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.

Tim Slover brings fresh clarity to his contemporary version of Shakespeare's final play. Playwright, poet, and novelist Tim Slover presents William Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's collaboration, The Two Noble Kinsmen, in a modern translation that retains all the wit, romance, and poetry of the original. For his last play, the Bard pulled out all the stops, creating a tragicomedy of heart's yearning and deadly rivalry, and peopling it with heroes and heroines out of legend, including two of the greatest--and least known--female roles in the entire canon. Fletcher provided the music and dance. Slover brings it all vividly to life with fresh clarity and fiery passion in this new, contemporary version. 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.

The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series, now in a dazzling new series design The 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 designed by Manuja Waldia, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come. This edition of Much Ado About Nothing is edited with an introduction by Peter Holland. 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.

To thine own text be true-Lisa Peterson's translation of Hamlet into contemporary American English makes the play accessible to new audiences while keeping the soul of Shakespeare's writing intact. Lovers of Shakespeare's language take heart: Lisa Peterson's translation of Hamlet into contemporary American English was guided by the principle of "First, do no harm." Leaving the most famous parts of Hamlet untouched, Peterson untied the language knots that can make the rest of the play difficult to understand in a single theatrical viewing. Peterson's translation makes Hamlet accessible to new audiences, drawing out its timeless themes while helping to contextualize "To be, or not to be: that is the question," and "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," so that contemporary audiences can feel their full weight. This translation of Hamlet 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.

OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Shakespeare and Text is an indispensable and unique guide to its topic. It takes Shakespeare readers to the very foundation of his work, explaining how his plays first took shape in the theatre where writing was part of a larger collective enterprise. As the resulting manuscripts are virtually all lost, the account then turns to the early modern printing industry that produced the earliest surviving texts of Shakespeare's plays. It describes the roles of publisher and printer, the controls exerted through the Stationers' Company, and the technology of printing. A chapter is devoted to the book that gathered Shakespeare's plays together for the first time, the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare and Text goes on to survey the major developments in textual studies over the past century. It builds on the recent upsurge of interest in textual theory, and deals with issues such as collaboration, the instability of the text, the relationship between theatre culture and print culture, and the book as a material object. Later chapters examine the current critical edition, explaining the procedures that transform early texts in to a very different cultural artefact, the edition in which we regularly encounter Shakespeare.

Othello is one of Shakespeare's most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili's new edition highlight's the tragedy of Othello's plight in ways no other previous edition of this play has. In twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in Othello the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare's words, and together they form their own hybrid object-something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello's blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him. The first play in the Seeing Shakespeare, Othello is illustrated by English contemporary artist Chris Ofili. Future titles in the series include A Midsummer Night's Dream illustrated by Marcel Dzama, and The Merchant of Venice with images by Jordan Wolfson.

"King Henry VIII" has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play, revealing it as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation which sees English life since Henry VIII's day as a series of bewildering changes in national and personal allegiance and represents "history" as the product of varied and contradictory testimony. McMullan makes a powerful claim for the rehabilitation of "Henry VIII," providing the fullest performance history of any edition to date and reading the work not as a marginal "late" Shakespeare play but as a play which is paradigmatic of the achievement of Renaissance drama as a whole. His introduction emphasizes truth and conscience and the dramatic devices used to portray these themes. This edition's appendices elucidate the chronology for the events portrayed in "King Henry VIII" and other source works. A scene from Beaumont and Fletcher's "A Maid's Tragedy," comments on music, a doubling chart, and other reference information are also included. The Arden Shakespeare has developed a reputation as the pre-eminent critical edition of Shakespeare for its exceptional scholarship, reflected in the thoroughness of each volume. An introduction comprehensively contextualizes the play, chronicling the history and culture that surrounded and influenced Shakespeare at the time of its writing and performance, and closely surveying critical approaches to the work. Detailed appendices address problems like dating and casting, and analyze the differing Quarto and Folio sources. A full commentary by one or more of the play's foremost contemporary scholars illuminates the text, glossing unfamiliar terms and drawing from an abundance of research and expertise to explain allusions and significant background information. Highly informative and accessible, Arden offers the fullest experience of Shakespeare available to a reader.
Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsGeneral Editors' PrefacePreface INTRODUCTIONAuthenticities: performance history Date and early performances Performances 1660-1916 Performances 1916-2000All is true: cultural history Truth and topicality Royal reputations The conscience of the King Truth and temperance Truth and textuality Truth and tragicomedy The character of the Queen Hidden reformations Truth and topicality: codaOriginals: textual history Text and modernization Resources Sources Analogues Collaboration KING HENRY VIII (ALL IS TRUE) Longer notes APPENDICES1. Contextual chronology for the events of "Henry VIII"2. Comparative chronology (1603-13) for plays in the Fletcher and Shakespeare canons3. Attribution and composition4. The Maid's Tragedy5. Uncollected sources/analogues6. Music7 Doubling chart Abbreviations and references Abbreviations used in notes Works in the Shakespeare canon Works in the Fletcher canon Editions of Shakespeare collated Other works Modern productions cited Film/television productions cited Index

In Shakespeare's Language, Keith Johnson offers an overview of the rich and dynamic history of the reception and study of Shakespeare's language from his death right up to the present. Tracing a chronological history of Shakespeare's language, Keith Johnson also picks up on classic and contemporary themes, such as: lexical and digital studies original pronunciation rhetoric grammar. The historical approach provides a comprehensive overview, plotting the attitudes towards Shakespeare's language, as well as a history of its study. This approach reveals how different cultural and literary trends have moulded these attitudes and reflects changing linguistic climates; the book also includes a chapter that looks to the future. Shakespeare's Language is therefore not only an essential guide to the language of Shakespeare, but it offers crucial insights to broader approaches to language as a whole.

Written at some time between 1602 and 1604, Othello belongs to the period in which Shakespeare's powers as a tragic dramatist were at their peak. On stage, the romantic cast of its story and the remorseless drive of its plotting, combined with operatic extravagance of its emotion and the swelling music of its poetry, have made it amongst the most consistently successful of his tragedies; and numerous anecdotes testify to its extraordinary capacity to overwhelm the imagination of an audience. In recent times the play's bold treatment of love and marriage across the divide of race has made it a work of particular interest to theatre directors and scholars alike. Yet Othello's critical fortunes have been uneven; for, since Rymer's notorious denunciation of this 'tragedy of [a] handkerchief,' at the end of the seventeenth century, its claim to rank amongst Shakespeare's greatest achievements has been challenged by critics who have found its plot too strained, its characters too improbable, and its tale of marital jealousy and murder too meanly domestic to challenge comparison with Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, or even that saga of tragic infatuation, Antony and Cleopatra. The extensive introduction to this new edition answers the play's detractors by stressing the public dimensions of the tragedy, paying particular attention to its treatment of colour and social relations. Although 'race' in the early modern period was still an embryonic category, Othello is explored as a text that-not least in its performance history-has played a formative role (for both good and ill) in the emergence of racial thinking, and that as a result remains deeply controversial. In the play's own time, however, the sensitivities aroused by the hero's colour might well have seemed less significant than the way in which Iago's perfidious role plays out a crisis in the institution of service on which the entire social order, including its treatment of gender, was founded. In this respect, too, Othello emerges as a work profoundly involved in the social and political processes that helped to shape the modern world. The text has been freshly edited in accordance with the general principles of the series. Othello has come down to us in two markedly different early texts; and the substantial differences between the 1622 Quarto and the 1623 Folio have led to its becoming involved, along with Hamlet and Lear, in an intense debate over Shakespearian revision. Michael Neill argues however, that, in the case of Othello, variation is much less likely to be the result of changed authorial intentions than of theatrical cutting and the peculiar circumstances of textual transmission. While the Folio is generally the more reliable of the rival versions, the Quarto's origin in a text that has been modified for performance text make it indispensable, and the two have been fully collated. This edition also makes full use of the Second Quarto (1632) a text which, although it is without independent authority, preserves important textual decisions made by an intelligent and well-informed editor nearly contemporary with the dramatist himself. Further appendices include a discussion of dating problems, an account of the music in the play, and a full translation of the Italian novella from which the story derives. The detailed commentary is designed to alert readers to the play's theatrical life, as well as helping them to explore its rich language and notoriously treacherous word-play.

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.

For this updated critical edition of King Lear, Lois Potter has written a completely new introduction, taking account of recent productions and reinterpretations of the play, with particular emphasis on its afterlife in global performance and adaptation. The edition retains the Textual Analysis of the previous editor, Jay L. Halio, shortened and with a new preface by Brian Gibbons. Professor Halio, accepting that we have two versions of equal authority, the one derived from Shakespeare's rough drafts, the other from a manuscript used in the playhouses during the seventeenth century, chooses the Folio as the text for this edition. He explains the differences between the two versions and alerts the reader to the rival claims of the quarto by means of a sampling of parallel passages in the Introduction and by an appendix which contains annotated passages unique to the quarto.

"Much Ado About Nothing" is the story of Leonato, an Italian nobleman, his daughter, Hero, and his niece, Beatrice. Following a war Leonato welcomes into his house Don Pedro, his good friend; fellow soldiers of Don Pedro, Claudio and Benedick; as well as Don Pedro's illegitimate brother, Don John. Quickly amorous relations develop between Claudio and Hero and later between Benedick and Beatrice. As wedding plans are being made for Claudio and Hero, Don John tricks Claudio into believing that Hero has been unfaithful. The wedding bliss is briefly interrupted until the truth is finally discovered and the play ends in a joyful double wedding.

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of "Henry IV Part One and Two" 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

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a definitive, fresh new look at Shakespeare's most compelling villain. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Richard III in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with an actor, a director and a designer - Simon Russell Beale, Bill Alexander and Tom Piper - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

From the entry of Shakespeare's birth in the Stratford church register to a Norwegian production of Macbeth in which the hero was represented by a tomato, this enthralling and splendidly illustrated book tells the story of Shakespeare's life, his writings, and his afterlife.

Drawing on a lifetime's experience of studying, teaching, editing, and writing about Shakespeare, Stanley Wells combines scholarly authority with authorial flair in a book that will appeal equally to the specialist and the untutored enthusiast. Chapters on Shakespeare's life in Stratford and in London offer a fresh view of the development of the writer's career and personality. At the core of the book lies a magisterial study of the writings themselves--how Shakespeare set about writing a play, his relationships with the company of actors with whom he worked, his developing mastery of the literary and rhetorical skills that he learned at the Stratford grammar school, the essentially theatrical quality of the structure and language of his plays. Subsequent chapters trace the fluctuating fortunes of his reputation and influence. Here are accounts of adaptations, productions, and individual performances in England and, increasingly, overseas; of great occasions such as the Garrick Jubilee and the tercentenary celebrations of 1864; of the spread of Shakespeare's reputation in France and Germany, Russia and America, and, more recently, the Far East; of Shakespearian discoveries and forgeries; of critical reactions, favorable and otherwise, and of scholarly activity; of paintings, music, films and other works of art inspired by the plays; of the plays' use in education and the political arena, and of the pleasure and intellectual stimulus that they have given to an increasingly international public.

Shakespeare, said Ben Jonson, was not of an age but for all time. This is a book about him for our time.

Often described as one of Shakespeare's 'problem plays', Measure for Measure explores issues of mercy and justice in corrupt Vienna. The Duke makes his strict moralistic deputy, Angelo, temporary leader of Vienna, while he disguises himself as a friar to witness all that ensues. In the comprehensive introduction to this new, fully-illustrated Arden edition, with commentary and notes from A. R. Braunmuller, Robert N. Watson explores the recent increased attention to the play and the shifting judgements of key characters such as the Duke and Isabella. He analyses the social foundations of these changes, their validity as readings of the text, and their manifestations in performance. It also explores the play's implications on topics including love, marriage, sexuality, consent, mortality, religion, statecraft, moderation, and theatre itself.

Das vorliegende Buch zeigt kritische Aufgabenbereiche und Erfolg versprechende Konzepte zur Losung der zukunftigen Herausforderungen der Wirtschaftsinformatik auf. Es dokumentiert "best practices" in Wissenschaft und Praxis und entwickelt innovative Szenarien. Das Spektrum der Themen deckt Branchen wie Fertigung, Handel und Dienstleistung ebenso ab wie Managementfunktionen der operativen und strategischen Planung und Steuerung. Moderne Losungen und Ansatze wie z.B. Multiagentensysteme oder Balanced Scorecard werden synergetisch eingeordnet in das gemeinsame Grundverstandnis systemhafter Ganzheitlichkeit und Dynamik, kybernetischer Selbststeuerung und Nachhaltigkeit sowie kooperativer Prozesssicht. Namhafte Forscher, erfolgreiche Unternehmer und Berater, Schuler, Partner und Freunde Hermann Krallmanns ziehen kritisch Bilanz aus 25 Jahren gemeinsamer Forschung und Entwicklung der Wirtschaftsinformatik.

Challenging conventional thinking about the earliest texts of the play, Martin chooses the Folio version, contributing new evidence about Shakespeare's methods of revision. The introduction discusses the meaning and appeal of the play's action, language, and anti-war themes, and describes its history in the theatre; and the commentary supplies historical information and clarifies meaning.

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. Edited and introduced by Martin Butler, this first New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Cymbeline takes full account of the critical and historical scholarship produced in the late twentieth century. It foregrounds the romance, tragicomedy and Jacobean stagecraft that shape the play and offers a refreshingly unsentimental reading of the heroine, Innogen. Butler pays greater attention than his predecessors to the politics of 1610, especially to questions of British union and nationhood. He also offers a lively account of Cymbeline's stage history from 1610 to the present day. The text has been edited from the 1623 Folio and features a detailed commentary on its linguistic and historical features.

Two different versions of Romeo and Juliet were published during Shakespeare's lifetime: the second quarto of 1599, on which modern editions are usually based, and the first quarto of 1597. The latter version was long denigrated as a 'bad' quarto', but recent scholarship sees in it a crucial witness for the theatrical practices of Shakespeare and his company. The shorter of the two versions by about one quarter, the first quarto has high-paced action, fuller stage directions than the second quarto, and fascinating alternatives to the famous speeches in the longer version. The introduction to this edition provides a full discussion of the origins of the first quarto, before analysing its distinguishing features and presenting a concise history of the 1597 version. The text is provided with a full collation and commentary which alert the reader to crucial differences between the first and the second quartos.

This innovative edition offers modernized texts not only of the 1599 quarto but also of the short, or 'bad', quarto of 1597, regarding each as witness to a 'mobile text' which changed in composition as Shakespeare wrote it and which has continued to evolve throughout its richly varied history, both in the theatre and in film, television, opera, and ballet. The more familiar 1599 text is accompanied by a detailed explanatory commentary. The Introduction traces the Romeo and Juliet narrative from its origins in myth through its adaptation in the novella, and shows how Shakespeare's transmutation of the story reflects contemporary concerns with love, death, adolescence, and patriarchism.

This is an invaluable introductory guide for the English student who needs to decipher a page from a play, or a facsimile equivalent, from the Shakespearean period. The original quartos and folios of early play texts are increasingly subject to editorial and critical scrutiny, and electronic facsimiles are making the originals accessible to undergraduate and graduate students. Giddens provides a practical 'how to' guide to the original printed texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He explains how the features of the play text came about, what the different elements mean, and who created them. The book provides that important first step towards bibliography and critical editing, presenting a detailed account of how to read these early texts and how they have been turned into the modern editions we are accustomed to.