakespeare reception were embedded in German history from the 1870s to the 1950s and eventually 1989, the year of German reunification.

The essays in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, written by renowned international scholars, open up the many dimensions and arenas of modernist movement and movements: spatial, geographical and political: affective and physiological; temporal and epochal; technological, locomotive and metropolitan; aesthetic and representational. Individual essays explore modernism's complex geographies, focusing on Anglo-European modernisms while also engaging with the debates engendered by recent models of world literatures and global modernisms. From questions of space and place, the volume moves to a focus on movement and motion, with topics ranging from modernity and bodily energies to issues of scale and quantity. The final chapters in the volume examine modernist film and the moving image, and travel and transport in the modern metropolis. 'Movement is reality itself', the philosopher Henri Bergson wrote: the original and illuminating essays in Moving Modernisms point in new ways to the realities, and the fantasies, of movement in modernist culture.

In distracted times like the present, Shakespeare too has been driven to distraction. Shakespeare | Cut considers contemporary practices of cutting up Shakespeare in stage productions, videogames, book sculptures, and YouTube postings, but it also takes the long view of how Shakespeare's texts have been cut apart in creative ways beginning in Shakespeare's own time. The book's five chapters consider cuts, cutting, and cutwork from a variety of angles: (1) as bodily experiences, (2) as essential parts of the process whereby Shakespeare and his contemporaries crafted scripts, (3) as units in perception, (4) as technologies situated at the interface between 'figure' and 'life,' and (5) as a fetish in western culture since 1900. Printed here for the first time are examples of the cut-ups that William S. Burroughs and Brion Guysin carried out with Shakespeare texts in the 1950s. Bruce R. Smith's original analysis is accompanied by twenty-four illustrations, which suggest the multiple media in which cutwork with Shakespeare has been carried out.

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple," declares Algernon early in Act One of The Importance of Being Earnest, and were it either, modern literature would be "a complete impossibility." It is a moment of sly, winking self-regard on the part of the playwright, for The Importance is itself the sort of complex modern literary work in which the truth is neither pure nor simple. Wilde's greatest play is full of subtexts, disguises, concealments, and double entendres. Continuing the important cultural work he began in his award-winning uncensored edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Nicholas Frankel shows that The Importance needs to be understood in relation to its author's homosexuality and the climate of sexual repression that led to his imprisonment just months after it opened at London's St. James's Theatre on Valentine's Day 1895. In a facing-page edition designed with students, teachers, actors, and dramaturges in mind, The Annotated Importance of Being Earnest provides running commentary on the play to enhance understanding and enjoyment. The introductory essay and notes illuminate literary, biographical, and historical allusions, tying the play closely to its author's personal life and sexual identity. Frankel reveals that many of the play's wittiest lines were incorporated nearly four years after its first production, when the author, living in Paris as an exiled and impoverished criminal, oversaw publication of the first book edition. This newly edited text is accompanied by numerous illustrations.

A discussion of the text or interpretation of passages from six plays by Euripides edited by the author for Oxford Classical Texts: Supplices, Electra, Heracles, Troades, Iphigenia in Tauris, Ion. In addition, if James Diggle has already discussed a passage from these plays in a published article, he has incorporated a reference to that discussion at the appropriate place, often adding new material. But the book is designed not only as a contribution to the amendment and interpretation of particular passages in these plays. Many of the notes are used as a basis for pursuing topics (whether linguistic or metrical) which are of general interest, and as a result the book will be of value to all future commentators on Greek tragedy.

'I could fly to New York and back every day for seven years and still not leave a carbon footprint as big as if I have a child. Ten thousand tonnes of CO2. That's the weight of the Eiffel Tower. I'd be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower.' In a time of global anxiety, terrorism, erratic weather and political unrest, a young couple want a child but are running out of time. If they over think it, they'll never do it. But if they rush, it could be a disaster.They want to have a child for the right reasons. Except, what exactly are the right reasons? And what will be the first to destruct - the planet or the relationship?

One way and another, nearly all of Shakespeare's countrymen and women (including the playwright himself) spent at least parts of their lives as servants of someone else. But until now that fact has gone largely unregarded. This book remedies the oversight, by showing how the ideals and practices of early modern service affect dozens of characters in almost all the plays, in ways that enrich our understanding of familiar figures like Iago and Falstaff and enhance the significance of lesser-known people and events across the canon. And it introduces an important concept, volitional primacy, into contemporary critical discourse.

With over forty original essays, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures offers an in-depth engagement with the current analytical methodologies and critical practices that are shaping the field in the twenty-first century. Divided into three sections-Structure, Taxonomy, Methodology-the volume carefully moves across approaches, genres, and forms to address a rich range topics that include popular culture in Late Qing China; Zhang Guangyu's Journey to the West in Cartoons; writings of Southeast Asian migrants in Taiwan; the Chinese Anglophone Novel; and depictions of HIV/AIDS in Chu T'ien-wen's Notes of a Desolate Man.

Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos: Person, Audience, Language breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates experiences of sublime pathos, for which audiences have been prepared by the sublime ethos described in the companion volume, Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare's model of mutualistic character, in which "entangled" language brokers a psychic communion between fictive persons and real-life audiences and readers. In the process, Sublime Critical platitudes regarding Shakespeare's liberating ambiguity and invention of the human are challenged, while the sympathetic imagination is reinstated as the linchpin of the playwright's sublime effects. As the argument develops, the Shakespearean sublime emerges as an emotional state of vulnerable exhilaration leading to an ethically uplifting openness towards others and an epistemologically bracing awareness of human unknowability. Taken together, Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos and Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

"This lively, lucid book undertakes a detailed and provocative study of Shakespeare's fascination with clowns, fools, and fooling. Through close reading of plays over the whole course of Shakespeare's theatrical career, Bell highlights the fun, wit, insights, and mysteries of some of Shakespeare's most vibrant and often vexing figures"--

This book offers fresh, critical insights into Shakespeare in Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan. It recognises that Shakespeare in East Asian education is not confined to the classroom or lecture hall but occurs on diverse stages. It covers multiple aspects of education: policy, pedagogy, practice, and performance. Beyond researchers in these areas, this book is for those teaching and learning Shakespeare in the region, those teaching and learning English as an Additional Language anywhere in the world, and those making educational policies, resources, or theatre productions with young people in East Asia.

From Shakespeare's Hamlet to Burton's Anatomy to Hilliard's miniatures, melancholy has long been associated with the emotional life of Renaissance England. But what other forms of sadness existed alongside, or even beyond, melancholy, and what kinds of selfhood did they help create? Beyond Melancholy explores the vital distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow, despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul. While most medical and philosophical writings emphasized the physiological and moral dangers of the 'dis-ease' of sadness, warning that in its most extreme form it could damage the body and even cause death, new Protestant teachings about the nature of devotion and salvation suggested that sadness could in fact be a positive, even transformative, experience, helping to humble believers' souls and bring them closer to God. The result of such dramatically conflicting paradigms was a widespread ambiguity about the value of sadness and a need to clarify its significance through active and wilful interpretation - something this book calls 'emotive improvisation'. Drawing on a wide range of Renaissance medical, philosophical, religious, and literary texts - including, but not limited to, moral treatises on the passions, medical text books, mortality records, doctors' case notes, sermons, theological tracts, devotional and elegiac poetry, letters, life-writings, ballads, and stage-plays - Beyond Melancholy explores the emotional codes surrounding the experience of sadness and the way writers responded to and reinterpreted them. In doing so it demonstrates the value of working across source materials too often divided along disciplinary lines, and the special importance of literary texts to the study of the emotional past.

SUFFOLK. As by your high imperial Majesty I had in charge at my depart for France, As procurator to your Excellence, To marry Princess Margaret for your Grace; So, in the famous ancient city Tours, In presence of the Kings of France and Sicil, The Dukes of Orleans, Calaber, Bretagne, and Alencon, Seven earls, twelve barons, and twenty reverend bishops, I have perform'd my task, and was espous'd; And humbly now upon my bended knee, In sight of England and her lordly peers, Deliver up my title in the Queen To your most gracious hands, that are the substance Of that great shadow I did represent: The happiest gift that ever marquis gave, The fairest queen that ever king receiv'd.

Rachel Crothers had a fascinating and influential career as a woman playwright and director. She was a major part of Broadway history during the first half of the 20th century, when she wrote for leading actresses such as Tallulah Bankhead, Katharine Cornell, and Gertrude Lawrence. While she is primarily known for her plays, she also worked for a time in Hollywood, and many of her plays were filmed--some more than once. This volume presents a biographical and critical overview of Crothers's life and career, along with synopses of her plays, descriptions of the critics' responses to each play, and substantial primary and secondary bibliographies. This book makes suggestions about the criticism that Crothers's work has elicited in the past, as well as about the directions that criticism might and should take in the future. Because of Crothers's work on Broadway, the book is a valuable guide to theater history throughout the 1900s, particularly because of the detailed cast and production information provided in the entries.

The sixteenth century was a turning point for both law and drama. Relentless professionalization of the common law set off a cascade of lawyerly self-fashioning - resulting in blunt attacks on lay judgment. English playwrights, including Shakespeare, resisted the forces of legal professionalization by casting legal expertise as a detriment to moral feeling. They celebrated the ability of individuals, guided by conscience and working alongside members of their community, to restore justice. Playwrights used the participatory nature of drama to deepen public understanding of and respect for communal justice. In plays such as King Lear and Macbeth, lay people accomplish the work of magistracy: conscience structures legal judgment, neighbourly care shapes the coroner's inquest, and communal emotions give meaning to confession and repentance. An original and deeply sourced study of early modern literature and law, Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England contributes to a growing body of scholarship devoted to the study of how drama creates and sustains community. Penelope Geng brings together a wealth of imaginative and documentary archives - including plays, sermons, conscience literature, Protestant hagiographies, legal manuals, and medieval and early modern chronicles - proving that literature never simply reacts to legal events but always actively invents legal questions, establishes legal expectations, and shapes legal norms.

A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism provides a rich collection of critical and secondary material selected to assist in the study of Shakespeare's plays. It includes a selection of sources and analogues Shakespeare drew upon in writing nine of his major works, a variety of widely divergent critical interpretations of the plays over the last sixty years - from the practical criticism of the 1930s to the theoretical approaches of the 1990s - and informative essays on Shakespeare's theatre and on the challenges of editing the Shakespeare text. This book represents an invaluable resource for students and teachers of Shakespeare, as well as for theatre practitioners.

Focusing on a burgeoning area of interest, this new study illustrates relations between legal and theatrical discourses in a range of plays. The essays focus on four general areas of interest to establish the vital connections between early modern drama and law during this seminal period in their professionalization: legal language and its construction of social norms and realities, positive law and the status of nature; the concept of property and its contractual guarantees; and the creation of power and authority under the law.

In his latest book, John Russell Brown sets out the grounds for a new and revealing way of studying Shakespeare's plays. By considering the entire theatrical event and not only what happens on stage, he takes his readers back to the major texts with a fuller understanding of their language and an enhanced view of a play's theatrical potential. Chapters on theatre-going, playscripts, acting, parts to perform, interplay, stage space, off-stage space, and the use of time all bring recent developments in Theatre Studies together with Shakespeare Studies.

This book presents an analysis of more than 30 plays written by Irish dramatists and poets that are based on the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. These plays proceed from the time of Yeats and Synge through MacNeice and the Longfords on to many of today's leading writers. A special feature of the book is that, in order to cater for these who may know little about Greek tragedy, it begins with a chapter entitled 'A Brief Reading of Greek Tragedy', and then, in regard to each Greek play analysed, it presents a mini-essay on that play, before coming to the Irish version(s) of it. Three features of these Irish appropriations stand out. Firstly, there are three methods of using a Greek tragedy: straight translation, which requires us to interrogate the original play; version, which preserves the invariant core of the original, but which can add or subtract material; loose adaptation, which often moves the action into the modern world. Secondly, there is a considerable stress on Sophocles whose emphasis on the theme of recognition resonates in a postcolonial society that must define itself. Thirdly, there is a considerable stress on the experience of women - such as Antigone and Medea - that can relate to the position of women in Irish society after independence.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Aristophanes' Wasps was produced in Athens in 422 BCE. Like other Aristophanic comedies, it is a satire on Athenian society and democratic institutions, in this case focusing on the legal system and its supposed manipulation for personal ends by corrupt democratic leaders. This critical edition of the play includes the full Greek text, detailed commentary notes, and an extensive introduction. It represents a thorough re-evaluation of the play, providing a wealth of insights and advances in our understanding of the work and related topics since the last full scholarly commentary by Douglas M. MacDowell in 1971. The text depends on a complete, independent collation of the manuscripts and contains numerous new choices of readings and emendations. The introduction guides readers around fundamental information; not just on Aristophanes' life, but on poetic and political interpretations of the play, matters of staging, and the manuscript tradition. The extensive commentary aims to equip readers of all levels with the information they will need to appreciate the play in its original performance context, and to evaluate it as both an historical document and an artistic creation. This new critical edition will be a starting point for all further research on Wasps, and will serve readers and scholars for decades to come.

Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice explores the impact of digital technologies on the theatrical performance of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century, both in terms of widening cultural access and developing new forms of artistry. Through close analysis of dozens of productions, both high-profile and lesser known, it examines the rise of live broadcasting and recording in the theatre, the growing use of live video feeds and dynamic projections on the mainstream stage, and experiments in born-digital theatre-making, including social media, virtual reality, and video-conferencing adaptations. In doing so, it argues that technologically adventurous performances of Shakespeare allow performers and audiences to test what they believe theatre to be, as well as to reflect on what it means to be present-with a work of art, with others, with oneself-in an increasingly online world.

This is the sixth volume of a detailed play-by-play catalogue of drama written by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish authors during the 110 years between the English Reformation to the English Revolution, covering every known play, extant and lost, including some which have never before been identified. It is based on a complete, systematic survey of the whole of this body of work, presented in chronological order. Each entry contains comprehensive information about a single play: its various titles, authorship, and date; a summary of its plot, list of its roles, and details of the human and geographical world in which the fictional action takes place; a list of its sources, narrative and verbal, and a summary of its formal characteristics; details of its staging requirements; and an account of its early stage and textual history.