The Quarto text of Henry V is of unique importance. It is the first and probably the only text of a Shakespeare play which provides the playscript corresponding to the version that was actually performed by Shakespeare's own company. It has the authority of being transcribed by actors in the company as a record of their original staging at the Globe in 1599. The quarto version differs radically from the First Folio text which is used as the source for all other editions. Half as long as the Folio, it represents a practical staging text that streamlined the script supplied by Shakespeare. This edition of the Henry V quarto provides a modernized text alongside the extensive commentary. Andrew Gurr examines each variant from the Folio text in detail, shedding new light on what happened to scripts that the Shakespeare company bought from their resident playwright.

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

Novy demonstrates how the plays are theatrical transformations of tensions in both ideals and practices in Renaissance society. Analyzing the dramatic images of lover and beloved, of husband and wife, of parent and child, Novy examines the ways in which the conflicts are resolved in the comedies and romances and how they are acted out in the tragedies. Chapters on individual plays provide original interpretations that delineate the tone and texture of gender relations.
A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

"Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year is not just for Christmas, but for all time." -Helena Bonham Carter A magnificent collection of 365 passages from Shakespeare's works, for the Shakespeare scholar and neophyte alike. Make Shakespeare a part of your daily routine with Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year, a yearlong collection of passages from Shakespeare's greatest works. Drawing from the full spectrum of plays and sonnets to mark each day of the year, whether it's a scene from Hamlet to celebrate Christmas or a Sonnet in June to help you enjoy a summer's day. There are also passages to mark important days in the Shakespeare calendar, both from his own life and from his plays: You'll read a pivotal speech from Julius Caesar on the Ides of March and celebrate Valentine's day with a sonnet. Every passage is accompanied by an enlightening note to teach you its significance and help you better appreciate the timelessness and poetry of Shakespeare's words. Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year will give you a thoughtful way reflect on each day, all while giving you a deeper appreciation for the most famous writer in the English language.

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 Measure for Measure Angela Stock has written a new introductory section that takes account of recent scholarly criticism and important contemporary productions on stage and film. The edition retains the text prepared by Brian Gibbons together with his comprehensive introduction, in which he shows how the play's critical reception and stage history varies from one period to the next according to the prevailing social, moral and religious issues of the day. Gibbons explores the thrilling experience of watching the play in performance, with its shocking reversals and surprises, great tragic poetry and exuberant comic prose. An updated reading list completes the edition.

This is a fully annotated edition of all the poems which are now generally regarded as Shakespeare's, excluding the Sonnets. It contains Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, and A Lover's Complaint. The introduction to the two long narrative poems examines their place within the classical and Renaissance European traditions, an issue which also applies to The Phoenix and the Turtle. John Roe analyses the conditions in which the collection was produced, and weighs the evidence for and against Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover's Complaint and the much-debated question of its genre. He demonstrates how in his management of formal tropes Shakespeare, like the best Elizabethans, fashions a living language out of handbook oratory. This updated edition contains a new introductory section on recent critical interpretations and an updated reading list.

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 Titus Andronicus Sue Hall-Smith has written a new section on recent scholarship and important contemporary performances of the play. The edition retains the text prepared by Alan Hughes, based on the first quarto and supplemented by crucial additions and stage directions from the Folio. In the introduction, Hughes contradicts the historically popular view that Titus Andronicus is a poor play of dubious authorship. Joining the growing ranks of critics who take the play seriously, Hughes applauds its thematic unity and grim humour, and demonstrates that it is the work of a brilliant stage craftsman, confident in his mastery of space, movement and verse.

A collection of essays on the ways the senses 'speak' on Shakespeare's stage. Drawing on historical phenomenology, science studies, gender studies and natural philosophy, the essays provide critical tools for understanding Shakespeare's investment in staging the senses.

Shakespeare everyone can understand--now in this new EXPANDED edition of MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM! Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, this popular guide makes Shakespeare accessible to everyone. And now it features expanded literature guide sections that help students study smarter. The expanded sections include: Five Key Questions: Five frequently asked questions about major moments and characters in the play. What Does the Ending Mean?: Is the ending sad, celebratory, ironic . . . or ambivalent? Plot Analysis: What is the play about? How is the story told, and what are the main themes? Why do the characters behave as they do? Study Questions: Questions that guide students as they study for a test or write a paper. Quotes by Theme: Quotes organized by Shakespeare's main themes, such as love, death, tyranny, honor, and fate. Quotes by Character: Quotes organized by the play's main characters, along with interpretations of their meaning.

Considered by most scholars to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote, The Tempest is a stormy tale of betrayal and forgiveness. After being banished by his brother Antonio, Prospero harnesses the magic of an otherworldly island full of monsters and spirits to seek revenge. In reworking this play for a twenty-first-century audience, Kenneth Cavander focuses on the humor and the magic in the tale, much of which has largely escaped modern audiences in recent years. Cavander's translation of The Tempest, which premiered at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2017, was written as part of the Play On! Shakespeare project, an ambitious undertaking from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that commissioned new translations of 39 Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard's work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

The 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 King Henry V, Shakespeare's most celebrated war play, Andrew Gurr has added a new section to his introduction in which he considers recent criticism and important contemporary productions of the play. Concentrating in particular on 'secret' versus 'official' readings of the work, he analyses Shakespeare's double vision of Henry as both military hero and self-seeking individual, and shows how the patriotic declarations of the Chorus are contradicted by the play's dramatic action. Controversial sequences are placed in the context of Elizabethan thought while the exceptional variety of language and dialect in the text is also studied. An updated reading list completes the edition.

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.

This second edition of Othello updates the first (Bristol Classical Press, 1987), both chronologically and conceptually. It includes consideration of productions from the last seventeen years, and reconsiders earlier material in the light of more recent critical attitudes. Post-colonial and feminist studies have had an impact on the way Othello is perceived and interpreted. The question of blacked-up/black/colour-blind casting and the significance of white and/or black audiences in different political and racial contexts have recently become much more clearly articulated. In the process, Shakespeare himself has not escaped the charge of racism. Equally, the position of Desdemona has received more focussed attention, both as the forbidden object of desire within a racial framework, and as a woman in her own right. This edition takes account of these developments in criticism, in the theatre, on film, and in the adaptations which set out to interrogate Shakespeare's text.

This second edition of Othello updates the first (Bristol Classical Press, 1987), both chronologically and conceptually. It includes consideration of productions from the last seventeen years, and reconsiders earlier material in the light of more recent critical attitudes. Post-colonial and feminist studies have had an impact on the way Othello is perceived and interpreted. The question of blacked-up/black/colour-blind casting and the significance of white and/or black audiences in different political and racial contexts have recently become much more clearly articulated. In the process, Shakespeare himself has not escaped the charge of racism. Equally, the position of Desdemona has received more focussed attention, both as the forbidden object of desire within a racial framework, and as a woman in her own right. This edition takes account of these developments in criticism, in the theatre, on film, and in the adaptations which set out to interrogate Shakespeare's text.

A Midsummer's Night's Dream is William Shakespeare's fourth comedy and is ranked amongst his best and most complex comedies. The metadramatic features and the centrality of labouring class characters makes this comedy different from his others. It was written in 1596. The Play A Midsummer Night's Dream, a romantic comedy, is a dramatic text that draws attention to the very fine balance between tragedy and comedy, order and chaos, reality and illusion, romance and violence and tyranny and rebellion. The action of the play takes place over two days and four interwoven plots: the wedding of Hippolyta, the Amazonian queen and Theseus, Duke of Athens; the discord in the Athenian forest due to Titania and Oberon, the Fairy Queen and King respectively; the inconstant love of young Athenians Hermia, Helena, Demetrius and Lysander; and the practice and performance of the play-within-the-play by Quice and company. The book comes along with A comprehensive introduction to the play Fully annotated and complete text Act-wise plot-summary Critical Essays

This 2001 book presents the first modernized and edited version of the 1622 Othello. By taking this earliest published version of Othello as a book in its own right, Scott McMillin accounts for the mystery of its thousands of differences from the Folio version by arguing that the Quarto was printed from a theatre script reflecting cuts and actors' interpolations made in the playhouse. McMillin explains that the playhouse script was apparently taken from dictation by a scribe listening to the actors themselves, and thus reveals how Othello was spoken in seventeenth-century performance. This edition, which consists of a detailed introduction, quarto text, select collation and textual notes, is an important book for scholars in Shakespeare and Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, with wide ramifications for other Shakespeare textual studies and for students of early theatre history.

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.

Thomas McFarland presents a personal theory of comedy which shows a wide knowledge of comic theory and practice, the origins and nature of the comic vision, the pastoral, the pastoral elegy, and the golden age. He deftly draws together the various elements and demonstrates how the blending of the pastoral with the comic allows the inclusion of religious concerns to be a natural part of what is initially a socially oriented art form. McFarland argues that Shakespeare's use of the pastoral is not just a fanciful game of veiled references to the court of Elizabeth but a strengthening and deepening of comedy itself. This process was possible because of a fundamental affinity between the realm of comedy and the realm of pastoral. As McFarland observes, ""The alliance of comedy and pastoral realizes what neither mode could adequately achieve by itself: the representation of paradise."" Plays discussed include Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, As You Like It, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.

Tragic tale of star-crossed lovers, feuding families, and timeless passion contains some of Bard's most beautiful poetry.

In this useful guide, Paul Cantor provides a clearly structured introduction to Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. Cantor examines Hamlet's status as tragic hero and the central enigma of the delayed revenge in the light of the play's Renaissance context. He offers students a lucid discussion of the dramatic and poetic techniques used in the play. In the final chapter he deals with the uniquely varied reception of Hamlet on the stage and in literature generally from the seventeenth century to the present day.

This major new edition of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy of love argues that that play is ultimately Juliet's. The play text is expertly edited and the on-page commentary notes discuss issues of staging, theme, meaning and Shakespeare's use of his sources to give the reader deep and engaging insights into the play. The richly illustrated introduction looks at the play's exceptionally beautiful and complex language and focuses on the figure of Juliet as being at its centre. Rene Weis discusses the play's critical, stage and film history, including West Side Story and Baz Luhrmann's seminal film Romeo + Juliet. This is an authoritative edition from a leading scholar, giving the reader a penetrating and wide-ranging insight into this ever popular play.

Alexander Leggatt has written a new Introduction to this updated edition of Russell Fraser's text on one of Shakespeare's most ambiguous plays. Leggatt's interest in performance informs his introduction and account of the instability of the main characters. He offers a thoughtful account of the play's critical and theatrical fortunes to the end of the twentieth century, as well as of the audience experience. An updated reading list completes the edition. First Edition Hb (1986): 0-521-22150-1 First Edition Pb (1986): 0-521-29365-0

'We go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves' Jeanette Winterson Beatrice and Benedick both claim they are determined never to marry. But when their friends trick them into believing that each harbours secret feelings for the other, the pair begin to question whether their witty banter and verbal sparring conceal something deeper. Schemes abound, dangerous misunderstandings proliferate and matches are eventually made in this dazzling, dark-edged comedy of mature love and second chances. Used and Recommended by the National Theatre General Editor Stanley Wells Edited by R. A. Foakes Introduction by Janette Dillon

This edition of one of Shakespeare's best known and most frequently performed plays argues for "Julius Caesar" as a new kind of political play, a radical departure from contemporary practice, combining fast action and immediacy with compelling rhetorical language, and finding a clear context for its study of tyranny in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I. The richly experimental verse and the complex structure of the play are analyzed in depth, and a strong case is made for this to be the first play to be performed at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.
The introduction to the play begins with a brief overview of its themes, characters, verse, and history. The editor proceeds to consider the dating of the play and why Shakespeare chose to write "Julius Caesar" in 1599, looking at the works that preceded it as well as other historical context. In the next sections, Daniell examines the play's language and structures, with extensive comparison to the other tragedies and histories. The editor then discusses the sources of the play, focusing primarily on Plutarch's "Lives." After a survey of the critical and performance histories of the play, Daniell concludes his introduction with a section on textual problems and interpretations. Also included in this edition are an appendix, Plutarch's "Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes," and a list of abbreviations and references. 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.