The book presents a systematic method of interpreting Shakespeare film adaptations based on their cinematic genres. Its approach is both scholarly and reader-friendly, and its subject is fundamentally interdisciplinary, combining the findings of Shakespeare scholarship with film and media studies, particularly genre theory. The book is organised into six large chapters, discussing films that form broad generic groups. Part I looks at three genres from the classical Hollywood era (western, melodrama and gangster-noir), while Part II deals with three contemporary blockbuster genres (teen film, undead horror and biopic). Beside a few better-known examples of mainstream cinema, the volume also highlights the Shakespearean elements in several nearly forgotten films, bringing them back to critical attention. -- .

Wonder is a highly ambivalent word and idea which can denote woe, horror, or terror on one hand and delight, jubilation, or ecstasy on the other. In the first part of this book, Adam Max Cohen embraces the many meanings of wonder in order to challenge the generic divides between comedy, tragedy, history, and romance to suggest that Shakespeare's primary goal in crafting each of his play worlds was the evocation of one or more varieties of wonder. In the second part of this book, seven esteemed scholars respond to Cohen's exploration and pay homage to his legacy.

Writing Catholic Women examines the interplay of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality through the lens of Catholicism in a wide range of works by women writers, forging interdisciplinary connections among women's studies, religion, and late twentieth-century literature. Discussing a diverse group of authors, Jeana DelRosso posits that the girlhood narratives of such writers constitute highly charged sites of their differing gestures toward Catholicism and argues that an understanding of the ways in which women write about religion from different cultural and racial contexts offers a crucial contribution to current discussions in gender, ethnic, and cultural studies.

This collection of multi-authored essays not only refashions and revises critical understandings of the early modern dramatist Ben Jonson and his canon of work, but is also self-reflexive about the process. It includes original essays by both established and emergent Jonson scholars, and employs materialist, feminist and queer theory in the production of its readings of Jonsonian playtexts and masques, familiar and otherwise. It is intended to encourage new approaches by students to this central figure from the Renaissance.

This volume offers a current reading of the Italian writer, Pirandello. The author examines the representation of gender relations in Pirandello's writing in the light of recent developments in textual analysis. She reassesses Pirandello's status as an innovative, avant-garde writer, arguing that whilst on the level of dramatic form he is certainly avant-garde, he is not so on the more covert level of gender relations. The author uses contemporary feminist theory to show how textual analysis can expose the covert reinforcement of patriarchal values. The study provides an illustration of a variety of methods which could be applied to texts other than those of Pirandello's.

This lively gathering of materials about Shakespeare's Julius Caesar will enrich students' understanding of the historical context of the play and encourage interpretations of its cultural meaning. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar reflects perennial cultural concerns about order and freedom, particularly as they clash in the figures of Caesar and Brutus. This innovative experiment in Shakespeare literacy features a wide variety of materials--from a modernized text of Plutarch's lives of Caesar and Brutus set on facing pages for easy comparison, to historical and contemporary parodies, to a rap version of the play. Most of the materials presented here are available in no other printed form. Study questions, project ideas, and bibliographies provide additional sources for examining the cultural and historical context of the play. Following a literary interpretation of the play, Derrick presents a wide variety of materials, including: a modernized version of Plutarch's lives of Caesar and Brutus, set side-by-side to aid in the comparison of their characters; dramatic sequels to the play in the Elizabethan theater; a comparison of Julius Caesar to the Lincoln assassination, with reprints of 19th-century newspaper accounts, John Wilkes Booth's obsessions about Brutus, and the desperate notes he left after the assassination; excerpts from popular culture, including a rap version of the play that is perfect for student performances, parodies from Mad Magazine, James Baldwin's little-known appeal to African American consciousness, "Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare," and John Housman's reflections on making the film version that starred Marlon Brando; popular allusions to the play and its verse fromthe 18th century to the present; and a chapter on teaching the play that includes commentary by noted teachers and a parallel layout of a rendering in Basic English alongside Shakespeare's edited play.

This work attempts to analyze Shakespeare's tragedies, play by play, to underline the major accidental irregularities and the more or less inspired discontinuities or "unconformities" to the found there. Performances of Shakespeare's plays are seen to eliminate or conceal the indirections and discontinuities and above all the minor discrepancies of the printed texts. But producers and directors as well as editors and "ordinary" readers are faced uncompromisingly with the texts - ultimately, the Elizabethan and Jacobean texts - and have to come to terms with them. It is regarded to be important, therefore, both for an understanding of Shakespeare's mind and craft and for a realistic interpretation of the plays to see clearly what problems of consistency they present.

This is a comprehensive study of Shakespeare's forgotten masterpiece 'The Phoenix and Turtle'. Bednarz confronts the question of why one of the greatest poems in the English language is customarily ignored or misconstrued by Shakespeare biographers, literary historians, and critics.

After theory and the new historicism, what might a self-conscious turn to formal analysis in Renaissance literary studies look like today? The essays address this question from a variety of critical perspectives, embodying a renewed engagement with questions of form.

Recurrent principles and "interests" in the sonnets are isolated in close studies of individual sonnets to show Shakespeare's pattern of mind. The study suggests various groupings by which the nature of Shakespeare's response to a number of stimuli can be gauged.

This is a critical study of Friel's entire oeuvre, relating his work to the problems of subjectivity, representation, history and the body, with a view to offering some placement of Friel in relation to both postmodernism and traditional humanism. Central to the study is Friel's concept of "translation", whereby he offers us the tension of shaping the new through a "translation" or reformulation of the old. The book includes discussion of Friel's play "Wonderful Tennessee".

During the years 1880 to 1945, American theatre grew up, moving from entertainment-driven motives and melodramatic formulas to serious confrontations with issues of its time and to an experimentation with forms that would allow those confrontations to be frank and earnest. Many of the playwrights of this time wrote works of lasting significance, while others have impacted the work of contemporary dramatists. This reference is a guide to American theatre during this formative period.

The volume includes alphabetically arranged entries for 40 American playwrights active between 1880 and 1945. Included are the most frequently canonized figures, as well as previously neglected women and minority playwrights whose work is a vital part of American theatre history. Each entry includes a biographical overview, a summary of the critical reception of major productions and significant revivals, a critical assessment of the playwright's career, and a listing of archival, primary, and secondary bibliographic material.

In New Labour's empathetic regime, how did diverse voices scrutinize its etiquettes of articulation and audibility? Using the voice as cultural evidence, Voice and New Writing explores what it means to 'have' a voice in mainstream theatre and for newly included voices to negotiate with the institutions that 'find' and 'represent' their identities.

Many readers today associate the early modern history play with Shakespeare. While not wishing to ignore the influence of Shakespeare, this collection of essays explores other historical drama between 1500 and 1660, covering a wide range of different formats outside the canon of 1590s history cycles. An introduction provides a survey of current criticism, including both early modern and contemporary definitions of the 'history play'. Individual essays in chronological order explore genres that perform 'history' in different ways, such as shows, moralities or closet drama. In this way this collection establishes alternative paradigms of early modern historical drama.

This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies--Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster’s Duchess and White Devil, among others--are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.

In studying performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama, Clum highlights the fact that - paradoxically - at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays about marriage were written by homosexual men. Beginning with Oscar Wilde and focusing on some of the most successful British and American playwrights of the past century, including Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, and Emlyn Williams in England and Clyde Fitch, George Kelly, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Edward Albee in the US, The Drama of Marriagelooks at how the plays they wrote about heterosexual marriage continue to impact contemporary gay playwrights and the depiction of marriage today.

MASTER. Boatswain! BOATSWAIN. Here, master; what cheer? MASTER. Good! Speak to th' mariners; fall to't yarely, or we run ourselves aground; bestir, bestir. BOATSWAIN. Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to th' master's whistle. Blow till thou burst thy wind, if room enough.

Eugene O'Neill, one of America's most gifted and prolific playwrights, wrote more than 60 plays between 1914 and 1941, a level of creativity paralleled in modern times only by Bernard Shaw. The progress of his art from crude, one-act plays to the monumental tragedies of his later years is a story as dramatic and compelling as that of his tortured personal history. Combining the two, Professor Bogard traces the contours of O'Neill's life in his art. By discussing, in their approximate order of composition, the published and unpublished works, Bogard illuminates not only the plays, but also the literary, aesthetic, and historical influences on the playwright's development. For the revised edition of this insightful, meticulously written work, the author has added new and unpublished material on A Tale of Possessors, Self-dispossessed, a cycle of nine plays written by O'Neill during the 1930s and '40s, only one of which he readied for the stage. Among the plays in this cycle that have been posthumously produced are More Stately Mansions (New York, 1967) and A Touch of the Poet (New York, 1958).

This volume comprises ten essays challenging the dominant account of Samuel Beckett's engagement with history. As the first full-length volume to address the historical debate in Beckett studies, "Samuel Beckett: " "History, Memory, Archive" provides both ground-breaking analysis of the major works as well as a sustained interrogation of the critical assumptions that underpin Beckett studies more generally. Drawing on a range of archival materials, and situating Beckett in historical context, these essays pose a strong challenge to the prevailing critical consensus that he was a deracinated modernist who cannot be read historically.

This four-volume "Companion to Shakespeare's Works," compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.

Complementing David Scott Kastan's "A Companion to Shakespeare "(1999), which focused on Shakespeare as an author in his historical context, these volumes examine each of his plays and major poems using all the resources of contemporary criticism from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analyses.

Scholars from all over the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States - have joined in the writing of new essays addressing virtually the whole of Shakespeare's canon from a rich variety of critical perspectives. A mixture of younger and more established scholars, their work reflects some of the most interesting research currently being conducted in Shakespeare studies.

Arguing for the persistence and utility of genre as a rubric for teaching and writing about Shakespeare's works, the editors have organized the four volumes in relation to generic categories: namely, the tragedies, the histories, the comedies, and the poems, problem comedies and late plays. Each volume thus contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre.

This ambitious project offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twentieth-first century.

This companion to Shakespeare's tragedies contains original essays on every tragedy from "Titus Andronicus" to "Coriolanus" as well as thirteen additionalessays on such topics as Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, Shakespeare's tragedies on film, Shakespeare's tragedies of love, Hamlet in performance, and tragic emotion in Shakespeare.

Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama is an accessible, informed survey of Peter Shaffer's work to date. Covering much ground, the book brings a fresh and original approach to this playwright's drama, incorporating discussion of every play in his canon. Suitable for readers ranging from 'A' level to undergraduate and postgraduate levels, this book introduces a variety of debates and interpretations to students, incorporating material that has not been published before. An engaging and authoritative contribution to the field.

The decade since Beckett's death has seen new interests in the erotic sweeping through our culture, acting in uneasy counterpoint to its established humanistic infrastructure and opening new questions about the significance of sexuality. Surprisingly or not, Beckett has startling further light to throw on the erotic phenomenon variously but insistently recognised in our time. This book is the first to propose a 'mythopoetics of sex' with which to explore Beckett's work as a whole.

This study examines the historical relationship between tragicomedy in the modernist theatre and the performative culture of Western consumer societies. While discussing a wide range of playwrights, it focusses specifically on the work of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard. Their plays, it is argued, illuminate the forms of pleasure, fear, performance and corruption which dominate our daily lives. Tragicomedy is seen as unique because of the existential playfulness and confusion of its protagonists, and because of its muted vision of apocalypse in the nuclear age.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This title offers a comprehensive critical analysis of the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors. This volume focuses on Shakespeare's reception by figures in Victorian theatre. "Great Shakespeareans" offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of William Charles Macready, Edwin Booth, Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.