The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? Vienna is corrupt. The Duke, who has let the city fall to vice, hands control to his Deputy, a hardline, puritan reformer. The Deputy uses ancient laws to sentence citizens to death for sexual misconduct. But when a religious Novice pleads for clemency, their heady encounter leaves the Deputy guilty of the very crime that the law condemns. Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse Josie Rourke's adaptation of Measure for Measure imagines the play in its original year of performance, 1604, and also in 2018.

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.

Caridad Svich offers a new take on the history play, which tells the story of Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn. Shakespeare's Henry VIII is a story of a brazen race to power and the desire for an heir. Advised by Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII is caught between church and state as he meets Anne Boleyn and seeks to annul his marriage to Queen Katherine. This episodic and plot-driven play examines the machinations of royal power. Shakespeare's Henry VIII, in this new translation by Caridad Svich, is a swift-moving, complex tale of intrigue. This translation of Henry VIII was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

Choreographing Shakespeare presents a hitherto unexplored history of the choreographers and performers who have created dance adaptations of Shakespeare. This book investigates forty dance works in genres such as ballet, modern dance, and hip-hop, produced between 1940 and 2016 by choreographers in Britain, America, and Europe, all of which use Shakespeare's plays and Sonnets as their source material. By combining scholarly analysis of these productions with practice-based conversations from six contemporary choreographers, Klett offers both breadth of coverage and in-depth analysis of how Shakespeare's poetic language is translated into the usually wordless medium of dance, and shows exactly how these dance adaptations move beyond the Shakespearean texts to engage with musical and choreographic influences. Ideal for students of Shakespeare and Dance Studies, Choreographing Shakespeare explores how dance adaptations strive to design legible and intelligible stories, while ultimately celebrating the beauty of pure movement.

Helen Vendler, widely regarded as our most accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as an incomparable guide to some of the best-loved poems in the English language. In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out not only new levels of import in particular lines, but also the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect. The commentaries--presented alongside the original and modernized texts--offer fresh perspectives on the individual poems, and, taken together, provide a full picture of Shakespeare's techniques as a working poet. With the help of Vendler's acute eye, we gain an appreciation of "Shakespeare's elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical imaginative intent."

New versions of Shakespeare's history plays from director and translator Douglas Langworthy. In his three Henry VI plays, Shakespeare tackles the infamous Wars of the Roses and the fall of the House of Lancaster. In this translation of Henry VI, Part 2, Douglas Langworthy follows the increasing tensions as the Duke of York foments rebellion against the crown. Langworthy's translation takes a deep dive into the language of Shakespeare. With a fine-tooth comb, he updates passages that are archaic and difficult to the modern ear, and matches them with the syntax and lyricism of the rest of the play, essentially translating archaic Shakespeare to match contemporary Shakespeare. This translation of Henry VI, Part 2 was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

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 richly documented Norton Critical Edition of Julius Caesar is based on the 1623 First Folio text. It is accompanied by a note on the text, an introduction that sets the biographical and historical stage necessary to appreciate this richly allusive play, explanatory annotations, a map, and five illustrations. "Sources and Contexts" presents possible sources as well as analogues to Julius Caesar, an account of Shakespeare's understanding of and approach to Roman history, and Ernest Schanzer's study of the narrative challenges posed by the play. "Criticism" includes early commentary-by, among others, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and Harley Granville-Barker-on Julius Caesar as well as modern interpretations. Among these are John W. Velz on role-playing in Julius Caesar; Jan H. Blits on Caesar's ambiguous end; Paul A. Cantor on rhetoric, poetry and the Roman republic; and R. A. Foakes on the themes of assassination and mob violence. "Performance History" reprints accounts of various aspects of staging Julius Caesar by Sidney Homan, John Nettles, and Robert F. Willson, Jr. A Film Bibliography and Selected Bibliography are also included.

One of the most frequently read and performed of all stage works, Shakespeare's Hamlet is unsurpassed in its complexity and richness. Now the most extensively annotated version of Hamlet to date makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers, and the general reader in mind.Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations provide readers with all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations. This version of Hamlet is unparalleled for its thoroughness and adherence to sound historical linguistics. In his introduction, Raffel offers important background on the origins and previous versions of the Hamlet story, along with an analysis of the characters Hamlet and Ophelia. And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom meditates on the originality of Shakespeare's achievement. The book also includes a careful selection of items for further reading.

The entire Shakespeare play - unabridged! "The course of true love never did run smooth;" With its mix of real people who stumble into a fairy kingdom (with it's own problems!) it's little wonder that this play is one of the best loved and most performed of all Shakespeare's masterpieces.

Rather than treating the plays as objects to be studied, described and interpreted, Engagements with Shakespearean Drama examines precisely what about Shakespeare's plays is so special - why they continue to be discussed and performed all around the world. This book highlights the importance of our experience as readers and audiences and argues that what makes the plays great is that they cause a wide range of intense, pleasurable and valuable experiences. This highly personal and emotive approach allows students to engage with the plays on a new level, taking their own responses seriously as grounds for assessing the plays' success and quality. The book also engages with the essential criticism of the plays from Shakespeare's time to our own, equipping students to engage in contemporary debates about the nature and achievement of Shakespearean drama.

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of The First Part of King Henry IV offers a theatrical perspective on the origins of Shakespeare's play and the history of its interpretation. In their introduction the editors, Herbert and Judith Weil, clarify the play's de-centred dramatic structure and call attention to the effects of civil war on a broad range of relationships. Falstaff's unpredictable vitality is also explored, together with such important contemporaneous values as honour, friendship, festivity and reformation. Lexical glosses make the rich wordplay accessible, while the notes provide a thorough commentary on Shakespeare's transformation of his sources. A supplementary section by Katharine Craik focuses on important modern interpretations.

Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's earliest and bloodiest tragedies and was hugely successful in his lifetime. Subsequent generations have struggled with its bold confrontation of violence but in the 20th and 21st centuries the play has chimed with audiences again, perhaps because of its simultaneously shocking and playful approach to violent revenge and bodily mutilation. Jonathan Bate's original Arden edition was first published in 1995 and has had a significant influence on how the play has been performed and studied in the past 20 years. This revised edition includes a new 10,000 word introductory essay in which Bate reassess his views on the play's co-authorship with George Peele in the light of contemporary textual scholarship and updates his lively account of the play's performance history, on the international stage and screen. With detailed on-page commentary notes this will continue to be the edition of choice for students, scholars and theatre-makers.

Shakespeare's famous play finds new life with a translation into contemporary American English. "For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo." In this new version of Romeo and Juliet, written in accessible modern English, Hansol Jung breathes new life into Shakespeare's famous tragedy. By closely examining the familiar language and focusing on the subtleties of the text, Jung illuminates a surprising and more nuanced world than many of us have come to expect from the well-known tale of star-crossed lovers. This translation of Romeo and Juliet was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

Argues that the Essais of Montaigne were a crucial factor in the composition of later Shakespearean drama A new way of accounting for the different sorts of plays that Shakespeare wrote later in his career A detailed history of the literary-critical interest in the Montaigne-Shakespeare connection, from the eighteenth century to the present day Case studies that, through sustained close-readings of Montaigne's essays and Shakespeare's plays, shows the shared concerns of the authors A new approach that differs from the more typical method of looking merely for verbal echoes, resulting in a deeper, richer sense of the way that Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne shaped his writing In this revisionist study, Peter G. Platt provides a detailed history of the literary-critical interest in the Montaigne-Shakespeare connection from the eighteenth century to the present day. Through sustained close-readings of Montaigne's essays and Shakespeare's plays, Platt explores both authors' approaches to self, knowledge and form that stress fractures, interruptions and alternatives. While the change in monarchy, the revived interest in judicial rhetoric and the alterations in Shakespeare's acting company helped shape plays such as Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest, this book contends that Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne is an under-recognised driving force in these later plays.

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of "Julius Caesar" on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right. Each No Fear Shakespeare contains

• The complete text of the original play
• A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday language
• A complete list of characters with descriptions
• Plenty of helpful commentary

Act and scene divisions are not indicated in the Quarto; those of the First Folio have been incorporated, with one exception: scene ii of Act V has been divided into two scenes, with the concluding scenes numbered accordingly. The Third Edition includes expanded annotations. "Contexts and Sources" includes dueling arguments on the play s completeness (one play or one half of a play?) and the naming of a central character (Falstaff or Oldcastle?). "Criticism" includes twenty-four essays from E. M. W. Tillyard s classic argument of an ordered Shakespearean universe to Graham Holderness s rebuttal to Gus Van Sant s interview regarding 1 Henry IV as the inspiration for his cult film, My Own Private Idaho nineteen of them new to the Third Edition. The Selected Bibliography has been thoroughly updated."

Lillian Groag presents a new version of Troilus and Cressida that will resonate with contemporary audiences. One of the most obscure plays in Shakespeare's canon, Troilus and Cressida may also be the Bard's darkest comedy. Exploring some of the events of Homer's Iliad, the play juxtaposes the carnage of the Trojan War with a love story between its two titular characters. Lillian Groag's translation brings this ancient world to modern audiences. Replacing the archaisms with new and accessible phrasing, Shakespeare's lines regain their meaning and humor in the twenty-first century. This translation illuminates Troilus and Cressida as one of Shakespeare's funniest, saddest, and most bitterly modern plays. This translation of Troilus and Cressida was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

In Cymbeline, Ancient Britain's female heir to the throne is slandered by a decadent Italian while the Romans invade Britain to retain it as part of their empire. Shakespeare's late romance is full of unpredictable conjunctions that are explored in the comprehensive introduction to this new, fully-illustrated Arden edition. Valerie Wayne takes a transformative look at the play's critical and performance history by examining its attention to gender, calumny and sexuality together with nationhood, colonialism and British identities. The authoritative play text is amply annotated to clarify its language and allusions, and three appendices delineate the play's textual history, its rich use of music and its casting. Offering students and scholars alike a wealth of insight and new research, this edition maintains the rigorous standards of the Arden Shakespeare.

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This is the third New Cambridge edition of The Taming of the Shrew, one of Shakespeare's most popular yet controversial plays. Ann Thompson considers its reception in the light of the hostility and embarrassment that the play often arouses, taking account of both scholarly defences and modern feminist criticism. For this version the editor pays lively attention to the problematic nature of debates about the play and its reception in the twenty-first century. She discusses recent editions and textual, performance and critical studies.

What did childhood mean in early modern England? To answer this question, this book examines two key contemporary institutions: the school and the stage. The rise of grammar schools and universities, and of the professional stage featuring boy actors, reflect the culture's massive investment in children. In this collection, an international group of well-respected scholars examines how the representation of children by major playwrights and poets reflected the period's educational and cultural values. This book contains chapters that range from Shakespeare and Ben Jonson to the contemporary plays of Tom Stoppard, and that explore childhood in relation to classical humanism, medicine, art, and psychology, revealing how early modern performance and educational practices produced attitudes to childhood that still resonate to this day.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 75 is 'Othello'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/collections/shakespeare-survey This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic and save and bookmark their results.

The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts a " and ghost writing. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written.

Ghosts take the form of absences, erasures, even forgeries and signatures a " metaphors extended to include Shakespeare himself and his haunting of us, and in particular theorists such Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud a " the figure of Shakespeare constantly made and remade by contemporary culture.

Marjorie Garber, one of the most eminent Shakespearean theorists writing today, asks what is at stake in the imputation that "Shakespeare" did not write the plays, and shows that the plays themselves both thematize and theorize that controversy.

This Routledge Classics edition contains a new preface and new chapter by the author.