Application of the Michael Chekhov Technique to Shakespeare's Sonnets, Soliloquies, and Monologues illustrates how to apply the Michael Chekhov Technique, through exercises and rehearsal techniques, to a wide range of Shakespeare's works. The book begins with a comprehensive chapter on the definitions of the various aspects of the Technique, followed by five chapters covering Shakespeare's sonnets, comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances. This volume offers a very specific path, via Michael Chekhov, on how to put theory into practice and bring one's own artistic life into the work of Shakespeare. Offering a wide range of pieces that can be used as audition material, Application of the Michael Chekhov Technique to Shakespeare's Sonnets, Soliloquies, and Monologues is an excellent resource for acting teachers, directors, and actors specializing in the work of William Shakespeare. The book also includes access to a video on Psychological Gesture to facilitate the application of this acting tool to Shakespeare's scenes.

Throughout his plays, Shakespeare placed an extraordinary emphasis on the power of the face to reveal or conceal moral character and emotion, repeatedly inviting the audience to attend carefully to facial features and expressions. The essays collected here disclose that an attention to the power of the face in Shakespeare's England helps explain moments when Shakespeare's language of the self becomes intertwined with his language of the face. As the range of these essays demonstrates, an attention to Shakespeare's treatment of faces has implications for our understanding of the historical and cultural context in which he wrote, as well as the significance of the face for the ongoing interpretation and production of the plays. Engaging with a variety of critical strands that have emerged from the so-called turn to the body, the contributors to this volume argue that Shakespeare's invitation to look to the face for clues to inner character is not an invitation to seek a static text beneath an external image, but rather to experience the power of the face to initiate reflection, judgment, and action. The evidence of the plays suggests that Shakespeare understood that this experience was extremely complex and mysterious. By turning attention to the face, the collection offers important new analyses of a key feature of Shakespeare's dramatic attention to the part of the body that garnered the most commentary in early modern England. By bringing together critics interested in material culture studies with those focused on philosophies of self and other and historians and theorists of performance, Shakespeare and the Power of the Face constitutes a significant contribution to our growing understanding of attitudes towards embodiment in Shakespeare's England.

Controversial and sexually charged, The Taming of the Shrew is possibly Shakespeare's first play, and certainly among the most performed. 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. Petruchio's courtship of the unwilling 'shrew' Katherina poses the question: is it an examination of brute male domination or a passionate love story with a powerful moral message? To read it is to gain unique insight into a portrait of a marriage as created by a true master.

A series of outstanding productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company and others have recently demonstrated the theatrical vitality of Shakespeare's plays about the reign of Henry VI. In the Third Part Shakespeare extends his essay on monarchical politics by contrasting two kings, the good but ineffective Henry VI with his rival, the sensual and victorious Edward IV. He also offers more evidence of the perils of aristocratic factionalism in a series of scenes that display the grievous wounds caused by the Wars of the Roses. Here we watch the savage death of the Duke of York at the hands of Queen Margaret, the moving lament of King Henry as he witnesses the slaughter of the battle of Towton where the Lancastrians were defeated, and finally, Henry's death at the hands of Richard of Gloucester, later King Richard III.

Choreographing Shakespeare presents a hitherto unexplored history of the choreographers and performers who have created dance adaptations of Shakespeare. This book investigates forty dance works in genres such as ballet, modern dance, and hip-hop, produced between 1940 and 2016 by choreographers in Britain, America, and Europe, all of which use Shakespeare's plays and Sonnets as their source material. By combining scholarly analysis of these productions with practice-based conversations from six contemporary choreographers, Klett offers both breadth of coverage and in-depth analysis of how Shakespeare's poetic language is translated into the usually wordless medium of dance, and shows exactly how these dance adaptations move beyond the Shakespearean texts to engage with musical and choreographic influences. Ideal for students of Shakespeare and Dance Studies, Choreographing Shakespeare explores how dance adaptations strive to design legible and intelligible stories, while ultimately celebrating the beauty of pure movement.

Shakespeare's famous play finds new life with a translation into contemporary American English. "For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo." In this new version of Romeo and Juliet, written in accessible modern English, Hansol Jung breathes new life into Shakespeare's famous tragedy. By closely examining the familiar language and focusing on the subtleties of the text, Jung illuminates a surprising and more nuanced world than many of us have come to expect from the well-known tale of star-crossed lovers. This translation of Romeo and Juliet was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

It takes account of recent discoveries concerning Shakespeare's early career, and pays particular attention to recent theatrical history, relating readings generated by modern performances to new ideologically positioned accounts of the history and politics of Shakespeare's age. Part II offers a searing account of aristocratic sedition and a portrait of a relationship between the King and his Protector, Good Duke Humphrey, which is as complex as that between Prince Hal and his father Bolingbrook. It concerns itself with the nature of history, the role of conscience, and the relation between law and equity. It also contains a complex reading of the kind of event that the Tudor regime had cause to fear, a popular uprising, led in this instance by Jack Cade.

The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? Vienna is corrupt. The Duke, who has let the city fall to vice, hands control to his Deputy, a hardline, puritan reformer. The Deputy uses ancient laws to sentence citizens to death for sexual misconduct. But when a religious Novice pleads for clemency, their heady encounter leaves the Deputy guilty of the very crime that the law condemns. Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse Josie Rourke's adaptation of Measure for Measure imagines the play in its original year of performance, 1604, and also in 2018.

King John had a distinguished life on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage, and this edition presents the fullest account of its stage history. The play's political importance, its rich and varied language, and its skillful design suggest that King John deserves a high place among Shakespeare's historical tragedies. The textual analysis includes examination of several disputed emendations to the text. In the appendix, Beaurline surveys the arguments about the dating of Shakespeare's King John and the anonymous Troublesome Reign of King John, presenting new evidence for the possibility that Shakespeare's play was written first.

This book considers and illustrates the stage history of the play, and provides an account of the authorship controversy from the mid-nineteenth century, when John Fletcher's name was first put forward as a collaborator, to recent scholarship, which has not yet reached a consensus. The introduction considers the political and religious background of the play, its pageant-like structure and visual effects, and its varied ironies. The commentary is detailed but concise, explaining difficult passages and contemporary references, and suggesting how the play might have been staged in an Elizabethan theater, or might still be staged for a modern audience.

Lillian Groag presents a new version of Troilus and Cressida that will resonate with contemporary audiences. One of the most obscure plays in Shakespeare's canon, Troilus and Cressida may also be the Bard's darkest comedy. Exploring some of the events of Homer's Iliad, the play juxtaposes the carnage of the Trojan War with a love story between its two titular characters. Lillian Groag's translation brings this ancient world to modern audiences. Replacing the archaisms with new and accessible phrasing, Shakespeare's lines regain their meaning and humor in the twenty-first century. This translation illuminates Troilus and Cressida as one of Shakespeare's funniest, saddest, and most bitterly modern plays. This translation of Troilus and Cressida was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare's verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print-a new First Folio for a new era.

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.

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.

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.

Argues that the Essais of Montaigne were a crucial factor in the composition of later Shakespearean drama A new way of accounting for the different sorts of plays that Shakespeare wrote later in his career A detailed history of the literary-critical interest in the Montaigne-Shakespeare connection, from the eighteenth century to the present day Case studies that, through sustained close-readings of Montaigne's essays and Shakespeare's plays, shows the shared concerns of the authors A new approach that differs from the more typical method of looking merely for verbal echoes, resulting in a deeper, richer sense of the way that Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne shaped his writing In this revisionist study, Peter G. Platt provides a detailed history of the literary-critical interest in the Montaigne-Shakespeare connection from the eighteenth century to the present day. Through sustained close-readings of Montaigne's essays and Shakespeare's plays, Platt explores both authors' approaches to self, knowledge and form that stress fractures, interruptions and alternatives. While the change in monarchy, the revived interest in judicial rhetoric and the alterations in Shakespeare's acting company helped shape plays such as Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest, this book contends that Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne is an under-recognised driving force in these later plays.

Over 150 exquisite poems deal with love, friendship, the tyranny of time, beauty's evanescence, death and other themes in language unsurpassed in passion, precision, originality and beauty. This inexpensive Dover edition enables any lover of poetry or fine literature to have this remarkable verse in his or her library. A brief glossary illuminates a number of archaic terms.

This richly documented Norton Critical Edition of Julius Caesar is based on the 1623 First Folio text. It is accompanied by a note on the text, an introduction that sets the biographical and historical stage necessary to appreciate this richly allusive play, explanatory annotations, a map, and five illustrations. "Sources and Contexts" presents possible sources as well as analogues to Julius Caesar, an account of Shakespeare's understanding of and approach to Roman history, and Ernest Schanzer's study of the narrative challenges posed by the play. "Criticism" includes early commentary-by, among others, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and Harley Granville-Barker-on Julius Caesar as well as modern interpretations. Among these are John W. Velz on role-playing in Julius Caesar; Jan H. Blits on Caesar's ambiguous end; Paul A. Cantor on rhetoric, poetry and the Roman republic; and R. A. Foakes on the themes of assassination and mob violence. "Performance History" reprints accounts of various aspects of staging Julius Caesar by Sidney Homan, John Nettles, and Robert F. Willson, Jr. A Film Bibliography and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 73 is 'Shakespeare and the City'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/collections/shakespeare-survey This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic and save and bookmark their results.

Though printer Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonettes (1557) remains the most influential poetic collection printed in the sixteenth century, the compiliation has long been ignored or misundertood by scholars of early modern English culture. Embracing a broad range of critical and historical perspectives, the eight essays within this volume offer the first sustained analysis of the many ways that consumers read and understood Songes and Sonettes as an anthology over the course of the early modern period. Copied by a monarch, set to music, sung, carried overseas, studied, appropriated, rejected, edited by consumers, transferred to manuscript, and gifted by Shakespeare, this muti-author verse anthology of 280 poems transformed sixteenth-century English language and culture. With at least eleven printings before the end of Elizabeth I's reign, Tottel's ground-breaking text greatly influenced the poetic publications that followed, including individual and multi-author miscellanies. Contributors to this essay collection explore how, in addition to offering a radically new kind of English verse, 'Tottel's Miscellany' engaged politics, friendship, religion, sexuality, gender, morality and commerce in complex-and at times, contradictory-ways.

The first full length treatment of how men of different professions, social ranks and ages are empowered by their emotional expressiveness in early modern English literary works, this study examines the profound impact of the cultural shift in the English aristocracy from feudal warriors to emotionally expressive courtiers or gentlemen on all kinds of men in early modern English literature. Jennifer Vaught bases her analysis on the epic, lyric, and romance as well as on drama, pastoral writings and biography, by Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson and Garrick among other writers. Offering new readings of these works, she traces the gradual emergence of men of feeling during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the blossoming of this literary version of manhood during the eighteenth century.

Ambition overpowers loyalty in this drama of a Scottish noble's rise to power. Goaded by his scheming wife, Macbeth realizes too late that "blood will have blood," as each monstrous crime demands the reinforcement of another, sending him further and further down the path to his own destruction. Shakespeare's drama of treason and doom features a fast-paced plot, tumultuous action, and a cast of compelling characters, including a trio of fortune-telling witches. A definitive survey, this Dover Thrift Study Edition offers the drama's complete and unabridged text, plus a comprehensive study guide. Created to help readers gain a thorough understanding of "Macbeth"'s content and context, the guide includes: - Scene-by-scene summaries
- Explanations and discussions of the plot
- Question-and-answer sections
- Shakespeare biography
- List of characters and more
Dover Thrift Study Editions feature everything that students need to undertake a confident reading of a classic text, as well as to prepare themselves for class discussions, essays, and exams.
A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

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 William C. Carroll, this edition of Love's Labour Lost features a lively account of the play's performance history from 1632 to the present day. Stage and screen productions of the late twentieth century receive particular attention and a range of international performances are also explored. New trends in the scholarly criticism are discussed in the introduction, as are the play's sources and historical contexts. Carroll's text is freshly edited from the First Quarto, published in 1598, and presents a highly readable modernised edition of Love's Labour Lost; a play known for its unorthodox ending and extraordinary use of language.

Shakespearean performances regularly take place at both historic sites and locations with complex resonances, such as Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London and the royal castle of Hamlet - Elsinore - in Denmark. The present issue of the Shakespeare International Yearbook examines the impact of specificities such as festivals and performance sites on our understanding of Shakespeare and globalization. Contributions survey the present state of Shakespeare studies and address issues that are fundamental to our interpretive encounter with Shakespeare's work and his time, across the whole spectrum of his literary output.

"The Two Gentlemen of Verona "is commonly agreed to be Shakespeare's first comedy, and probably his first play. A comedy built around the confusions of doubling, cross-dressing, and identity, it is also a play about the ideal of male friendship and what happens to those friendships when men fall in love. William Carroll's engaging introduction focuses on the traditions and sources that stand behind the play and explores Shakespeare's unique and bold treatment of them. Carroll first explores the early modern discourse of male friendship and relates it to the play's unsettling ending. Special attention is given to the strong female figure of Julia and the controversial final scene. He goes on to discuss various other relevant topics: the influence of the Prodigal Son story on the play, the problem of using a boy in drag (for the first time in a Shakespearean comedy) to depict Julia, and Shakespeare's debt to Ovid and John Lyly in using the theme of metamorphosis. Next, the editor explores the use of letters; the portrayal and breed of Crab, the play's infamous dog; the complex geography of the story; and the play's dramaturgy. Carroll concludes with an extensive look at the play's theatrical and critical afterlife, and a discussion of the original text and date. This edition of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" also includes one appendix (a casting chart), 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.

These individual volumes extracted from The Norton Shakespeare bring to readers a meticulously edited new text that reflects current textual-editing scholarship and introduces innovative teaching features. The print and digital bundles offer students a great reading experience in two ways-printed volumes for their lifetime library and digital editions ideal for in-class use. Every introduction, note, gloss and bibliography has been reconsidered in light of reviewers' suggestions, and new textual introductions and performance notes reflect the extensive new scholarship in these fields. The ebooks are accessed with The Norton Shakespeare Digital Edition registration code included in the print volumes.