This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare's drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare's work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare's works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare's works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange.

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.

This book establishes new information about the likely content of ten lost plays from the period 1580-1642. These plays' authors include Nashe, Heywood, and Dekker; and the plays themselves connect in direct ways to some of the most canonical dramas of English literature, including Hamlet, King Lear, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi. The lost plays in question are: Terminus & Non Terminus (1586-8); Richard the Confessor (1593); Cutlack (1594); Bellendon (1594); Truth's Supplication to Candlelight (1600); Albere Galles (1602); Henry the Una (c. 1619); The Angel King (1624); The Duchess of Fernandina (c. 1630-42); and The Cardinal's Conspiracy (bef. 1639). From this list of bare titles, it is argued, can be reconstructed comedies, tragedies, and histories, whose leading characters included a saint, a robber, a Medici duchess, an impotent king, at least one pope, and an angel. In each case, newly-available digital research resources make it possible to interrogate the title and to identify the play's subject-matter, analogues, and likely genre. But these concrete examples raise wider theoretical problems: What is a lost play? What can, and cannot, be said about objects in this problematic category? Known lost plays from the early modern commercial theatre outnumber extant plays from that theatre: but how, in practice, can one investigate them? This book offers an innovative theoretical and practical frame for such work, putting digital humanities into action in the emerging field of lost play studies.

After Robert Armin joined the Chamberlain's Men, singing in Shakespeare's dramas catapulted from 1.25 songs and 9.95 lines of singing per play to 3.44 songs and 29.75 lines of singing, a virtually unnoticed phenomenon. In addition, many of the songs became seemingly improvisatory-similar to Armin's personal style as an author and solo comedian. In order to study Armin's collaborative impact, this interdisciplinary book investigates the songs that have Renaissance music that could have been heard on Shakespeare's stage. They occur in some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and The Tempest. In fact, Shakespeare's plays, as we have them, are not complete. They are missing the music that could have accompanied the plays' songs. Significantly, Renaissance vocal music, far beyond just providing entertainment, was believed to alter the bodies and souls of both performers and auditors to agree with its characteristics, directly inciting passions from love to melancholy. By collaborating with early modern music editor and performing artist Lawrence Lipnik, Catherine Henze is able to provide new performance editions of seventeen songs, including spoken interruptions and cuts and rearrangement of the music to accommodate the dramatist's words. Next, Henze analyzes the complete songs, words and music, according to Renaissance literary and music primary sources, and applies the new information to interpretations of characters and scenes, frequently challenging commonly held literary assessments. The book is organized according to Armin's involvement with the plays, before, during, and after the comic actor joined Shakespeare's company. It offers readers the tools to interpret not only these songs, but also vocal music in dramas by other Renaissance playwrights. Moreover, Robert Armin and Shakespeare's Performed Songs, written with non-specialized terminology, provides a

King John's evil reputation has outlasted and proved more enduring than that of Richard III, whose notoriety seemed ensured thanks to Shakespeare's portrayal of him. The paradox is even greater when we realize that this portrait of John endures despite Shakespeare's portrait of him in the play King John, where he hardly comes off as a villain at all. Here Igor Djordjevic argues that the story of John's transformation in cultural memory has never been told completely, perhaps because the crucial moment in John's change back to villainy is a literary one: it occurs at the point when the 'historiographic' trajectory of John's character-development intersects with the 'literary' evolution of Robin Hood. But as Djordjevic reveals, John's second fall in cultural memory became irredeemable as the largely unintended result of the work of three men - John Stow, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday - who knew each other and who all read a significant passage in a little known book (the Chronicle of Dunmow), while a fourth man's money (Philip Henslowe) helped move the story from page to stage. The rest, as they say, is history. Paying particular attention to the work of Michael Drayton and Anthony Munday who wrote for the Lord Admiral's Men, Djordjevic traces the cultural ripples their works created until the end of the seventeenth century, in various familiar as well as previously ignored historical, poetic, and dramatic works by numerous authors. Djordjevic's analysis of the playtexts' source, and the personal and working relationship between the playwright-poets and John Stow as the antiquarian disseminator of the source text, sheds a brighter light on a moment that proves to have a greater significance outside theatrical history; it has profound repercussions for literary history and a nation's cultural memory.

In Shakespeare, Adaptation, Psychoanalysis, Matthew Biberman analyzes early adaptations of Shakespeare's plays in order to identify and illustrate how both social mores and basic human psychology have changed in Anglo-American culture. Biberman contests the received wisdom that Shakespeare's characters reflect essentially timeless truths about human nature. To the contrary, he points out that Shakespeare's characters sometimes act and think in ways that have become either stigmatized or simply outmoded. Through his study of the adaptations, Biberman pinpoints aspects of Shakespeare's thinking about behavior and psychology that no longer ring true because circumstances have changed so dramatically between his time and the time of the adaptation. He shows how the adaptors' changes reveal key differences between Shakespeare's culture and the culture that then supplanted it. These changes, once grasped, reveal retroactively some of the ways in which Shakespeare's characters do not act and think as we might expect them to act and think. Thus Biberman counters Harold Bloom's claim that Shakespeare fundamentally invents our sense of the human; rather, he argues, our sense of the human is equally bound up in the many ways that modern culture has come to resist or outright reject the behavior we see in Shakespeare's plays. Ultimately, our current sense of 'the human' is bound up not with the adoption of Shakespeare's psychology, perhaps, but its adaption-or, in psychoanalytic terms, its repression and replacement.

This book makes a significant contribution to recent scholarship on the ways in which women responded to the regulation of their behavior by focusing on representations of women speakers and their audiences in moments Smith identifies as "scenes of speech." This new approach, examining speech exchanges between a speaker and audience in which both anticipate, interact with, and respond to each other and each other's expectations, demonstrates that the prescriptive process involves a dynamic exchange in which each side plays a role in establishing and contesting the boundaries of acceptable speech for women. Drawing from a wide range of evidence, including pamphlets, diaries, illustrations, and plays, the book interprets the various and at times contradictory representations and reception of women's speech that circulated in early modern England. Speech scenes examined within include wives' speech to their husbands in private, private speech between women, public speech before death, and the speech of witches. Looking at scenes of women's speech from male and female authors, Smith argues that these early modern texts illustrate a means through which societal regulations were negotiated and modified. This book will appeal to those with an interest in early modern drama, including the playwrights Shakespeare, Cary, Webster, Fletcher, and Middleton, as well as readers of non-dramatic early modern literary texts. The volume is of particular use for scholars working in the areas of early modern literature and culture, women's history, gender studies, and performance studies.

"Post-Hamlet: Shakespeare in an Era of Textual Exhaustion" examines how postmodern audiences continue to reengage with Hamlet in spite of our culture's oversaturation with this most canonical of texts. Combining adaptation theory and performance theory with examinations of avant-garde performances and other unconventional appropriations of Shakespeare's play, Post-Hamlet examines Shakespeare's Hamlet as a central symbol of our era's "textual exhaustion," an era in which the reader/viewer is bombarded by text-printed, digital, and otherwise. The essays in this edited collection, divided into four sections, focus on the radical employment of Hamlet as a cultural artifact that adaptors and readers use to depart from textual "authority" in, for instance, radical English-language performance, international film and stage performance, pop-culture and multi-media appropriation, and pedagogy.

Samurai warriors have reclaimed a future post-nuclear world of mutants in the original manga version of Shakespeare's tale of skulduggery. The series keeps true to Shakespeare's original text, but is specially abridged for use in the manga, which makes it ideal for students to use as a primer and a way of getting to grips with the themes in Shakespeare's plays. A fusion of classic Shakespeare with manga visuals, these are cutting-edge books that will intrigue and grip readers.

Written by an international group of highly regarded scholars and rooted in the field of intermedial approaches to literary studies, this volume explores the complex aesthetic process of "picturing" in early modern English literature. The essays in this volume offer a comprehensive and varied picture of the relationship between visual and verbal in the early modern period, while also contributing to the understanding of the literary context in which Shakespeare wrote. Using different methodological approaches and taking into account a great variety of texts, including Elizabethan sonnet sequences, metaphysical poetry, famous as well as anonymous plays, and court masques, the book opens new perspectives on the literary modes of "picturing" and on the relationship between this creative act and the tense artistic, religious and political background of early modern Europe. The first section explores different modes of looking at works of art and their relation with technological innovations and religious controversies, while the chapters in the second part highlight the multifaceted connections between European visual arts and English literary production. The third section explores the functions performed by portraits on the page and the stage, delving into the complex question of the relationship between visual and verbal representation. Finally, the chapters in the fourth section re-appraise early modern reflections on the relationship between word and image and on their respective power in light of early-seventeenth-century visual culture, with particular reference to the masque genre.

Shakespeare's enduring characters are set adrift in present-day Athens, but a present with a massive difference - an alternative history. Rigid class systems and 'god given' monarchies of the past have not been lost. Modern technologies meet ancient tradition; and the citizens of Athens are frustrated by continuing restrictions and hierarchies. Only the forest, home to the fairies and fey spirits can offer the illicit lovers what they seek.

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. Special attention is given to the strong female figure of Julia and the controversial final scene.

1 Henry VI was the Rose's great draw in the Spring of 1592, and is a dramatic tale of the lives of soldiers, diplomats, kings, and insurrectionists; the fractious instability of the court and nobility of fifteenth-century England, and their squabbles with their French counterparts. Despite its debut performance in 1592, however, 1 Henry VI does not take a printed form until its appearance some thirty years later in the 1623 folio. There are many questions, therefore, surrounding exactly how many people wrote the play, when they did so, how it was performed, who played what part, and what was the nature of the manuscript behind the first performance. In his wide-ranging introduction, Michael Taylor offers answers to these questions, and discusses other key issues such as language, structure, performance history, and the role of women in the play.

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing an introduction to:
* the contexts of the play, through a concise, accessible overview, a chronology and reprinted documents from the period
* the range of critical responses to the play, through a brief critical history and reprinted critical texts, accompanied by explanatory headnotes; and
* the play in performance, through a selection of clearly introduced readings on this topic, along with illustrations.
The Sourcebook then examines key passages of the play in detail. Each passage is reprinted in full, along with a headnote and annotations offering crucial guidance to Shakespeare's language and the critical issues which surround the text. Throughout the volume, cross-references link together the contextual materials, critical responses and the play's text.
If you are beginning to study Othello, this Routledge Literary Sourcebook is the one guide you cannot afford to be without.

Demonstrating and defending a method of close reading and historical contextualisation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this collection of essays by Tom McAlindon combines a number of previously published pieces with original studies. The volume includes six interpretative studies, all but one of which involve challenges to radical readings of the plays involved, including Henry V, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and Doctor Faustus. The other three essays are critiques of the claims and methods of radical, postmodernist criticism (new historicism and cultural materialism especially); they illustrate the author's conviction that some leading scholars in the field of Renaissance literature and drama, who deserve credit for shifting attention to new areas of interest, must also be charged with responsibility for a marked decline in standards of analysis, interpretation, and argument. Likely to provoke considerable debate, this stimulating collection is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies.

Shakespeare's poetic-dramatic worlds are inescapably limited. There is always, in his poems and plays, a force (a contingent drive, a pre-textual undertow, a rational-critical momentum, an ironic stance, the deflections of error) coercing plot and meaning to their end. By examining the work of limits in the sonnets and in five of his plays, this book seeks not only to highlight the poet's steadfast commitment to critical rationality. It also aims to plead a case of hermeneutic continence. Present-day appraisals of Shakespeare's world-making and meaning-projecting potential are often overruled by a neo-romantic and phenomenological celebration of plenty. This pre-critical tendency unwittingly obtains epistemic legitimation from philosophical quarters inspired by Alain Badiou's derisive rejection of "the pathos of finitude". But finitude is much more than a modish, neo-existentialist, watchword. It is what is left of ontology when reason is done. And cool reason was already at work before Kant. In accounting for the way in which Shakespeare places limits to life (Romeo and Juliet), to experience (The Tempest), to love (the Sonnets), to time (Macbeth), to the world (Hamlet) and to knowledge (Othello), Limited Shakespeare: The Reason of Finitude aims to underscore the deeply mediated dimension of Shakespearean experience, always over-determined by the twin forces of contingency and textual determinism, and his meta-rational and virtually ironic taste for irrational, accidental, and error-driven limits (bonds, bounds, deaths).

"Macbeth" is one of Shakespeare's most performed and studied tragedies. This major new Arden edition offers students detailed on-page commentary notes highlighting meaning and theatrical ideas and themes, as well as an illustrated, lengthy introduction setting the play in its historical, theatrical and critical context and outlining the recent debates about Middleton's possible co-authorship of some scenes.A comprehensive and informative edition ideal for students and teachers seeking to explore the play in depth, whether in the classroom or on the stage.

This bibliography will give comprehensive coverage to published commentary in English on Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition during the period from 1961-1985. Doctoral dissertations will also be included. Each entry will provide a clear and detailed summary of an item's contents. For pomes and plays based directly on classical sources like Antony and Cleopatra and The Rape of Lucrece, virtually all significant scholarly work during the period covered will be annotated. For other works such as Hamlet, any scholarship that deals with classical connotations will be annotated. Any other bibliographies used in the compiling of this volume will be described with emphasis on their value to a student of Shakespeare and the Classics.

First published in 1970, this work explores the literary genre of satire. After identifying the definitive aspects of satire, it goes on to examine the subjects which can be susceptible to satire, the modes and means of satire, the tone of satire and the satirist's relationship with the reader. In doing so, it introduces the reader to a number of key satirical writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding. This book presents a comprehensive overview the genre and provides a useful starting point for those wishing to further study satirical literature.

Twenty-two leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume to explore three closely interconnected research questions. To what extent did playwrights represent dramatis personae in their entertainments as forming, or failing to form, communal groupings? How far were theatrical productions likely to weld, or separate, different communal groupings within their target audiences? And how might such bondings or oppositions among spectators have tallied with the community-making or -breaking on stage? Chapters in Part One respond to one or more of these questions by reassessing general period trends in censorship, theatre attendance, forms of patronage, playwrights' professional and linguistic networks, their use of music, and their handling of ethical controversies. In Part Two, responses arise from detailed re-examinations of particular plays by Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Both Parts cover a full range of early-Stuart theatre settings, from the public and popular to the more private circumstances of hall playhouses, court masques, women's drama, country-house theatricals, and school plays. And one overall finding is that, although playwrights frequently staged or alluded to communal conflict, they seldom exacerbated such divisiveness within their audience. Rather, they tended toward more tactful modes of address (sometimes even acknowledging their own ideological uncertainties) so that, at least for the duration of a play, their audiences could be a community within which internal rifts were openly brought into dialogue.

Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama traces the near-simultaneous rise of economic theory, literary criticism, and public theater in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, and posits that connecting all three is a fascination with creating something out of nothing simply by acting as if it were there. Author Brian Sheerin contends that the motivating force behind both literary and economic inquiry at this time was the same basic quandary about the human imagination--specifically, how investments of belief can produce tangible consequences. Just as speculators were realizing the potency of collective imagination on economic circulation, readers and dramatists were becoming newly introspective about whether or not the 'lies' of literature could actually be morally 'profitable.' Could one actually benefit by taking certain fictions 'seriously'? Each of the five chapters examines a different dimension of this question by highlighting a particular dramatization of economic trust on the Renaissance stage, in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, and Jonson. The book fills a gap in current scholarship by keeping economic and dramatic interests rigorously grounded in early modern literary criticism, but also by emphasizing the productive nature of debt in a way that resonates with recent economic sociology.

What is the role of disgust or revulsion in early modern English literature? How did early modern English subjects experience revulsion and how did writers represent it in poetry, plays, and prose? What does it mean when literature instructs, delights, and disgusts? This collection of essays looks at the treatment of disgust in texts by Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, and others to demonstrate how disgust, perhaps more than other affects, gives us a more complex understanding of early modern culture. Dealing with descriptions of coagulated eye drainage, stinky leeks, and blood-filled fleas, among other sensational things, the essays focus on three kinds of disgusting encounters: sexual, cultural, and textual. Early modern English writers used disgust to explore sexual mores, describe encounters with foreign cultures, and manipulate their readers' responses. The essays in this collection show how writers deployed disgust to draw, and sometimes to upset, the boundaries that had previously defined acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, people, and literatures. Together they present the compelling argument that a critical understanding of early modern cultural perspectives requires careful attention to disgust.

Analyzing Shakespeare's views on theatre and magic and John Dee's concerns with philosophy and magic in the light of the Italian version of philosophia perennis (mainly Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno), this book offers a new perspective on the Italian-English cultural dialogue at the Renaissance and its contribution to intellectual history. In an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach, it investigates the structural commonalities of theatre and magic as contiguous to the foundational concepts of perennial philosophy, and explores the idea that the Italian thinkers informed not only natural philosophy and experimentation in England, but also Shakespeare's theatre. The first full length project to consider Shakespeare and John Dee in juxtaposition, this study brings textual and contextual evidence that Gonzalo, an honest old Counsellor in The Tempest, is a plausible theatrical representation of John Dee. At the same time, it places John Dee in the tradition of the philosophia perennis-accounting for what appears to the modern scholar the conflicting nature of his faith and his scientific mind, his powerful fantasy and his need for order and rigor-and clarifies Edward Kelly's role and creative participation in the scrying sessions, regarding him as co-author of the dramatic episodes reported in Dee's spiritual diaries. Finally, it connects the Enochian/Angelic language to the myth of the Adamic language at the core of Italian philosophy and brings evidence that the Enochian is an artificial language originated by applying creatively the analytical instruments of text hermeneutics used in the Cabala.

The significance of human anatomy to the most physical of art forms, the theatre, has hitherto been an under-explored topic. Filling this gap, Christian Billing questions conventional wisdom regarding the one-sex anatomical model and uses a range of medical treatises to delineate an emergent two-sex paradigm of human biology. The impact such a model had on the staging of the human form in English professional theatre is also explored in appraisals of: (i) the homo-erotic significance of a two-sex paradigm; (ii) social and theatrical cross-dressing; (iii) the uses of theatrical androgyny; (iv) masculine corporality and the representation of assertive women; and (v) the theatrical poetics of human dissection. Billing supports cultural and scientific study with close-readings of Lyly, Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Ford. The book provides a sophisticated and original analysis of the early modern stage body as a discursive site in wider debates concerning sexuality and gender.