King Lear is arguably the most complex and demanding play in the whole of Shakespeare. Once thought impossible to stage, today it is performed with increasing frequency, both in Britain and America. It has been staged more often in the last fifty years than in the previous 350 years of its performance history, its bleak message clearly chiming in with the growing harshness, cruelty and violence of the modern world. Performing King Lear offers a very different and practical perspective from most studies of the play, being centred firmly on the reality of creation and performance. The book is based on Jonathan Croall's unique interviews with twenty of the most distinguished actors to have undertaken this daunting role during the last forty years, including Donald Sinden, Tim Pigott-Smith, Timothy West, Julian Glover, Oliver Ford Davies, Derek Jacobi, Christopher Plummer, Michael Pennington, Brian Cox and Simon Russell Beale. He has also talked to two dozen leading directors who have staged the play in London, Stratford and elsewhere. Among them are Nicholas Hytner, David Hare, Kenneth Branagh, Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner, Jonathan Miller and Dominic Dromgoole. Each reveals in precise and absorbing detail how they have dealt with the formidable challenge of interpreting and staging Shakespeare's great tragedy.

In this first substantive study of directing Shakespeare in the USA, Charles Ney compares and contrasts directors working at major companies across the country. Because of the complexities of directing Shakespeare for audiences today, a director's methods, values and biases are more readily perceptible in their work on Shakespeare than in more contemporary work. Directors disclose their interpretation of the text, their management of the various stages of production, how they go about supervising rehearsals and share tactics. This book will be useful to students wanting to develop skills, practitioners who want to learn from what other directors are doing, and scholars and students studying production practice and performance.

For teachers and lovers of Shakespeare, ShakesFear and How to Cure It provides a comprehensive approach to the challenge and rewards of teaching Shakespeare and gives teachers both an overview of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays and specific classroom tools for teaching it. Written by a celebrated teacher, scholar and director of Shakespeare, it shows teachers how to use the text to make the words and the moments come alive for their students. It refutes the idea that Shakespeare's language is difficult and provides a survey of the plays by someone who has lived intimately with them on the page and on the stage.

The Victorian classical burlesque was a popular theatrical genre of the mid-19th century. It parodied ancient tragedies with music, melodrama, pastiche, merciless satire and gender reversal. Immensely popular in its day, the genre was also intensely metatheatrical and carries significance for reception studies, the role and perception of women in Victorian society and the culture of artistic censorship. This anthology contains the annotated text of four major classical burlesques: Antigone Travestie (1845) by Edward L. Blanchard, Medea; or, the Best of Mothers with a Brute of a Husband (1856) by Robert Brough, Alcestis; the Original Strong-Minded Woman (1850) and Electra in a New Electric Light (1859) by Francis Talfourd. The cultural and textual annotations highlight the changes made to the scripts from the manuscripts sent to the Lord Chamberlain's office and, by explaining the topical allusions and satire, elucidate elements of the burlesques' popular cultural milieu. An in-depth critical introduction discusses the historical contexts of the plays' premieres and unveils the cultural processes behind the reception of the myths and original tragedies. As the burlesques combined spectacular effects with allusions to contemporary affairs, ambivalent and provocative attitudes to women, the plays represent an essential tool for reading the social history of the era.

xv, 266 pp. Using fiction as a lens through which to view particular developments in the law, each of the essays in this book discusses a work of literary fiction - some classical (the tale of Ruth in the Bible, the fiction of Franz Kafka and Herman Melville, the plays of William Shakespeare), some modern (the post-September 11 fiction of William Gibson, Ken Kalfus, Claire Messud, Ian McEwan and Helen Schulman) - that concerns, directly or indirectly, the historical development of the law. This exploration of legal history through fiction pays particular attention to its relevance to our present circumstances and our growing concerns about terrorism and civil liberties.
Each essay considers the legal lessons about the fictional event or events at its core, lessons that tell us something worth remembering as we continue to chart law's evolution. These lessons, like those that may be found in all great literature, necessarily extend beyond the historical confines of the characters and plot and background of each story to embrace the modern condition - which, as these great stories suggest, is and always has been the only condition.
"These provocative, scholarly essays range from the Bible to a look at how tomorrow's technology may influence fundamental social organization with many startling stops in between - Lady Macbeth, Kafka, Napster and post 9/11 fiction to name a few. Friedman's choices help the reader view the transit of law and culture through novel, sometimes unforgettable, dimensions."
-- Michael Meltsner, Matthews Distinguished University Professor, Northeastern Law School and author of The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer.
"The stories examined here brilliantly reflect worlds imagined by literature that speak to the modern condition: worlds steeped in law, worlds where law is refracted through complex orderings, and worlds where law seems virtually absent. All eloquently express the power of law to shape and unshape our realities within the modern condition.
The authors examine the law's role within a wide range of literary and historical texts. This volume remembers our deeply missed colleague George Dargo, and builds on his prolific examination of law in the context of biblical texts and the works of Herman Melville and Franz Kafka. Three of his elegantly written articles are included here. Lawrence Friedman's intricately researched essays reveal continuities, within the legal imaginary, between the novel at the height of its power in the nineteenth century and cutting-edge postmodern fiction in the post-9/11 world. Carla Spivack rounds out the volume with essays that take a fresh look at property rights and law, not normally viewed as the most scintillating of subjects. She engages in a fascinating exegesis of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and in her other articles provides bold insights from feminist, gender and queer studies. "
-- Tawia B. Ansah, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Professor of Law, FIU, College of Law.
LAWRENCE FRIEDMAN received his bachelor of arts in history from Connecticut College and holds law degrees from Boston College Law School and Harvard Law School. A member of the faculty at New England Law - Boston, he has written widely in the areas of constitutional law, national security law, and law and literature. His previous books include The Massachusetts State Constitution (with Lynnea Thody) and The Case for Congress: Separation of Powers and the War on Terror (with Victor Hansen).

While large bodies of scholarship exist on the plays of Shakespeare and the philosophy of Heidegger, this book is the first to read these two influential figures alongside one another, and to reveal how they can help us develop a creative and contemplative sense of ethics, or an 'ethical imagination'. Following the increased interest in reading Shakespeare philosophically, it seems only fitting that an encounter take place between the English language's most prominent poet and the philosopher widely considered to be central to continental philosophy. Interpreting the plays of Shakespeare through the writings of Heidegger and vice versa, each chapter pairs a select play with a select work of philosophy. In these pairings the themes, events, and arguments of each work are first carefully unpacked, and then key passages and concepts are taken up and read against and through one another. As these hermeneutic engagements and cross-readings unfold we find that the words and deeds of Shakespeare's characters uniquely illuminate, and are uniquely illuminated by, Heidegger's phenomenological analyses of being, language, and art.

Shakespeare's Pictures is the first full-length study of visual objects in Shakespearean drama. In several plays (Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, among others) pictures are brought on stage - in the form of portraits or other images - as part of the dramatic action. Shakespeare's characters show, exchange and describe them. The pictures arouse in their beholders strong feelings, of desire, nostalgia or contempt, and sometimes even taking the place of the people they depict. The pictures presented in Shakespeare's work are part of the language of the drama, and they have a significant impact on theatrical performance, from Shakespeare's time to our own. Keir Elam pays close attention to the iconographic and literary contexts of Shakespeare's pictures while also exploring their role in performance history. Highly illustrated with 46 images, this volume examines the conflicted cooperation between the visual and the verbal.

Dr. Krims, a psychoanalyst for more than three decades, takes readers into the sonnets and characters of Shakespeare and unveils the Bard's talent for illustrating psychoanalytical issues. These "hidden" aspects of the characters are one reason they feel real and, thus, have such a powerful effect, explains Krims. In exploring Shakespeare's characters, readers may also learn much about their own inner selves. In fact, Krims explains in one chapter how reading Shakespeare and other works helped him resolve his own inner conflicts. Topics of focus include Prince Hal's aggression, Hotspur's fear of femininity, Hamlet's frailty, Romeo's childhood trauma and King Lear's inability to grieve. In one essay, Krims offers a mock psychoanalysis of Beatrice from Much Ado about Nothing. All of the essays look at the unconscious motivations of Shakespeare's characters, and, in doing so, both challenge and extend common understandings of his texts.

The shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the consequence of internal as well as external developments: internally, the playwright was liberated from the old imperative of "Unity of Time" and the expectation that the events of the play must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time functioned.

Fortune's Fool Here is William Shakespeare's brilliant play the Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, set in Verona during a feud between the Capulets and the Montagues. Romeo, a Montague, falls desperately in love with Juliet, a Capulet, and the two secretly marry. Lyrical and poignant, this immortal play of star-crossed lovers will stay with you long after the play ends. 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is widely considered Shakespeare's greatest play. Hamlet is confronted by the ghost of his father, who tells him that Hamlet's uncle and mother conspired to poison him. Knowing that his uncle, who now sits upon the throne, and his mother, who has married his uncle and is now his queen, have murdered his father, Hamlet sets out to avenge his father's death and set things to right. But his plan could destroy the entire realm. To be, or not to be-that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. To die-to sleep- No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

Shakespeare's tragedies are among the greatest works of tragic art and have attracted a rich range of commentary and interpretation from leading creative and critical minds. This Reader's Guide offers a comprehensive survey of the key criticism on the tragedies, from the 17th century through to the present day. In this book, Nicolas Tredell: - Introduces essential concepts, themes and debates. - Relates Shakespeare's tragedies to fi elds of study including psychoanalysis, gender, race, ecology and philosophy. - Summarises major critical texts from Dryden and Dr Johnson to Janet Adelman and Julia Reinhard Lupton, and covers influential critical movements such as New Criticism, New Historicism and poststructuralism. - Demonstrates how key critical approaches work in practice, with close reference to Shakespeare's texts. Informed and incisive, this is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in how the category of Shakespeare's tragedies has been constructed, contested and changed over the years.

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Contributions from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making these books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: Essays on the play's critical and performance histories A keynote chapter reviewing current research and recent criticism of the play A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of learning and teaching resources for both instructors and students This volume offers a thought-provoking guide to Shakespeare's Richard II, surveying its critical heritage and the ways in which scholars, critics, and historians have approached the play, from the 17th to the 21st century. It provides a detailed, up-to-date account of the play's rich performance history on stage and screen, looking closely at some major British productions, as well as a guide to learning and teaching resources and how these might be integrated into effective pedagogic strategies in the classroom. Presenting four new critical essays, this collection opens up fresh perspectives on this much-studied drama, including explorations of: the play's profound preoccupation with earth, ground and land; Shakespeare's engagement with early modern sermon culture, 'mockery' and religion; a complex network of intertextual and cultural references activated by Richard's famous address to the looking-glass; and the long-overlooked importance to this profoundly philosophical drama of that most material of things: money.

The video-sharing platform YouTube signals exciting opportunities and challenges for Shakespeare studies. As patron, distributor and archive, YouTube occasions new forms of user-generated Shakespeares, yet a reduced Bard too, subject to the distractions of the contemporary networked mediascape. This book identifies the genres of YouTube Shakespeare, interpreting them through theories of remediation and media convergence and as indices of Shakespeare's shifting cultural meanings. Exploring the intersection of YouTube's participatory culture - its invitation to 'Broadcast Yourself' - with its corporate logic, the book argues that YouTube Shakespeare is a site of productive tension between new forms of self-expression and the homogenizing effects of mass culture. Stephen O'Neill""unfolds the range of YouTube's Bardic productions to elaborate on their potential as teaching and learning resources. The book importantly argues for a critical media literacy, one that attends to identity constructions and to the politics of race and gender as they emerge through Shakespeare's new media forms. "Shakespeare and YouTube" will be of interest to students and scholars of Shakespearean drama, poetry and adaptations, as well as to new media studies.

Essential for students of theatre studies, Methuen Drama's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to 2009 in six volumes. Each volume features a critical analysis and reevaluation of the work of four key playwrights from that decade authored by a team of experts, together with an extensive commentary on the period . The 1960s was a decade of seismic changes in British theatre as in society at large. This important new study in Methuen Drama's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series explores how theatre-makers responded to the changes in society. Together with a thorough survey of the theatrical activity of the decade it offers detailed reassessments of the work of four of the leading playwrights. The 1960s volume provides in-depth studies of the work of four of the major playwrights who came to prominence: Edward Bond (by Steve Nicholson), John Arden (Bill McDonnell), Harold Pinter (Jamie Andrews) and Alan Ayckbourn (Frances Babbage). It examines their work then, its legacy today, and how critical consensus has changed over time.

Hamlet is the most often produced play in the western literary canon, and a fertile global source for film adaptation. Samuel Crowl, a noted scholar of Shakespeare on film, unpacks the process of adapting from text to screen through concentrating on two sharply contrasting film versions of Hamlet by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996). The films' socio-political contexts are explored, and the importance of their screenplay, film score, setting, cinematography and editing examined. Offering an analysis of two of the most important figures in the history of film adaptations of Shakespeare, this study seeks to understand a variety of cinematic approaches to translating Shakespeare's "words, words, words" into film's particular grammar and rhetoric

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.

Essential for students of theatre studies, Methuen Drama's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to 2009 in six volumes. Each volume features a critical analysis and reevaluation of the work of four key playwrights from that decade authored by a team of experts, together with an extensive commentary on the period . Modern British Playwriting: The 1950s provides an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of the theatre of the decade together with a detailed study of the work of T.S Eliot (by Sarah Bay-Cheng) , Terence Rattigan (David Pattie), John Osborne (Luc Gilleman) and Arnold Wesker (John Bull). The volume sets the context by providing a chronological survey of the 1950s, a period when Britain was changing rapidly and the very fabric of an apparently stable society seemed to be under threat. It explores the crisis in the theatrical climate and activity in the first part of the decade and the shift as the theatre began to document the unease in society, before documenting the early life of the four principal playwrights studied in the volume. Four scholars provide detailed examinations of the playwrights' work during the decade, combining an analysis of their plays with a study of other material such as early play drafts, interviews and the critical receptions of the time. An Afterword reviews what the writers went on to do and provides a summary evaluation of their contribution to British theatre from the perspective of the twenty-first century.

Described as the Mona Lisa of literature and the world's first detective story, Sophocles' Oedipus the King is a major text from the ancient Greek world and an iconic work of world literature. Aristotle's favourite play, lauded by him as the exemplary Athenian tragedy, Oedipus the King has retained its power both on and off the stage. Before Freud's famous interpretation of the play - an appropriation, some might say - Hlderlin and Nietzsche recognised its unique qualities. Its literary worth is undiminished, philosophers revel in its probing into issues of freedom and necessity and Lacan has ensured its vital significance for post-Freudian psychoanalysis. This Reader's Guide begins with Oedipus as a figure from Greek mythology before focusing on fifth-century Athenian tragedy and the meaning of the drama as it develops scene by scene on the stage. The book covers the afterlife of the play in depth and provides a comprehensive guide to further reading for students.

Numerous books have been written about Greek tragedy, but almost all of them are concerned with the 32 plays that still survive. This book, by contrast, concentrates on the plays that no longer exist. Hundreds of tragedies were performed in Athens and further afield during the classical period, and even though nearly all are lost, a certain amount is known about them through fragments and other types of evidence. Matthew Wright offers an authoritative two-volume critical introduction and guide to the lost tragedies. This first volume examines the remains of works by playwrights such as Phrynichus, Agathon, Neophron, Critias, Astydamas, Chaeremon, and many others who have been forgotten or neglected. (Volume 2 explores the lost works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.) What types of evidence exist for lost tragedies, and how might we approach this evidence? How did these plays become lost or incompletely preserved? How can we explain why all tragedians except Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides became neglected or relegated to the status of 'minor' poets? What changes and continuities can be detected in tragedy after the fifth century BC? Can the study of lost works and neglected authors change our views of Greek tragedy as a genre? This book answers such questions through a detailed study of the fragments in their historical and literary context. Including English versions of previously untranslated fragments as well as in-depth discussion of their significance, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy makes these works accessible for the first time.

For most of the twentieth century the exuberantfluency of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art was not regarded as worthy ofserious attention. Even the evidence for the swiftness of her wit, thought andcomposition remains more impressionistic and anecdotal than firmly proven.Through close attention to original manuscript material, Josie Billingtonargues that Barrett Browning's fast, fine and excitedly vigorous and agileimaginative intelligence is Shakespearean, both in its power, and in thecreative drive and dynamic to which it gives rise. Billington contends that for Barrett Browning, asfor Shakespeare, writing was demonstrably a creative event not a second-orderrecord of experience, and that Barrett Browning's characteristic habits ofcomposition, and her creative procedure, resemble in significant ways those ofthe poet she valued most highly. A fascinating study of both writers' analogouscreative dispositions, minds and modes.>

This book's underlying claim is that English Renaissance tragedy addresses live issues in the experience of readers and spectators today: it is not a genre to be studied only for aesthetic or "heritage" reasons. The book considers the way in which tragedy in general, and English Renaissance tragedy in particular, addresses ideas of freedom, understood both from an individual and a sociopolitical perspective. Tragedy since the Greeks has addressed the constraints and necessities to which human life is subject (Fate, the gods, chance, the conflict between state and individual) as well as the human desire for autonomy and self-direction. In short, "English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom" shows how the tragic drama of Shakespeare's age addresses problems of freedom, slavery, and tyranny in ways that speak to us now.

Winner of the 2022 Olivier Award for Best New Play "Life of Pi will make you believe in the power of theatre" (Times). After a cargo ship sinks in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, there are five survivors stranded on a lifeboat - a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, a Royal Bengal tiger, and a sixteen year-old boy named Pi. Time is against them, nature is harsh, who will survive? Based on one of the most extraordinary and best-loved works of fiction - winner of the Man Booker Prize, selling over fifteen million copies worldwide - and featuring breath-taking puppetry and state-of-the-art visuals, Life of Pi is a universally acclaimed, smash hit adaptation of an epic journey of endurance and hope. Adapted by acclaimed playwright Lolita Chakrabarti, this edition was published to coincide with the West End premiere in November 2021.

Oedipus, king of Thebes, is one of the giant figures of ancient mythology. Through the centuries, his story has inspired works of epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, opera, a gospel musical and more. The myth has been famously deployed in psychology by Sigmund Freud. It may not be too bold to claim that Oedipus is the name from Greco-Roman mythology best known beyond the academy at the present time, thanks to Freud's famous phrase 'the Oedipus complex'. The most famous version of the Oedipus myth from antiquity is the Greek play by Sophocles. But there is another version, the Latin drama by the Roman philosopher and politician Seneca. Seneca's version is an entirely different treatment from that of Sophocles and reflects concerns special to the author and his Roman audience in the first century AD. Moreover, the play actually exercised a much greater influence on European literature and thought than has usually been suspected. This book offers a compact and incisive study of the multi-faceted Oedipus myth, of Seneca as dramatist, of the distinctive characteristics of Seneca's play and of the most important aspects of the reception of the play in European drama and culture. The scope of the book ranges chronologically from Homer's treatment of Oedipus myth in the Odyssey down to a twenty-first century Senecan treatment by a Lebanese Canadian dramatist. No knowledge of Latin or other foreign languages is required.