A wide-ranging survey of critical responses to Shakespeare's masterpiece. The Merchant of Venice has always been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. However, the critical tradition reveals sharply divided opinions, reflecting the tremendous capacity of the play to provoke discussion among its readers and audiences. This volume collects the work of over seventy commentators writing between 1775 and 1939 (when the first signs of Nazi anti-Semitism are noted). They include well-known critics and scholars, such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, Furnivall, Brandes, Moulton, Stoll, Spurgeon, Wilson Knight and Middleton Murry, but also little-known writers who addressed the Jewish issues in the play with some authority: George Farren, Israel Davis, Sidney Lee, Charles Salaman, 'El Seyonpi', F. S. Boas, Israel Gollancz, Gerald Friedlander, and Cecil Roth. In addition, reflecting the play's great popularity in the theatre, this collection documents four celebrated interpretations of Shylock (Macklin, Kean, Edwin Booth, and Henry Irving), and two of Portia (Helen Faucit, Ellen Terry).

This fascinating title, first published in 1922, presents a detailed overview of the life and works of Shakespeare. Alden first considers Shakespeare's Elizabethan context, alongside exploring the Classical and Italian foundations, political theories, concepts and theatrical trends that influenced his works. Next, a comprehensive biography provides insight into Shakespeare's probable education, relationships and contemporaries. The final sections are devoted to the genres into which Shakespeare's works have been categorised, with full analyses of and backgrounds to the poems, histories, comedies and tragedies. An important study, this title will be of particular value to students in need of a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare's life and works, as well as the more general inquisitive reader.

Shakespeare's famous tragedy unfurls in front of a dramatic manga setting, in which the fair city of Verona becomes a street in the highly fashionable Shibuya district of Tokyo. The swordfights become duals with katanas; the Capulets and the Montagues, opposing Yakuza families. Conflict explodes when Romeo - a bleached-blonde, well-dressed rock star - falls in love with Juliet, the pure and innocent Capulet daughter.

This open access book provides translations of early German versions of Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew. The introductory material situates these plays in their German context and discusses the insights they offer into the original English texts. English itinerant players toured in northern Continental Europe from the 1580s. Their repertories initially consisted of plays from the London theatre, but over time the players learnt German, and German players joined the companies, meaning the dramatic texts were adapted and translated into German. There are four plays that can legitimately be considered as versions of Shakespeare's plays. The present volume (volume 2) offers fully-edited translations of two of them: Tito Andronico (Titus Andronicus) and Kunst uber alle Kunste, ein boes Weib gut zu machen / An Art beyond All Arts, to Make a Bad Wife Good (The Taming of the Shrew). For the other two plays, Der Bestrafte Brudermord / Fratricide Punished (Hamlet) and Romio und Julieta (Romeo and Juliet), see volume 1. These plays are of great interest not only to all Shakespeareans, but also to scholars who are concerned with the broader issues of translation, performance and textual transmission over time. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Swiss National Science Foundation.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Power, corruption and betrayal are at the heart of Shakespeare's most well-known historical and political drama. As Julius Caesar moves closer to securing power for himself and is perceived by some as a threat to Roman citizens, his senators plot to bring about his downfall. Caesar's assassination leads to civil war rather than peace and the play explores the subsequent deaths of the conspirators Brutus and Cassius. Shakespeare's contemporaries would have spotted the playwright's attempts to use the shift from republican to imperial Rome to highlight the political situation of the Elizabethans at the time. Featuring some of the most powerfully resonant and rousing speeches of any of Shakespeare's plays, Julius Caesar remains one of his most well-loved historical tragedies.

William Dodd (29 May 1729 - 27 June 1777) was an English Anglican clergyman and a man of letters. He lived extravagantly, and was nicknamed the "Macaroni Parson." He dabbled in forgery in an effort to clear his debts, was caught, convicted, and, despite a public campaign for a Royal pardon, became the last person to be hanged at Tyburn for forgery. The Beauties of Shakespear was his most successful book and played a key role in reviving Shakespeare's popularity. This is a facsimile edition.

From the author's preface to this collection of "Greatest Hits"

I shall not attempt any labored encomiums of Shakspeare, or endeavor to set forth his perfections, at a time when such universal and just applause is paid him, and when every tongue is big with his boundless fame. He himself tells us -

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess."
And wasteful and ridiculous indeed it would be to say anything in his praise, when presenting the world with such a collection of Beauties as per- haps is nowhere to be met with, and, I may very safely affirm, cannot be paralleled from the produc- tions of any other single author, ancient or modern. There is scarcely a topic, common with other writers, on which he has not excelled them all; there are many nobly peculiar to himself, where he shines unrivalled, and like the eagle, properest emblem of his daring genius, soars beyond the common reach and gazes undazzled on the sun.

GLOUCESTER. Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths; Our bruised arms hung up for monuments; Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Grim-visag'd war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front, And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. But I-that am not shap'd for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass- I-that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nym

FOLGER Shakespeare Library: the world's leading center for Shakespeare studies.

Each edition includes:
- Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
- Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
- Scene-by-scene plot summaries
- A key to famous lines and phrases
- An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language
- An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
- Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare

Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing volumes offer a new type of study aid that combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the writing skills you need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's complex dramatic language and expanding your own critical vocabulary as you respond to his plays. Each guide in the series will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm. This lively and informative guide to Shakespeare's popular comedy equips you with the critical skills to analyse its language, structure and themes and to expand and enrich your own response to the play. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a perfect play for exploring Shakespeare's diverse uses of language to reveal character and themes, from formal iambics and rhyming couplets of courtiers and lovers, and 'warbling' notes' and nursery rhythms of fairies, to stocky prose by the artisan players including Bottom's comic malapropisms. An introduction considers when and how the play was written, and addresses the language with which Shakespeare created A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal. It then moves to a detailed examination and analysis of the play, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies, and its critical reception; an account of the play's movie adaptations completes the volume. Each chapter offers a 'writing matters' section, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations.

RODERIGO. Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this. IAGO. 'Sblood, but you will not hear me. If ever I did dream of such a matter, Abhor me. RODERIGO. Thou told'st me thou didst hold him in thy hate. IAGO. Despise me, if I do not. Three great ones of the city, In personal suit to make me his lieutenant, Off-capp'd to him; and, by the faith of man, I know my price, I am worth no worse a place. But he, as loving his own pride and purposes, Evades them, with a bumbast circumstance Horribly stuff'd with epithets of war, And, in conclusion,

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.

First published in English 1961, this reissue relates the problems of form and style to the development of dramatic speech in pre-Shakespearean tragedy. The work offers positive standards by which to assess the development of pre-Shakespearean drama and, by tracing certain characteristics in Elizabethan tragedy which were to have a bearing on Shakespeare's dramatic technique, helps to illuminate the foundations on which Shakespeare built his dramatic oeuvre.

Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617 is the first book to consider railing plays and pamphlets as participating in a coherent literary movement that dominated much of the English literary landscape during the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. Author Prendergast considers how these crisis-ridden texts on religious, gender, and aesthetic controversies were encouraged and supported by the emergence of the professional theater and print pamphlets. She argues that railing texts by Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson, Jane Anger and others became sites for articulating anxious emotions-including fears about the stability of England after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the increasing factional splits between Protestant groups. But, given that railings about religious and political matters often led to censorship or even death, most railing writers chose to circumvent such possible repercussions by railing against unconventional gender identity, perverse sexual proclivities, and controversial aesthetics. In the process, Prendergast argues, railers shaped an anti-aesthetics that was itself dependent on the very expressions of perverse gender and sexuality that they discursively condemned, an aesthetics that created a conceptual third space in which bitter enemies-male or female, conformist or nonconformist-could bond by engaging in collaborative experiments with dialogical invective. By considering a literary mode of articulation that vehemently counters dominant literary discourse, this book changes the way that we look at late Elizabethan and early Jacobean literature, as it associates works that have been studied in isolation from each other with a larger, coherent literary movement.

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.

LEONATO. I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Arragon comes this night to Messina. MESSENGER. He is very near by this. He was not three leagues off when I left him. LEONATO. How many gentlemen have you lost in this action? MESSENGER. But few of any sort, and none of name. LEONATO. A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers. I find here that Don Pedro hath bestowed much honour on a young Florentine called Claudio.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ A Midsummer Night's Dream ...: With Alterations, Additions, And New Songs; As It Is Performed At ... Covent Garden William Shakespeare, John Philip Kemble Frederick Reynolds Printed for John Miller, 1816

A bitter feud between the Montagues and the Capulets keeps the city of Verona, Italy, in a state of constant unrest. Despite the enmity, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet fall passionately in love. Enlisting the help of Friar Laurence, the young lovers wed in secret, hoping that their marriage will finally unite the two families. But things go terribly, tragically wrong. One of Shakespeare's most widely performed plays, "Romeo and Juliet" has been adapted for every conceivable format. Yet no adaptation -- film, television, radio, or opera -- can match the richness of the original. This inspired graphic novel version depicts every scene of the play in full-color illustrations, accompanied by every word of the original text. Authentic yet easy to follow, this exciting adaptation is ideal for purists, students, and readers who appreciate Shakespeare's matchless verse. Also available are the Original Text, with the Bard's original, unabridged work, and a Quick Text version, with less dialogue for a fast-paced read.

THESEUS. Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour Draws on apace; four happy days bring in Another moon; but, O, methinks, how slow This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires, Like to a step-dame or a dowager, Long withering out a young man's revenue. HIPPOLYTA. Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities.

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.

First published in English in 1965, this book discusses the roots and development of the dumb show as a device in Elizabethan drama. The work provides not only a useful manual for those who wish to check the occurrence of dumb shows and the uses to which they are put; it also makes a real contribution to a better understanding of the progress of Elizabethan drama, and sheds new light on some of the lesser known plays of the period.

Each edition includes:
- Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
- Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages_facing the text of the play
- Scene-by-scene plot summaries
- A key to famous lines and phrases
- An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language
- An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing_a modern perspective on the play
- Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare_Library's vast holdings of rare books
TEACHERS: Lesson plans for this play are available at_www.folger.edu. To receive a curriculum guide for this play, email your request to [email protected]. Please specify PDF or print version.
Essay by Michael Neill
The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit www.folger.edu.