During the early modern period, the publication process decisively shaped the history play and its reception. Bringing together the methodologies of genre criticism and book history, this study argues that stationers have - through acts of selection and presentation - constructed some remarkably influential expectations and ideas surrounding genre. Amy Lidster boldly challenges the uncritical use of Shakespeare's Folio as a touchstone for the history play, exposing the harmful ways in which this has solidified its parameters as a genre exclusively interested in the lives of English kings. Reframing the Folio as a single example of participation in genre-making, this book illuminates the exciting and diverse range of historical pasts that were available to readers and audiences in the early modern period. Lidster invites us to reappraise the connection between plays on stage and in print, and to reposition playbooks within the historical culture and geopolitics of the book trade.

George Lyman Kittredge's insightful editions of Shakespeare have endured in part because of his eclecticism, his diversity of interests, and his wide-ranging accomplishments, all of which are reflected in the valuable notes in each volume.

These new editions have specific emphasis on the performance histories of the plays (on stage and screen).

Features of each edition include: The original introduction to the Kittredge EditionEditor's Introduction to the Focus Edition. An overview on major themes of the plays, and sections on the play's performance history on stage and screen.Explanatory Notes. The explanatory notes either expand on Kittredge's superb glosses, or, in the case of plays for which he did not write notes, give the needed explanations for Shakespeare's sometimes demanding language.Performance notes. These appear separately and immediately below the textual footnotes and include discussions of noteworthy stagings of the plays, issues of interpretation, and film and stage choices.How to read the play as Performance Section. A discussion of the written play vs. the play as performed and the various ways in which Shakespeare's words allow the reader to envision the work "off the page."Comprehensive Timeline. Covering major historical events (with brief annotations) as well as relevant details from Shakespeare's life. Some of the Chronologies include time chronologies within the plays.Topics for Discussion and Further Study Section. Critical Issues: Dealing with the text in a larger context and considerations of character, genre, language, and interpretative problems. Performance Issues: Problems and intricacies of staging the play connected to chief issues discussed in the Focus Editions' Introduction.Select Bibliography & Filmography

Each New Kittredge edition also includes film stills from major productions, for comparison and scene study.

What does it mean to have an emotional response to poetry and music? And, just as important but considered less often, what does it mean not to have such a response? What happens when lyric utterances--which should invite consolation, revelation, and connection--somehow fall short of the listener's expectations? As Seth Lerer shows in this pioneering book, Shakespeare's late plays invite us to contemplate that very question, offering up lyric as a displaced and sometimes desperate antidote to situations of duress or powerlessness. Lerer argues that the theme of lyric misalignment running throughout The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, and Cymbeline serves a political purpose, a last-ditch effort at transformation for characters and audiences who had lived through witch-hunting, plague, regime change, political conspiracies, and public executions. A deep dive into the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book also explores what Shakespearean lyric is able to recuperate for these "victims of history" by virtue of its disjointed utterances. To this end, Lerer establishes the concept of mythic lyricism: an estranging use of songs and poetry that functions to recreate the past as present, to empower the mythic dead, and to restore a bit of magic to the commonplaces and commodities of Jacobean England. Reading against the devotion to form and prosody common in Shakespeare scholarship, Lerer's account of lyric utterance's vexed role in his late works offers new ways to understand generational distance and cultural change throughout the playwright's oeuvre.

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of "The Comedy of Errors" 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

Iago's 'I am not what I am' epitomises how Shakespeare's work is rich in philosophy, from issues of deception and moral deviance to those concerning the complex nature of the self, the notions of being and identity, and the possibility or impossibility of self-knowledge and knowledge of others. Shakespeare's plays and poems address subjects including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and social and political philosophy. They also raise major philosophical questions about the nature of theatre, literature, tragedy, representation and fiction. The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy is the first major guide and reference source to Shakespeare and philosophy. It examines the following important topics: What roles can be played in an approach to Shakespeare by drawing on philosophical frameworks and the work of philosophers? What can philosophical theories of meaning and communication show about the dynamics of Shakespearean interactions and vice versa? How are notions such as political and social obligation, justice, equality, love, agency and the ethics of interpersonal relationships demonstrated in Shakespeare's works? What do the plays and poems invite us to say about the nature of knowledge, belief, doubt, deception and epistemic responsibility? How can the ways in which Shakespeare's characters behave illuminate existential issues concerning meaning, absurdity, death and nothingness? What might Shakespeare's characters and their actions show about the nature of the self, the mind and the identity of individuals? How can Shakespeare's works inform philosophical approaches to notions such as beauty, humour, horror and tragedy? How do Shakespeare's works illuminate philosophical questions about the nature of fiction, the attitudes and expectations involved in engagement with theatre, and the role of acting and actors in creating representations? The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in aesthetics, philosophy of literature and philosophy of theatre, as well as those exploring Shakespeare in disciplines such as literature and theatre and drama studies. It is also relevant reading for those in areas of philosophy such as ethics, epistemology and philosophy of language.

The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series, now in a dazzling new series designThis edition ofJulius Caesaris edited by William Montgomery with an introduction by Douglas Trevorand was recently repackaged with cover art by Manuja Waldia.Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series. The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators."

Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War illuminates the ways Shakespeare's works provide a rich and imaginative resource for thinking about the topic of war. Contributors explore the multiplicity of conflicting perspectives his dramas offer: war depicted from chivalric, masculine, nationalistic, and imperial perspectives; war depicted as a source of great excitement and as a theater of honor; war depicted from realistic or skeptical perspectives that expose the butchery, suffering, illness, famine, degradation, and havoc it causes. The essays in this volume examine the representations and rhetoric of war throughout Shakespeare's plays, as well as the modern history of the war plays on stage, in film, and in propaganda. This book offers fresh perspectives on Shakespeare's multifaceted representations of the complexities of early modern warfare, while at the same time illuminating why his perspectives on war and its consequences continue to matter now and in the future.

The third volume in the re-launched series Shakespeare on Screen is devoted to film versions and adaptations of King Lear. Bringing together an international group of scholars, the chapters provide new insights and perspectives on what constitutes 'Learness' in a range of films, TV productions, translations, free retellings and appropriations from around the world. Taking 'screen' in its broader sense, it also covers digital material such as video archives, internet movies and YouTube videos. The volume features an invaluable film-bibliography and accompanying online resources include additional essays and an expanded version of the film-bibliography.

Twelfth Night is one of the most popular of Shakespeare's plays in the modern theatre, and this edition places particular emphasis on its theatrical qualities throughout. Peopled with lovers misled either by disguises or their own natures, it combines lyrical melancholy with broad comedy.
The introduction analyses its many views of love and the juxtaposition of joy and melancholy, while the detailed commentary pays particular attention to its linguistic subtleties.
Music is particularly important in Twelfth Night, and this is the only modern edition to offer material for all the music required in a performance. James Walker has re-edited the existing music from the original sources, and where noe exists has composed settings compatible with the surviving originals.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Theatre Design involves everything seen on stage: not only scenery but costumes, wigs, makeup, properties, lighting, sound, even the shape and material of the stage itself. Designers' Shakespeare presents and analyses the work of a half-dozen leading practitioners of this specialist art. By focusing specifically on their Shakespearean work, it also offers a fresh, exciting perspective on some of the best-known drama of all time. Shakespeare's plays offer an unusual range of opportunities to designers. As they were written for a theatre which gave no opportunity for scenic support or embellishment, designers are freed from any compulsion to imitate original practices. This has resulted in the extraordinarily diverse range of works presented in this volume, which considers among others the work of Josef Svoboda, Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Ming Cho Lee, Alison Chitty, Robert Wilson, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Filter Theatre, Catherine Zuber, John Bury , Christopher Morley, Ralph Koltai and Sean Kenny. Designers' Shakespeare joins Actors' Shakespeare and Directors' Shakespeare as essential reading for lovers of Shakespeare from theatre-goers and students to directors and theatre designers.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and productions. Since 1948, the 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 67 is 'Shakespeare's Collaborative Work'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at http://www.cambridge.org/online/shakespearesurvey. 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.

Playwright Migdalia Cruz breathes new life into Richard III. Nuyorican playwright Migdalia Cruz unpacks and repositions Shakespeare's Richard III for a twenty-first-century audience. She presents a contemporary English verse translation, faithfully keeping the poetry, the puns, and the politics of the play intact, with a rigorous and in-depth examination of Richard III-the man, the king, the outsider-who is still the only English king to have died in battle. In the Wars of the Roses, his Catholic belief in his country led to his slaughter at Bosworth's Field by his Protestant rivals. In reimagining this text, Cruz emphasizes Richard III's outsider status-exacerbated by his severe scoliosis, which twisted his spine-by punctuating the text with punk music from 1970s London. Cruz's Richard is no one's fool or lackey. He is a new kind of monarch, whose dark sense of humor and deep sense of purpose leads his charge against the society which never fully accepted him because he looked different. This translation 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. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

Hunger and appetite permeate Renaissance theatre, with servants, soldiers, courtiers and misers all defined with striking regularity through their relation to food. Demonstrating the profound ongoing relevance of Marxist literary theory, Hunger, Appetite and the Politics of the Renaissance Stage highlights the decisive role of these drives in the complex politics of early modern drama. Plenty and excess were thematically inseparable from scarcity and want for contemporary audiences, such that hunger and appetite together acquired a unique significance as both subject and medium of political debate. Focusing critical attention on the relationship between cultural texts and the material base of society, Matthew Williamson reveals the close connections between how these drives were represented and the underlying socioeconomic changes of the period. At the same time, he shows how hunger and appetite provided the theatres with a means of conceptualising these changes and interrogating the forces that motivated them.

'It reads as freshly today as it did fifty years ago, when it surprised everyone with its originality and daring, an intriguing blend of personal insight and solid detective-work. If ever a word-book deserved to be called a classic, it is this.' - David Crystal

'Eric was a human lexicographer, like Samuel Johnson. He was a philologist rather than a linguist. He knew what Chomsky was doing and what had happened to phonology in Prague, but he eschewed the strict scientific approach. Linguistics is scared of semantics and prefers to concentrate on structures, leaving the study of the meaning of words to anthropologists - or, perhaps with misgivings, to Johnsonian word-lovers like Eric Partridge.' - Anthony Burgess

'It reads as freshly today as it did fifty years ago, when it surprised everyone with its originality and daring, an intriguing blend of personal insight and solid detective-work. If ever a word-book deserved to be called a classic, it is this.' - David Crystal

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. For this second edition of Antony and Cleopatra, David Bevington has included in his introductory section a thorough consideration of recent critical and stage interpretations, demonstrating how the theatrical design and imagination of this play make it one of Shakespeare's most remarkable tragedies. The edition is attentive throughout to the play as theatre: a detailed, illustrated account of the stage history is followed, in the commentary, by discussion of staging options offered by the text. The commentary is especially full and helpful, untangling many obscure words and phrases, illuminating sexual puns, and alerting the reader to Shakespeare's shaping of his source material in Plutarch's Lives.

The quintessential Shakespearean tragedy, whose highly charged confrontations and anguished soliloquies probe depths of human feeling rarely sounded in any art. Reprinted from an authoritative British edition complete with illuminating footnotes.

For most of the 1590s, the Admiral's Men were the main competitors of Shakespeare's company in the London theatres. Not only did they stage old plays by dramatists such as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd: their playwrights invented the genres of humours comedy (with An Humorous Day's Mirth) and city comedy (with Englishmen for My Money), while other new plays such as A Knack to Know an Honest Man and The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon were important influences on Shakespeare. This is the first book to read the Admiral's repertory against Shakespeare's plays of the 1590s, showing both how Shakespeare drew on their innovations and how his plays influenced Admiral's dramatists in turn. Shedding new light on well-known plays and offering detailed analysis of less familiar ones, it offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic culture of the 1590s.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories. Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that focus on the concepts of sexuality, lineage, nationality, and globalization. The collection helps students to grapple with the unique role performance plays in constructions of race by Shakespeare (and in Shakespearean performances), considering both historical and contemporary actors and directors. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race will be the first book that truly frames Shakespeare studies and early modern race studies for a non-specialist, student audience.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen provides a lively guide to film and television productions adapted from Shakespeare's plays. Offering an essential resource for students of Shakespeare, the companion considers topics such as the early history of Shakespeare films, the development of 'live' broadcasts from theatre to cinema, the influence of promotion and marketing, and the range of versions available in 'world cinema'. Chapters on the contexts, genres and critical issues of Shakespeare on screen offer a diverse range of close analyses, from 'Classical Hollywood' films to the BBC's Hollow Crown series. The companion also features sections on the work of individual directors Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Vishal Bhardwaj, and is supplemented by a guide to further reading and a filmography.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories. Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that focus on the concepts of sexuality, lineage, nationality, and globalization. The collection helps students to grapple with the unique role performance plays in constructions of race by Shakespeare (and in Shakespearean performances), considering both historical and contemporary actors and directors. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race will be the first book that truly frames Shakespeare studies and early modern race studies for a non-specialist, student audience.

This volume features a wide range of plays that reimagine Shakespeare works from Borderlands perspectives. For several decades, Chicanx and Indigenous theatermakers have been repurposing Shakespeare's plays to reflect the histories and lived realities of the US-Mexico Borderlands and to create space to tell stories of and for La Frontera. Celebrating this rich tradition, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera brings a wide range of Borderlands Shakespeare plays together for the first time in a multi-volume open-access scholarly edition. This anthology celebrates the dynamic, multilingual reworking of canon and place that defines Borderlands Shakespeare, and it situates these geographically and temporally diverse plays within the robust study of Shakespeare's global afterlives. The editors offer a critical framework for understanding the artistic and political traditions that shape these plays and the place of Shakespeare within the multilayered colonial histories of the region. Borderlands Shakespeare plays, they contend, do not simply reproduce Shakespeare in new contexts but rather use his work in innovative ways to negotiate colonial power and to envision socially just futures.

Domestic tragedy was an innovative genre, suggesting that the lives and sufferings of ordinary people were worthy of the dramatic scope of tragedy. In this compelling study, Whipday revises the narrative of Shakespeare's plays to show how this genre, together with neglected pamphlets, ballads, and other forms of 'cheap print' about domestic violence, informed some of Shakespeare's greatest works. Providing a significant reappraisal of Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, the book argues that domesticity is central to these plays: they stage how societal and familial pressures shape individual agency; how the integrity of the house is associated with the body of the housewife; and how household transgressions render the home permeable. Whipday demonstrates that Shakespeare not only appropriated constructions of the domestic from domestic tragedies, but that he transformed the genre, using heightened language, foreign settings, and elite spheres to stage familiar domestic worlds.

For the first time, the world-renowned Arden Shakespeare is producing Performance Editions, aimed specifically for use in the rehearsal room. Published in association with the Shakespeare Institute, the text features easily accessible facing page notes - including short definitions of words, key textual variants, and guidance on metre and pronunciation; a larger font size for easier reading; space for writing notes and reduced punctuation aimed at the actor rather than the reader. With editorial expertise from the worlds of theatre and academia, the series has been developed in association with actors and drama students. The Series Editors are distinguished scholars Professor Michael Dobson and Dr Abigail Rokison and leading Shakespearean actor, Simon Russell Beale.

George Lyman Kittredge's insightful editions of Shakespeare have endured in part because of his eclecticism, his diversity of interests, and his wide-ranging accomplishments, all of which are reflected in the valuable notes in each volume.

These new editions have specific emphasis on the performance histories of the plays (on stage and screen).

Features of each edition include: The original introduction to the Kittredge EditionEditor's Introduction to the Focus Edition. An overview on major themes of the plays, and sections on the play's performance history on stage and screen.Explanatory Notes. The explanatory notes either expand on Kittredge's superb glosses, or, in the case of plays for which he did not write notes, give the needed explanations for Shakespeare's sometimes demanding language.Performance notes. These appear separately and immediately below the textual footnotes and include discussions of noteworthy stagings of the plays, issues of interpretation, and film and stage choices.How to read the play as Performance Section. A discussion of the written play vs. the play as performed and the various ways in which Shakespeare's words allow the reader to envision the work "off the page."Comprehensive Timeline. Covering major historical events (with brief annotations) as well as relevant details from Shakespeare's life. Some include time chronologies within the plays.Topics for Discussion and Further Study. Critical Issues: Dealing with the text in a larger context and considerations of character, genre, language, and interpretative problems. Performance Issues: Problems and intricacies of staging the play connected to chief issues discussed in the Focus Editions' Introduction.Select Bibliography & Filmography

Each New Kittredge edition also includes screen grabs from major productions, for comparison and scene study.