What actions are justified when the fate of a nation hangs in the balance, and who can see the best path ahead? Julius Caesar has led Rome successfully in the war against Pompey and returns celebrated and beloved by the people. Yet in the senate fears intensify that his power may become supreme and threaten the welfare of the republic. A plot for his murder is hatched by Caius Cassius who persuades Marcus Brutus to support him. Though Brutus has doubts, he joins Cassius and helps organize a group of conspirators that assassinate Caesar on the Ides of March. But, what is the cost to a nation now erupting into civil war? A fascinating study of political power, the consequences of actions, the meaning of loyalty and the false motives that guide the actions of men, Julius Caesar is action packed theater at its finest.

"Character Studies" aims to promote sophisticated literary analysis through the concept of character. It demonstrates the necessity of linking character analysis to texts, themes, issues and ideas, and encourages students to embrace the complexity of literary characters and the texts in which they appear. The series thus fosters close critical reading and evidence-based discussion, as well as an engagement with historical context, and with literary criticism and theory.This book provides an introductory study of Beckett's most famous play, dealing not just with the four main characters but with the pairings that they form, and the implications of these pairings for the very idea of character in the play. After locating Godot within the context of Beckett's work, Lawley discusses some of the play's puzzles and difficulties - including the absent 'fifth character', Godot himself - he examines character-in-action in particular episodes and passages, drawing frequently on Beckett's revised text and paying consistent attention to the problems and possibilities of the text in performance."Character Studies" aims to promote sophisticated literary analysis through the concept of character. It demonstrates the necessity of linking character analysis to texts' themes, issues and ideas, and encourages students to embrace the complexity of literary characters and the texts in which they appear. The series thus fosters close critical reading and evidence-based discussion, as well as an engagement with historical context, and with literary criticism and theory.

In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme - testimony, power, humour and survival - to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.

Hamlet is considered the greatest of Shakespeare's works, unsurpassed in richness and levels of meaning; it probes into the deepest human emotions. Haunted by his father's ghost, Hamlet sets out to avenge his death. But, has he heard his father or the voice of madness welling up from his mourning heart? The father's ghost accuses his brother Claudius, who has assumed the throne and married his wife Queen Gertrude, of murder. Unable to trust anyone anymore, Hamlet is consumed by his mission, shunning those who love him, even killing the eavesdropping Polonius, thinking him to be Claudius. This sets into motion events that threaten the stability of the whole kingdom. A story of truth, betrayal, family, loyalty and fate it has been unfailingly popular since it was first performed. Hamlet speaks to each generation of its own yearnings and problems.

This book opens up "Twelfth Night" as a play to see and hear, provides useful contextual and source material, and considers the critical and theatrical reception over four centuries. A detailed performance commentary brings to life the many moods of Shakespeare's subtle but robust humor. Students are encouraged to imagine the theatrical challenges of Shakespeare's Illyria afresh for themselves, as well as the thought, creative responses and wonder it has provoked.

The people of Rome are starving, kindling unrest and rioting. Their anger turns particularly against the arrogant Caius Marcius, who makes no efforts to hide his contempt for the common man. The riots are halted by a war with the neighboring Volscians, in which Marcius gains glory leading the Roman army in the battle for the town of Corioli. Now titled Coriolanus, he returns to Rome a hero and is selected to take a seat in the senate. But his inability to show humility, or to mask his disdain soon turns the populace against him, forcing him into exile. Shakespeare's ultimate tragedy portrays an exceptional soldier who has no place in society, who cannot accept mundane compromise for peace and is guided by a nave machismo. Seldom performed, Coriolanus, is a captivating study of public and personal life and of the complexities and tension that marked Roman society.

What does it matter what we read? The question of the materiality of the book has surprising consequences when applied to dramatic writing, where the bookish qualities of dramatic literature, qualities emphasised by the dominion of print culture, have always seemed antagonistic to plays' other life on the stage. In Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama, W. B. Worthen asks how the print form of drama bears on how we understand its dual identity - as play texts and in performance. Beginning with the most salient modern critique of printed drama - arising in the field of Shakespeare editing - Worthen then looks at the ways playwrights and performance artists from George Bernard Shaw and Gertrude Stein to Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Anna Deavere Smith and Sarah Kane stage the poetics of modern drama in the poetics of the page.

<I>An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems</I> provides a lively and informed examination of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry: the narrative poems<I> Venus and Adonis</I> and <I>The Rape of Lucrece</I>; the <I>Sonnets</I>; and various minor poems, including some only recently attributed to Shakespeare. Peter Hyland locates Shakespeare as a skeptical voice within the turbulent social context in which Elizabethan professional poets had to work, and relates his poems to the tastes, values, and political pressures of his time. Hyland also explores how Shakespeare's poetry can be of interest to 21st century readers.

There is no Shakespeare without text. Yet readers often do not realize that the words in the book they hold, like the dialogue they hear from the stage, has been revised, augmented and emended since Shakespeare's lifetime. An essential resource for the history of Shakespeare on the page, Shakespeare and Textual Theory traces the explanatory underpinnings of these changes through the centuries. After providing an introduction to early modern printing practices, Suzanne Gossett describes the original quartos and folios as well as the first collected editions. Subsequent sections summarize the work of the 'New Bibliographers' and the radical challenge to their technical analysis posed by poststructuralist theory, which undermined the presumed stability of author and text. Shakespeare and Textual Theory presents a balanced view of the current theoretical debates, which include the nature of the surviving texts we call Shakespeare's; the relationship of the author 'Shakespeare' and of authorial intentions to any of these texts; the extent and nature of Shakespeare's collaboration with others; and the best or most desirable way to present the texts - in editions or performances. The book is illustrated throughout with examples showing how theoretical decisions affect the text of Shakespeare's plays, and case studies of Hamlet and Pericles demonstrate how different theories complicate both text and meaning, whether a play survives in one version or several. The conclusion summarizes the many ways in which beliefs about Shakespeare's texts have changed over the centuries.

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.

Classics, Computer Science, and Linguistics are brought together in this book, in an attempt to provide an answer to the authorship question concerning Prometheus Bound, a disputed play in the Aeschylean corpus, by applying some well-established Computer Stylistics methods. One of the main objectives of Stylometry, which, broadly speaking, is the study of quantified style, is Authorship Attribution. In its traditional form it can range from manually calculating descriptive statistics to the use of computer-assisted methodologies. However, non-traditional Authorship Attribution drastically changed the field. It brought together modern Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence applications (machine learning, natural language processing), and its key characteristic is that it aims at developing fully-automated systems for the attribution of texts of unknown authorship. In this book the author employs a series of supervised and unsupervised techniques used in non-traditional Authorship Attribution-applied here for the first time in ancient drama. The outcome of the analysis indicates a significant distance between the disputed text and the secure plays of Aeschylus, but also various interesting (micro-linguistic) ties of affinity with other authors, especially Sophocles and Euripides.

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.

Two titanic personages and two of the greatest world empires become entangled in this magnificent drama of love and war. The Roman leader Mark Antony should be ruling the eastern Roman Empire, but the seductive, cunning Egyptian Queen Cleopatra has captured all of his attention. Octavius has become Ceasar and believes that Antony has neglected his duties and left Rome vulnerable. Tensions mount and the rift escalates until their armies clash. Blinded by his passion for Cleopatra Antony is unable to meet his responsibilities, unable to choose between an empire and love. Their irresistible attraction causes each to make ruinous decisions which lead irretrievably to despair and defeat. Spanning a ten-year period, this bold, splendid tragedy ranks among Shakespeare's greatest achievements.

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.

Offering for the first time a student introduction to Aristophanes’ most explosive political satire, this volume is an essential guide to the context, themes and later reception of Cavalry. The ancient comedy is a fascinating insight into demagoguery and political rhetoric in classical Athens. These are subjects that resonate with a modern audience more now than ever before. Originally performed in 424 BCE, Cavalry was the first play Aristophanes directed himself and it was awarded first prize. It targets the Athenian demagogue, Cleon, who had risen to prominence since the death of Pericles and to pre-eminence after an audacious victory over Sparta in 425 BCE. In Cavalry, Aristophanes attacks Cleon’s popularity with the masses, but also criticises the democracy itself as guilty of gullibility, self-interest and political shortsightedness. As the play shows, the only hope of escape from the crisis is for Athens to find a leader even more popular Cleon. And who better to be more foul-mouthed, depraved and shameless than a sausage-seller, if only because he turns out in the end to have a good heart and a true love of traditional Athenian values?

This volume presents the proceedings of the international conference "Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires: Looking at Early Modern England and Spain", held in 2012 as part of the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet). Implementing the concept of culture as a virtual network, it investigates Early modern European drama and its global dissemination. The 12 articles of the volume - all written by experts in the field teaching in the United Kingdom, the USA, Russia, Switzerland, India and Germany - focus on a selection of English and Spanish dramas from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Analysing and comparing motifs, formal parameters as well as plot structures, they discuss the commonalities and differences of Early modern drama in England and Spain.

Though a staple in high school English classes, Julius Caesar is not a simple play. Seemingly irreconcilable forces are at work: fate and free will, the changeableness and stubbornness of ambitious men, the demands of public service and the desire for private gain. Drawn from history as recorded by Plutarch, the major characters-Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony-are complex, as are the twists and turns of their fortunes. What kind of man rises to power? What price does he pay when he becomes a politician? These questions raised by Shakespeare are relevant in every age, whether ancient Rome, Elizabethan England, or even in our own day.

Outlaws, irreverent humorists, political underdogs, authoritarians - and the silhouette, throughout, of a contemporary Australian woman: these are some of the figures who emerge from Philippa Kelly's extraordinary personal tale, The King and I. Kelly uses Shakespeare's King Lear as it has never been used before - to tell the story of Australia and Australians through the intimate journey she makes with Shakespeare's old king, whose struggles and torments are touchstones for the variety, poignancy and humour of Australian life. We hear the shrieking of birds and feel the heat of dusty towns, and we also come to know about important moments in Australia's social and political landscape: about the evolution of women's rights; about the erosion and reclamation of Aboriginal identity and the hardships experienced by transported settlers; and about attitudes toward age and endurance. At the heart of this book is one woman's personal story, and through this story we come to understand many profound and often hilarious features of the land Down Under.

Beginning by mapping out an overview of the expansion of elementary education in Britain across the nineteenth century, Andrew Murphy explores, for the first time, the manner in which Shakespeare acquired a working-class readership. He traces developments in publishing which meant that editions of Shakespeare became ever cheaper as the century progressed. Drawing on more than a hundred published and manuscript autobiographical texts, the book examines the experiences of a wide range of working-class readers. Particular attention is focused on a set of radical readers for whom Shakespeare's work had a special political resonance. Murphy explores the reasons why the playwright's working-class readership began to fall away from the turn of the century, noting the competition he faced from professional sports, the cinema, radio and television. The book concludes by asking whether it matters that, in our own time, Shakespeare no longer commands a general popular audience.

Stopping at nothing in his evil obsession for the throne, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, schemes and betrays, deceives and murders as he sees fit. Rarely has Shakespeare created a character that is at the same time so intelligent and evil, so despicable and fascinating. In order to wrest the crown from his brother Edward IV he conspires to have his other brother George charged with treason, arrested and murdered. This is enough to kill the severely ill King leaving Richard to serve as regent until the King's heirs are of age. To strengthen his own claim to the throne Richard woos Lady Anne the widow of the also murdered Prince of Wales. The opposition soon forms and the last Lancastrian heir Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, leads an army from France against Richard. Disturbing and enthralling, Richard III is a gripping tragedy and one of Shakespeare's enduring successes.

What does it mean for a play to be political in the 21st century? Does it require explicit engagement with events and situations with the aim of bringing about change or highlighting social wrongs? Is it purely a matter of content or is it also a matter of structure? The Contemporary Political Play: Rethinking Dramaturgical Structure examines the politics of contemporary 'political' drama. It traces the origins of the contemporary British political play to the emergence of the idea of 'serious drama' in the late 19th century through the work of Bernard Shaw, and argues that a Shavian version of serious drama was inextricably linked to the social and political structures of British society at the time. While political drama is still often thought of as adhering to a Shavian model in which social issues are presented through a dialectical structure, Grochala argues that the different political structures of contemporary Britain give rise to formally inventive dramaturgies that are no less 'serious' or political than their Shavian forebears. Through analysing the experimental dramaturgies of contemporary plays by playwrights including Caryl Churchill, Simon Stephens, Anthony Neilson, debbie tucker green and Mark Ravenhill, among others, it offers a set of new principles for understanding how a play functions politically and reveals how today the dramaturgical structure of a play is as political as its content.

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.

'Much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to: in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.' Porter, Macbeth, II i. Why would Elizabethan audiences find Shakespeare's Porter in Macbeth so funny? And what exactly is meant by the name the 'Weird' Sisters? Jonathan Hope, in a comprehensive and fascinating study, looks at how the concept of words meant something entirely different to Elizabethan audiences than they do to us today. In Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance, he traces the ideas about language that separate us from Shakespeare. Our understanding of 'words', and how they get their meanings, based on a stable spelling system and dictionary definitions, simply does not hold. Language in the Renaissance was speech rather than writing - for most writers at the time, a 'word' was by definition a collection of sounds, not letters - and the consequences of this run deep. They explain our culture's inability to appreciate Shakespeare's wordplay, and suggest that a rift opened up in the seventeenth century as language came to be regarded as essentially 'written'. The book also considers the visual iconography of language in the Renaissance, the influence of the rhetorical tradition, the extent to which Shakespeare's late style is driven by a desire to increase the subjective content of the text, and new ways of studying Shakespeare's language using computers. As such it will be of great interest to all serious students and teachers of Shakespeare. Despite the complexity of its subject matter, the book is accessibly written with an undergraduate readership in mind.

Published in association with the seminar series of the same name held by the University of Oxford, "Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies" presents the best new scholarship addressing the sources, development and ongoing influence of Samuel Beckett's work. Edited by convenors Dr Peter Fifield and Dr David Addyman, the volume presents ten research essays by leading international scholars ranging across Beckett's work, opening up new avenues of enquiry and association for scholars, students and readers of Beckett's work.Among the subjects covered the volume includes studies of: -Beckett and the influence of new media 1956-1960-the influence of silent film on Beckett's work-death, loss and Ireland in Beckett's drama - tracing Irish references in Beckett's plays from the 1950s and 1960s, including" Endgame," "All That Fall," " Krapp's Last Tape" and "Eh Joe"-a consideration of Beckett's theatrical notebooks and annotated copies of his plays which provide a unique insight into his attitude toward the staging of his plays, the ways he himself interpreted his texts and approached theatrical practice.-the French text of the novel "Mercier et Camier," which both biographically and aesthetically appeared at a very significant moment in Beckett's career and indicates a crucial development in his writing-the matter of tone in Beckett's drama, offering a new reading of the ways in which this elusive property emerges and can be read in the relationship between published text, canon and performance