Bill Bryson's biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet and playwright. Ever since he took the theatre of Elizabethan London by storm over 400 years ago, Shakespeare has remained centre stage. His fame stems not only from his plays - performed everywhere from school halls to the world's most illustrious theatres - but also from his enigmatic persona. His face is familiar to all, yet in reality very little is known about the man behind the masterpieces. Shakespeare's life, despite the scrutiny of generations of biographers and scholars, is still a thicket of myths and traditions, some preposterous, some conflicting, arranged around the few scant facts known about the Bard - from his birth in Stratford to the bequest of his second best bed to his wife when he died. Taking us on a journey through the streets of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Bryson examines centuries of stories, half-truths and downright lies surrounding our greatest dramatist. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, he introduces a host of engaging characters, as he celebrates the magic of Shakespeare's language and delights in details of the bard's life, folios, poetry and plays.

Despite the outpour of interpretations, from critics of all schools, on Shakespeare's dramatic works and other poetic works, A Lover's Complaint has been almost totally ignored by criticism. This collection of essays is designed to bring to the poem the attention it deserves for its beauty, its aesthetic, psychological and conceptual complexity, and its representation of its cultural moment. A series of readings of A Lover's Complaint, particularly engaging with issues of psychoanalysis and gender, the volume cumulatively builds a detailed picture of the poem, its reception, and its critical neglect. The essays in the volume, by leading Shakespeareans, open up this important text before scholars, and together generate the long-overdue critical conversation about the many intriguing facets of the poem.

From one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, Harold Bloom presents Othello's Iago, perhaps the Bard's most compelling villain--the fourth in a series of five short books about the great playwright's most significant personalities. Few antagonists in all of literature have displayed the ruthless cunning and deceit of Iago. Denied the promotion he believes he deserves, Iago takes vengeance on Othello and destroys him. One of William Shakespeare's most provocative and culturally relevant plays, Othello is widely studied for its complex and enduring themes of race and racism, love, trust, betrayal, and repentance. It remains widely performed across professional and community theatre alike and has been the source for many film and literary adaptations. Now award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Iago's motives and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. Why and how does Iago use lies and deception--the fake news of the 15th century--to destroy Othello and several other characters in his path? What can Othello tell us about racism? Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, treating Shakespeare's characters like people he has known all his life. He delivers exhilarating intimacy and clarity in these pages, writing about his shifting understanding--over the course of his own lifetime--of this endlessly compelling figure, so that Iago also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. "There are few readers more astute than Bloom" (Publishers Weekly), and his Iago is a provocative study for our time.

The Shakespearean Originals Series takes as its point of departure the question: "What is it that we read Shakespeare?" The answer may seem self-evident: we read the words that Shakespeare wrote. But do we? In the case of all the major editions of Shakespeare available in the market, the fact of the matter is that many of the words that we read in an edition of, say, Hamlet, never appeared in the text as it was printed during or shortly after Shakespeare's own lifetime. They are the interpetations and interpolations of a series of editors who have been systematically changing Shakespeare's text from the eighteenth century onwards. This volume offers the text of Macbeth, as printed in the 1623 First Folio.

This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context. Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.

Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume's tripartite structure considers instead the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare's oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting's cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

The use of Italian culture in the Jacobean theatre was never an isolated gesture. In considering the ideological repercussions of references to Italy in prominent works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Michael J. Redmond argues that early modern intertextuality was a dynamic process of allusion, quotation, and revision. Beyond any individual narrative source, Redmond foregrounds the fundamental role of Italian textual precedents in the staging of domestic anxieties about state crisis, nationalism, and court intrigue. By focusing on the self-conscious, overt rehearsal of existing texts and genres, the book offers a new approach to the intertextual strategies of early modern English political drama. The pervasive circulation of Cinquecento political theorists like Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Guicciardini combined with recurrent English representations of Italy to ensure that the negotiation with previous writing formed an integral part of the dramatic agendas of period plays.

Explored in this essay collection is how Shakespeare is rewritten, reinscribed and translated to fit within the local tradition, values, and languages of the world's various communities and cultures. Contributors show that Shakespeare, regardless of the medium - theater, pedagogy, or literary studies - is commonly 'rooted' in the local customs of a people in ways that challenge the notion that his drama promotes a Western idealism. Native Shakespeares examines how the persistent indigenization of Shakespeare complicates the traditional vision of his work as a voice of Western culture and colonial hegemony. The international range of the collection and the focus on indigenous practices distinguishes Native Shakespeares from other available texts.

First published in 1971, Poison, Play and Duel explores the dominant symbols of the language and action of Hamlet. The Ghost first reveals that Claudius murdered his brother by poison, and this act of poisoning is then dramatically presented before the King. The ultimate consequence of the 'poison in jest' performed by the actors is the poisoned 'play' with rapiers between Laertes and Hamlet. This representation of violence, and the vengeful response to violence, creates the moral and the psychological problems of Hamlet. Critics naturally question, and disagree about, the way that Hamlet plays his role in this play because the role of Hamlet is a theatrical device designed to bring all human actions into debate and question. It is hardly surprising that audiences have seen mirrored in Hamlet their own most fundamental and inescapable problems. Nigel Alexander shows how Shakespeare, like Raphael, Titian and other Renaissance artists, developed and adapted the imagery inherited from the Christian and classical past. The battle within the soul, the choice of life, the hunt of passion, the triple face of prudence and the dance of the graces are given dramatic habitation in Hamlet's soliloquies, in the inner-play and in the savage contrast of sexuality between Gertrude and Ophelia. This book will be of interest to students of literature, drama, psychology and philosophy.

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.

Paying special attention to Sidney's Arcadia, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's romances, this study engages in sustained examination of chiasmus in early modern English literature. The author's approach leads to the recovery of hidden designs which are shown to animate important works of literature; along the way Engel offers fresh and more comprehensive interpretations of seemingly shopworn conventions such as memento mori conceits, echo poems, and the staging of deus ex machina. The study, grounded in the philosophy of symbolic forms (following Ernst Cassirer), will be a valuable resource for readers interested in intellectual history and symbol theory, classical mythology and Renaissance iconography. Chiastic Designs affords a glimpse into the transformative power of allegory during the English Renaissance by addressing patterns that were part and parcel of early modern "mnemonic culture."

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England offers a new approach to evaluating the psychological 'loss' of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England by illustrating how, in the wake of Mary's demotion, re-inscriptions of her roles and meanings only proliferated, seizing hold of national imagination and resulting in new configurations of masculinity. The author surveys the early modern cultural and literary response to Mary's marginalization, and argues that Shakespeare employs both Roman Catholic and post-Reformation views of Marian strength not only to scrutinize cultural perceptions of masculinity, but also to offer his audience new avenues of exploring both religious and gendered subjectivity. By deploying Mary's symbolic valence to infuse certain characters, and dramatic situations with feminine potency, Espinosa analyzes how Shakespeare draws attention to the Virgin Mary as an alternative to an otherwise unilaterally masculine outlook on salvation and gendered identity formation.

Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance features essays questioning the extent to which education, an activity pursued in the home, classroom, and the church, led to, mirrored, and was perhaps even transformed by moments of instruction on stage. This volume argues that along with the popular press, the early modern stage is also a key pedagogical site and that education"performed and performative"plays a central role in gender construction. The wealth of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed and manuscript documents devoted to education (parenting guides, conduct books, domestic manuals, catechisms, diaries, and autobiographical writings) encourages examination of how education contributed to the formation of gendered and hierarchical structures, as well as the production, reproduction, and performance of masculinity and femininity. In examining both dramatic and non-dramatic texts via aspects of performance theory, this collection explores the ways education instilled formal academic knowledge, but also elucidates how educational practices disciplined students as members of their social realm, citizens of a nation, and representatives of their gender.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This study considers the figure of the bastard in the context of analogies of the family and the state in early modern England. The trope of illegitimacy, more than being simply a narrative or character-driven issue, is a vital component in the evolving construction and representation of British national identity in prose and drama of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Through close reading of a range of plays and prose texts, the book offers readers new insight into the semiotics of bastardy and concepts of national identity in early modern England, and reflects on contemporary issues of citizenship and identity. The author examines play texts of the period including Bale's King Johan, Peele's The Troublesome Reign of John, and Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and King Lear in the context of a selection of legal, religious, and polemical texts. In so doing, she illuminates the extent to which the figure of the bastard and, more generally the trope of illegitimacy, existed as a distinct discourse within the wider discursive framework of family and nation.

Through exciting and unconventional approaches, including critical/historical, printing/publishing and performance studies, this study mines Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to produce new insights into the early modern family, the individual, and society in the context of early modern capitalism. Inspired by recent work in cultural materialism and the material book, it also foregrounds the ways in which the contexts and the text itself become available to the reader today. The opening material on critical/historical approaches focuses on the way that readers have frequently read and played the text to explore issues that cluster around the family, marriage, gender and sexuality. Chapter two, on the ways that actors today inhabit character and create behaviour, provides intertextual comment on acting in the early modern period, and the connections between acting and social behaviour that inform self-image and the performance of identity both then and now. The third chapter on printing/publishing approaches to the text offers a detective story about the differences between Quarto One and Quarto Two, that focuses on the curious appearance in Quarto Two of material related to the law at word, phrase, line and scene level. The next three chapters integrate a close study of the language of the play to negotiate its potential significance for the present in the areas of: Family, Marriage, Gender and Sexuality; Identity, Individualism and Humanism; and the Law, Religion and Medicine. Among the startling aspects of this book are that it: - takes the part of Juliet far more seriously than other criticism has tended to do, attributing to her agency and aspects of character that develop the part suddenly from girl to woman; - recognizes the way the play explores early modern identity, becoming a handbook for individualism and humanism in the private domestic setting of early capitalism; and - brings to light the least recognized element in the play at the moment, its demonstration of the emerging structures of state power, governance by law, the introduction of surveillance, detection and witness, and the formation of what we now call the 'subject'. The volume includes on DVD a scholarly edition with commentary of the text of Romeo & Juliet, which re-instates many of the original early modern versions of the play.

This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career. The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge. The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.

Crossing the disciplinary borders between political, religious, and economic history, Aaron Kitch's innovative new study demonstrates how sixteenth-century treatises and debates about trade influenced early modern English literature by shaping key formal and aesthetic concerns of authors between 1580 and 1630. The author's analysis concentrates on a commonly overlooked period of economic history-the English commercial revolution before 1620-and, utilizing an impressive combination of archival research, close reading, and attention to historical detail, traces the transformation of genre in both neglected and canonical texts. The topics here are wide-ranging but are presented with a commitment to providing a concrete understanding of the religious, political, and historic context in literary thought. Kitch begins with the emerging wool trade and explosion of economic writing, Spenser's glorification of commerce and the Protestant state as presented in The Faerie Queene, and writers such as Thomas Nashe who drew on the same economic principles to challenge Spenser. Other topics include the reaction to the herring trade in prose satire and pamphlets, the presentation of Jewish trading nations in Shakespeare and Marlowe, and the tension between the crown and London merchants as reflected in Middleton's city comedies and Jonson's and Munday's pageants and court masques.

Located at the intersection of new historicism and the 'new formalism', historical formalism is one of the most rapidly growing and important movements in early modern studies: taking seriously the theoretical issues raised by both history and form, it challenges the anti-formalist orthodoxies of new historicism and expands the scope of historicist criticism. Shakespeare and Historical Formalism is the first volume devoted exclusively to collecting and assessing work of this kind. With essays on a broad range of Shakespeare's works and engaging topics from performance theory to the emergence of 'the literary' and from historiography to pedagogy, the volume demonstrates the value of historical formalism for Shakespeare studies and for literary criticism as a whole. Shakespeare and Historical Formalism begins with an introduction that describes the nature and potential of historical formalism and traces its roots in early modern literary theory and its troubled relationship with new historicism. The volume is then divided into two sections corresponding to the two chief objectives of historical formalism: a historically informed and politically astute formalism, and a historicist criticism revitalized by attention to issues of form. The first section, 'Historicizing Form', explores from a variety of perspectives the historical and political sources, meanings and functions of Shakespeare's dramatic forms. The second section, 'Re-Forming History', uses questions of form to rethink our understanding of historicism and of history itself, and in doing so challenges some of our fundamental literary-critical, pedagogical and epistemological assumptions. Concluding with suggestions for further reading on historical formalism and related work, Shakespeare and Historical Formalism invites scholars to rethink the familiar categories and principles of formal and historical criticism.

Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which-though many of them are considered of great literary worth-were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

Bringing together methods, assumptions and approaches from a variety of disciplines, Geraldo U. de Sousa's innovative study explores the representation, perception, and function of the house, home, household, and family life in Shakespeare's great tragedies. Concentrating on King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, de Sousa's examination of the home provides a fresh look at material that has been the topic of fierce debate. Through a combination of textual readings and a study of early modern housing conditions, accompanied by analyses that draw on anthropology, architecture, art history, the study of material culture, social history, theater history, phenomenology, and gender studies, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare explores the materiality of the early modern house and evokes domestic space to convey interiority, reflect on the habits of the mind, interrogate everyday life, and register elements of the tragic journey. Specific topics include the function of the disappearance of the castle in King Lear, the juxtaposition of home-centered life in Venice and nomadic, 'unhoused' wandering in Othello, and the use of special lighting effects to reflect this relationship, Hamlet's psyche in response to physical space, and the redistribution of domestic space in Macbeth. Images of the house, home, and household become visually and emotionally vibrant, and thus reflect, define, and support a powerful tragic narrative.

Shakespeare's history plays are central to his dramatic achievement. In recent years they have become more widely studied than ever, stimulating intensely contested interpretations, due to their relevance to central contemporary issues such as English, national identities and gender roles. Interpretations of the history plays have been transformed since the 1980s by new theoretically-informed critical approaches. Movements such as New Historicism and cultural materialism, as well as psychoanalytical and post-colonial approaches, have swept away the humanist consensus of the mid-twentieth century with its largely conservative view of the plays. The last decade has seen an emergence of feminist and gender-based readings of plays which were once thought overwhelmingly masculine in their concerns. This book provides an up-to-date critical anthology representing the best work from each of the modern theoretical perspectives. The introduction outlines the changing debate in an area which is now one of the liveliest in Shakespearean criticism.

Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.

This diachronic study of Boudica serves as a sourcebook of references to Boudica in the early modern period and gives an overview of the ways in which her story was processed and exploited by the different players of the times who wanted to give credence and support to their own belief systems. The author examines the different apparatus of state ideology which processed the social, religious and political representations of Boudica for public absorption and helped form the popular myth we have of Boudica today. By exploring images of the Briton warrior queen across two reigns which witnessed an act of political union and a move from English female rule (under Elizabeth I) to British/Scottish masculine rule (under James VI & I) the author conducts a critical cartography of the ways in which gender, colonialism and nationalism crystallised around this crucial historical figure. Concentrating on the original transmission and reception of the ancient texts the author analyses the historical works of Hector Boece, Raphael Holinshed and William Camden as well as the canonical literary figures of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. She also looks at aspects of other primary sources not covered in previous scholarship, such as Humphrey Llwyd's Breuiary of Britayne (1573), Petruccio Ubaldini's Le Vite delle donne illustri, del regno d'Inghilterra, e del regno di Scotia (1588) and Edmund Bolton's Nero Caesar (1624). Furthermore, she incorporates archaeological research relating to Boudica.