Since young male players were the norm during the English Renaissance, were all cross-dressed performances of female characters played with the same degree of seriousness? Probably not. Spectrums of Representation in Shakespearean Crossdressing examines these varied types of female characters in English Renaissance drama, drawing from a range of play texts themselves in order to investigate if evidence exists for varying performance practices for male-to-female crossdressing. This book argues for a reading of the representation of female characters on the English Renaissance stage that not only suggests categorizing crossdressing along a spectrum of theatrical artifice, but also explores how this range of artifice enriches our understanding of the plays. The scholarship surrounding cross-dressing rarely makes this distinction, since in our study of early modern plays we tend to accept as a matter of course that all crossdressing was essentially the same. The basis of Spectrums of Representation in Shakespearean Crossdressing is that it was not.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern Stage furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. It considers the ways in which performances of magic reflect and feed into a sense of national identity, both in the form of magic contests and in its recurrent linkage to national defence; the extent to which magic can trope other concerns, and what these might be; and how magic is staged and what the representational strategies and techniques might mean. The essays range widely over both canonical plays-Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Doctor Faustus, Bartholomew Fair-and notably less canonical ones such as The Birth of Merlin, Fedele and Fortunio, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Devil is an Ass, The Late Lancashire Witches and The Witch of Edmonton, putting the two groups into dialogue with each other and also exploring ways in which they can be profitably related to contemporary cases or accusations of witchcraft. Attending to the representational strategies and self-conscious intertextuality of the plays as well as to their treatment of their subject matter, the essays reveal the plays they discuss as actively intervening in contemporary debates about witchcraft and magic in ways which themselves effect transformation rather than simply discussing it. At the heart of all the essays lies an interest in the transformative power of magic, but collectively they show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects or even to the subjects of magic, but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to bring about change in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and stereotypes.

Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos: Person, Audience, Language breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates experiences of sublime pathos, for which audiences have been prepared by the sublime ethos described in the companion volume, Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare's model of mutualistic character, in which "entangled" language brokers a psychic communion between fictive persons and real-life audiences and readers. In the process, Sublime Critical platitudes regarding Shakespeare's liberating ambiguity and invention of the human are challenged, while the sympathetic imagination is reinstated as the linchpin of the playwright's sublime effects. As the argument develops, the Shakespearean sublime emerges as an emotional state of vulnerable exhilaration leading to an ethically uplifting openness towards others and an epistemologically bracing awareness of human unknowability. Taken together, Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos and Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

In late November 1623, Edward Blount finally took delivery at his bookshop at the sign of the Black Bear near St Paul's of a book that had been long in the making. Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies was the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, appearing some seven years after their author's death in 1616. Its 950 folio pages included thirty-six plays, half of which had not previously been printed, divided under the three generic headings of the title. There was no fanfare at the book's arrival. There was nothing of the marketing overdrive that marks an important new publication in our own period: no advertising campaign, no reviews, interviews, endorsements or literary prizes, no queues in St Paul's Churchyard, no sales figures, price war, copycat publications or bestseller lists - in short, no sensation. Nevertheless, it is hard to overstate the importance of this literary, cultural and commercial moment. This book, generously illustrated with key pages from the publication and comparative works tells the human, artistic, economic and technical stories of the birth of the First Folio - and the emergence of Shakespeare's towering reputation.

Renaissance ideas of honour had a profound influence on the English people who formed Shakespeare's audiences. In When Honour's at the Stake, first published in 1973, Norman Council describes the increasing importance of these ideas to the themes and structure of a number of Shakespeare's major plays. The validity of the most widely approved code of honour was being challenged on a variety of fronts, yet both personal standards of behaviour and public affairs were habitually understood in terms of honour. A series of tragedies are given their basic form by dramatizing the pernicious effects of man's disobedience to the various demands of honour; in Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear honour is among the principal motives of tragedy. In this way, the modern reader's comprehension of the plays can be greatly enhanced by reference to Elizabethan honour codes.

Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism examines Shakespeare in relation to ongoing conversations that interrogate the vulnerability of Black and brown people amid oppressive structures that aim to devalue their worth. By focusing on the way these individuals are racialized, politicized, policed, and often violated in our contemporary world, it casts light on dimensions of Shakespeare's work that afford us a better understanding of our ethical responsibilities in the face of such brutal racism. Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism is divided into seven short chapters that cast light on contemporary issues regarding racism in our day. Some salient topics that these chapters address include the murder of unarmed Black men and women, the militarization of the U.S. Mexico border, anti-immigrant laws, exclusionary measures aimed at Syrian refugees, inequities in healthcare and safety for women of color, international trends that promote white nationalism, and the dangers of complicity when it comes to racist paradigms. By bringing these contemporary issues into conversation with a wide range of plays that span the many genres in which Shakespeare wrote throughout his career, these chapters demonstrate how the widespread racism and discord within our present moment stands to infuse with urgent meaning Shakespeare's attention to the (in)humanity of strangers, the ethics of hospitality, the perils of insularity, abuses of power, and the vulnerability of the political state and its subjects. The book puts into conversation Shakespeare with present-day events and cultural products surrounding topics of race, ethnicity, xenophobia, immigration, asylum, assimilation, and nationalism as a means of illuminating Shakespeare's cultural and literary significance in relation to these issues. It should be an essential read for all students of literary studies and Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's skillful manipulation of events and people makes Richard III a chilling incarnation of the lure of evil and the temptation of power. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is illustrated throughout by Sir John Gilbert, and includes an introduction by Ned Halley. Richard, Duke of Gloucester - the bitter, deformed brother of the King - is secretly plotting to seize the throne of England. Charming and duplicitous, powerfully eloquent and viciously cruel, he is prepared to go to any lengths to achieve his goal.

For this updated edition of one of Shakespeare's most problematic plays, Tom Lockwood has added a new introductory section on the latest scholarly trends, performance and adaptation practices which have occurred over the last two decades. Investigating the latest critical frames through which the play has been interpreted, the updated introduction also focuses on recent international performances on stage and screen (including Al Pacino's performances on film and in Daniel Sullivan's production in New York, the Habima National Theatre's production for the Globe to Globe Festival, Jonathan Munby's touring production for the Globe performed in London, New York and Venice, and Rupert Goold's production for the Royal Shakespeare Company). Finally, new forms of adaptation are considered: a performance transposed to the different generic mode of a New York auction room, and the remaking of the play in Howard Jacobson's 2016 novel, Shylock Is my Name.

'The man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul' John Dryden Antonio, a Venetian merchant, wishes to help his friend get money to impress a rich heiress. But he is forced to borrow the sum from a cynical, abused Jewish moneylender, Shylock, and signs a chilling contract to honour the debt with a pound of his own flesh. An ambiguous, complex and controversial comedy, The Merchant of Venice explores prejudice, marriage, money and the true nature of justice in an unforgiving world. Used and Recommended by the National Theatre General Editor Stanley Wells Edited by W. Moelwyn Merchant Introduction by Peter Holland

This landmark publication is printed in clear, legible type. Each play has its own comprehensive introduction as well as extensive, expert annotations. Highlighted areas show where lines have been altered over time and also shows where verse has been changed to prose in the past (but not here!) The original compositions are marked and folio clues are highlighted.

Shakespeare wrote for a theater in which the audience was understood to be, and at times invited to be, active and participatory. How have Shakespeare's audiences, from the sixteenth century to the present, responded to that invitation? In what ways have consumers across different cultural contexts, periods, and platforms engaged with the performance of Shakespeare's plays? What are some of the different approaches taken by scholars today in thinking about the role of Shakespeare's audiences and their relationship to performance? The chapters in this collection use a variety of methods and approaches to explore the global history of audience experience of Shakespearean performance in theater, film, radio, and digital media. The approaches that these contributors take look at Shakespeare's audiences through a variety of lenses, including theater history, dramaturgy, film studies, fan studies, popular culture, and performance. Together, they provide both close studies of particular moments in the history of Shakespeare's audiences and a broader understanding of the various, often complex, connections between and among those audiences across the long history of Shakespearean performance.

Rehearsing Shakespeare offers a dynamic guide to practice in rehearsals and workshops for actors, directors and trainers in a UK and global context. The book analyses the roots and development of modern-day approaches to Shakespeare and applies theory of verse analysis to practical work, ranging from the drama student to the highest professional level in major global theatres. At the heart of the book are a series of carefully tested acting exercises, worked with professional actors and drama students across the world, both in English and in translation. Featuring several case studies from the author's own work and the work of others, it explores how acting and directing relate to design and other forms of artistic collaboration during Shakespeare production. An excellent resource for students and teachers of acting and directing courses, drama and English literature students at all levels, new professional actors and professional actors undertaking the exciting task of acting and directing Shakespeare at an international level, Rehearsing Shakespeare offers practical approaches to cutting and editing through to the core challenges of any Shakespearian play.

The influence of Shakespeare on American culture is unequivocal. And despite its youth, young adult literature has grown into a literary force majeure. Considering the widespread popularity of both Shakespeare and young adult literature, their pairing can offer teachers and students a wide array of instructional possibilities. Our collection offers secondary (6-12) educators engaging ideas and approaches for pairing Shakespeare's most frequently taught plays alongside young adult novels which often provide a unique examination of a topic that teaching a single text could not afford. The pairings offered in each chapter allow for comparisons in some cases, for extensions in others, and for critique in some.

Powerful tragedy of an aging king, betrayed by his daughters, robbed of his kingdom, descending into madness. Perhaps the bleakest of Shakespeare's tragic dramas, it explores themes of filial ingratitude, injustice, wretchedness and the meaninglessness of life with unsurpassed power and depth. Reprinted here from an authoritative British edition, complete with explanatory footnotes.

This collection explores the consequences of accentism-an under-researched issue that intersects with racism and classism-in the Shakespeare industry across languages and cultures, past and present. It adopts a transmedia and transhistorical approach to a subject that has been dominated by the study of "Original Pronunciation." Yet the OP project avoids linguistically "foreign" characters such as Othello because of the additional complications their "aberrant" speech poses to the reconstruction process. It also evades discussion of contemporary, global practices and, underpinning the enterprise, is the search for an aural "purity" that arguably never existed. By contrast, this collection attends to foreign speech patterns in both the early modern and post-modern periods, including Indian, East Asian, and South African, and explores how accents operate as "metasigns" reinforcing ethno-racial stereotypes and social hierarchies. It embraces new methodologies, which includes reorienting attention away from the visual and onto the aural dimensions of performance.

Why the Theatre is a collection of 26 personal essays by college teachers, actors, directors, and playwrights about the magnetic pull of the theatre and its changing place in society. The book is divided into four parts, examining the creative role of the audience, the life of the actor, director, and playwright in performance, ways the theatre moves beyond the playhouse and into the real world, and theories and thoughts on what the theatre can do when given form onstage. Based on concrete, highly personal examples, experiences, and memories, this collection offers unique perspectives on the meaning of the theatre and the beauty of weaving the world of the play into the fabric of our lives. Covering a range of practices and plays, from the Greeks to Japanese Butoh theatre, from Shakespeare to modern experiments, this book is written by and for the theatre instructor and theatre appreciation student.

Why the Theatre is a collection of 26 personal essays by college teachers, actors, directors, and playwrights about the magnetic pull of the theatre and its changing place in society. The book is divided into four parts, examining the creative role of the audience, the life of the actor, director, and playwright in performance, ways the theatre moves beyond the playhouse and into the real world, and theories and thoughts on what the theatre can do when given form onstage. Based on concrete, highly personal examples, experiences, and memories, this collection offers unique perspectives on the meaning of the theatre and the beauty of weaving the world of the play into the fabric of our lives. Covering a range of practices and plays, from the Greeks to Japanese Butoh theatre, from Shakespeare to modern experiments, this book is written by and for the theatre instructor and theatre appreciation student.

Published in 1979: This is a play based on the reign of King John with notes.

It is widely acknowledged that the hit franchise Game of Thrones is based on the Wars of the Roses, a bloody fifteenth-century civil war between feuding English families. In this book, Jeffrey R. Wilson shows how that connection was mediated by Shakespeare, and how a knowledge of the Shakespearean context enriches our understanding of the literary elements of Game of Thrones. On the one hand, Shakespeare influenced Game of Thrones indirectly because his history plays significantly shaped the way the Wars of the Roses are now remembered, including the modern histories and historical fictions George R.R. Martin drew upon. On the other, Game of Thrones also responds to Shakespeare's first tetralogy directly by adapting several of its literary strategies (such as shifting perspectives, mixed genres, and metatheater) and tropes (including the stigmatized protagonist and the prince who was promised). Presenting new interviews with the Game of Thrones cast, and comparing contextual circumstances of composition-such as collaborative authorship and political currents-this book also lodges a series of provocations about writing and acting for the stage in the Elizabethan age and for the screen in the twenty-first century. An essential read for fans of the franchise, as well as students and academics looking at Shakespeare and Renaissance literature in the context of modern media.

This book presents a ground-breaking, comprehensive study of the modern performance history of plays in the John Fletcher canon, excluding his collaborations with Shakespeare. It examines how seventeen of Fletcher's plays have been interpreted in British productions. In addition, the book offers a consideration of the contexts in which these productions took place, from the early twentieth century 'Elizabethan Revival' to the more politicized theatrical cultures of the 1960s and beyond. Revived with Care opens a window on some of the theatrical developments of the past 135 years, in the context of radical changes in the presentation and reception of early modern drama, while for theatre practitioners it provides ideas and inspiration for exploring little-known but powerful plays in exciting new productions. The book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the field of theatre and performance studies.

This book takes a new approach to Shakespeare's plays, exploring them as dream-thought in the modern psychoanalytic sense of unconscious thinking. Through his commitment to poetic language, Shakespeare offers images and dramatic sequences that illustrate fundamental developmental conflicts, the solutions for which are not preconceived but evolve through the process of dramatisation. In this volume, Meg Harris Williams explores the fundamental distinction between the surface meanings of plot or argument and the deep grammar of dreamlife, applied not only to those plays known as 'dream-plays' but also to critical sequences throughout Shakespeare's oeuvre. Through a post-Kleinian model based on the thinking of Bion, Meltzer, and Money-Kyrle, this book sheds new light on both Shakespeare's own relation to the play and on the identificatory processes of the playwright, reader, or audience. Dream Sequences in Shakespeare is important reading for psychoanalysts, playwrights, and students.

This volume critically analyses and theorises Asian interventions in the expanding phenomenon of Global Shakespeare. It interrogates Shakespeare's 'universality' from Asian perspectives: how this has been modified or even replaced by the 'global bard' as a recognisable brand, and how Asian Shakespeares have contributed to or subverted this process by both facilitating the worldwide dissemination of the bard's plays and challenging and resisting the very templates through which they become globally legible. Critically acclaimed Asian productions have prominently figured at premier Western festivals, and popular Asian appropriations like Bollywood, manga and anime have created new kinds of globally accessible Shakespeare. Essays in this collection engage with the emergent critical issues: the efficacy of definitions of the 'local', 'global', 'transnational' and 'cosmopolitan' and of the liminalities and mobilities in between. They further examine the politics of 'West' and 'East', the evolving markers of the 'Asian' and the equation of the 'glocal' with the 'Asian'; they attend to performance and archiving protocols and bring the current debates on translation, appropriation, and world literature to speak to the concerns of global and transnational Shakespeare. These investigations analyse recent innovative Asian theatre productions, popular cinematic and manga appropriations and the increasing presence of Shakespeare in the Asian digital sphere. They provide an Asian standpoint and lens in rereading the processes of cultural globalisation and the mobilisation of Shakespeare.

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.