Who had the greatest last words, and what were they? Who enjoyed the slowest, most tedious death? Who had it coming more than anyone else? From the celebrated comedy ensemble SpyMonkey and acclaimed illustrator Chris Riddell, this hilariously morbid (and informative!) trump card game has players testing their knowledge while having a lark with everyone's favorite Shakespearean construct: the amazing deaths!

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG --------------------- Enter BERTRAM, the COUNTESS OF ROUSILLON, HELENA, and LAFEU, all in black COUNTESS. In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband. BERTRAM. And I in going, madam, weep o'er my father's death anew; but I must attend his Majesty's command, to whom I am now in ward, evermore in subjection. LAFEU. You shall find of the King a husband, madam; you, sir, a father. He that so generally is at all times good must of necessity hold his virtue to you, whose worthiness would stir it up where it wanted, rather than lack it where there is such abundance.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The quality of mercy is not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven' Bassiano, a noble Venetian, hopes to woo the beautiful heiress Portia. However, he requires financial assistance from his friend Antonio. Antonio agrees, but he, in turn, must borrow from the Jewish moneylender Shylock. As recourse for past ills, Shylock stipulates that the forfeit on the loan must be a pound of Antonio's flesh. In the most renowned onstage law scene of all time, Portia proves herself one of Shakespeare's most cunning heroines, disguising herself as a lawyer and vanquishing Shylock's claims; meanwhile, Shylock triumphs on a humanitarian level with his plea for tolerance: 'Hath not a Jew eyes?' Viewed paradoxically as anti-Semitic, while at the same time powerfully liberal for its time, The Merchant of Venice is at its core a bittersweet drama, exploring the noble themes of prejudice, justice and honour.

Currently in its seventeenth year and formerly published by Ashgate, The Shakespearean International Yearbook surveys the present state of Shakespeare studies, addressing issues that are fundamental to our interpretive encounter with Shakespeare's work and his time, across the whole spectrum of his literary output. Contributions are solicited from among the most active and insightful scholars in the field, from both hemispheres of the globe. New trends are evaluated from the point of view of established scholarship, and emerging work in the field encouraged, to present a view of what is happening all around the world. Each issue includes a special section under the guidance of a specialist Guest Editor, as well as a review of recent critical work in Shakespeare studies. An essential reference tool for scholars of early modern literature and culture, this annual captures, from year to year, current and developing thought in Shakespeare scholarship and theater practice worldwide.

William Shakespeare's As You Like It, the incredible story about love, rebellion, and generosity, now presented by the Folger Shakespeare Library with valuable new tools for educators and dynamic new covers. Readers and audiences have long greeted As You Like It with delight. Its characters are brilliant conversationalists, including the princesses Rosalind and Celia and their Fool, Touchstone. Soon after Rosalind and Orlando meet and fall in love, the princesses and Touchstone go into exile in the Forest of Arden, where they find new conversational partners. Duke Frederick, younger brother to Duke Senior, has overthrown his brother and forced him to live homeless in the forest with his courtiers, including the cynical Jaques. Orlando, whose older brother Oliver plotted his death, has fled there, too. The authoritative edition of As You Like It from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes: -The exact text of the printed book for easy cross-reference -Hundreds of hypertext links for instant navigation -Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play -Full explanatory notes conveniently linked to the text of the play -Scene-by-scene plot summaries -A key to the play's famous lines and phrases -An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language -An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play -Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books -An annotated guide to further reading -An essay by a leading Shakespeare expert

"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 tragi-comedy is one of the plays we know Shakespeare worked with a collaborator on -- John Fletcher -- and is based on Chaucer's "Knight's Tale." The Arden Third series edition was first published in 1996. This revised edition includes a new introductory essay bringing the edition up-to-date in terms of both the play's performance and critical history, and in particular with current thinking about the nature of Shakespeare's collaboration with other playwrights. As scholars have begun to discover more about this aspect of his career, interest in the play has grown. This revised edition is ideal for undergraduate study, offering on-page annotations to the play text as well as a lengthy, illustrated introduction.

The complete play is translated into plain English! 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun'! This title presents the tragic tale of doomed love, set in Verona, Italy, where the Montagues and the Capulets constantly feud and bring unrest to the city. So how could love possibly survive between this pair of star-crossed lovers, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet? Only Shakespeare could take such a romantic story and turn it into a soul-searching tragedy.

Shakespeare, The Movie brings together an impressive line-up of contributors to consider how Shakespeare has been adapted on film, TV, and video, and explores the impact of this popularization on the canonical status of Shakespeare.
Taking a fresh look at the Bard an his place in the movies, Shakespeare, The Movie includes a selection of what is presently available in filmic format to the Shakespeare student or scholar, ranging across BBC television productions, filmed theatre productions, and full screen adaptations by Kenneth Branagh and Franco Zeffirelli. Films discussed include:
* Amy Heckerling's Clueless
* Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho
* Branagh's Henry V
* Baz Luhrman's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
* John McTiernan's Last Action Hero
* Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books
* Zeffirelli's Hamlet.

Casual Shakespeare is the first full-length study of the thousands of quotations both in and of Shakespeare's works which represent intertextuality outside of what is conventionally appreciated as literary value. Drawing on the insights gained as a result of a major, ongoing Digital Humanities project, this study posits a historical continuum of casual quotation which informs Shakespeare's own works as well as their afterlives. In this groudbreaking, rigorous analysis, Dr. Regula Trillini offers readers a new approach and understanding of the use and impact quotes like the infamous, 'To be or not to be,' have had througout literary history.

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare's plays alongside contemporaneous conduct literature - how-to books on self-improvement - this book demonstrates the ways that the pursuit of personal improvement was accomplished by the simultaneous stigmatization of particular kinds of difference. The widespread belief that one could better, or cultivate, oneself through proper conduct was coupled with an equally widespread belief that certain markers (including but not limited to "blackness"), indicated an inability to conduct oneself properly, laying the foundation for what we now call "racism." A careful reading of Shakespeare's plays reveals a recurring critique of the conduct system voiced, for example, by malcontents and social climbers like Iago and Caliban, and embodied in the struggles of earnest strivers like Othello, Bottom, Dromio of Ephesus, and Dromio of Syracuse, whose bodies are bruised, pinched, blackened, and otherwise indelibly marked as uncultivatable. By approaching race through the discourse of conduct, this volume not only exposes the epistemic violence toward stigmatized others that lies at the heart of self-cultivation, but also contributes to the broader definition of race that has emerged in recent studies of cross-cultural encounter, colonialism, and the global early modern world.

Race may dominate everyday speech, media headlines and public policy, yet still questions of racialized blackness and whiteness in Shakespeare are resisted. In his compelling new book Ian Smith addresses the influence of systemic whiteness on the interpretation of Shakespeare's plays. This far-reaching study shows that significant parts of Shakespeare's texts have been elided, misconstrued or otherwise rendered invisible by readers who have ignored the presence of race in early modern England. Bringing the Black American intellectual tradition into fruitful dialogue with European thought, this urgent interdisciplinary work offers a deep, revealing and incisive analysis of individual plays, including Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. Demonstrating how racial illiteracy inhibits critical practice, Ian Smith provides a necessary anti-racist alternative that will transform the way you read Shakespeare.

"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.

This volume presents a contrastive study of the overlapping careers of Shakespeare and Caravaggio through the comparison of their strikingly similar conventional belief in symbol and the centrality of the subject, only to gradually open it up in an exaltation of multiplicity and the "indistinct regard" (Othello). Utilizing a methodological premise on the notions of early modern indistinction and multiplicity, Shakespeare, Caravaggio, and the Indistinct Regard analyses the survival of English art after iconoclasm and the circulation of Italian art and motifs, methodologically reassessing the conventional comparison between painting and literature. The book examines Caravaggio's and Shakespeare's works in the perspective of the gradual waning of symbolism, the emergence of chiaroscuro and mirror imagery underneath their radically new concepts of representation, and the triumph of multiplicity and indistinction. Furthermore, this work assesses the validity of the twin concepts of multiplicity and indistinction as an interpretive tool in a dialectical interplay with much recent work on indeterminacy in literary criticism and the sciences.

One of a series on Shakespeare's original texts, including facsimile pages, this version of "Henry V" is claimed to be, in some ways, the most authentic version of the play that we have. Included are an introduction, notes, and a theoretical, historical and contextual critique. The original text - or First Quarto - of "Henry V", published in 1600, is missing the Chorus, a dramatic device which recent criticism has used to suggest a strikingly modern view of history and politics. These and other significant changes mean that critics can no longer assume that the play presents a distanced, ironic perspective on its own political and military action. If Elizabethan audiences saw in performance something closer to the First Folio than the 1623 Folio text, then their dramatic engagement with history was of a kind very different from that of the play's 20th-century interpreters. This new edition makes available the original text of "Henry V", in all its theatrical simplicity and historical difference.

* This is the first book on acting Shakespeare that incorporates modern clown techniques and historically informed performance principles in a way that synthesizes well with contemporary acting technique. * This book is pragmatic and clear for the 21st-century actor and director. All of the information is explained in a manner that can be easily translated into acting choices through a conventional rehearsal process. * The case study section presents several interpretive examples that show how the principles and techniques presented in this book can be used selectively and in concert to create a role.

Originally published in 1981. This study concentrates on one aspect of Victorian theatre production in the second half of the nineteenth century - the spectacular, which came to dominate certain kinds of production during that period. A remarkably consistent style, it was used for a variety of dramatic forms, although surrounded by critical controversy. The book considers the theories and practice of spectacle production as well as the cultural and artistic movements that created the favourable conditions in which spectacle could dominate such large areas of theatre for so many years. It also discusses the growth of spectacle and the taste of the public for it, examining the influence of painting, archaeology, history, and the trend towards realism in stage production. An explanation of the working of spectacle in Shakespeare, pantomime and melodrama is followed by detailed reconstructions of the spectacle productions of Irving's Faust and Beerbohm Tree's King Henry VIII.

In recent years the twin themes of travel and translation have come to be regarded as particularly significant to the study of early modern culture and literature. Traditional notions of 'The Renaissance' have always emphasised the importance of the influence of continental, as well as classical, literature on English writers of the period; and over the past twenty years or so this emphasis has been deepened by the use of more complicated and sophisticated theories of literary and cultural intertextuality, as well as broadened to cover areas such as religious and political relations, trade and traffic, and the larger formations of colonialism and imperialism. The essays collected here address the full range of traditional and contemporary issues, providing new light on canonical authors from More to Shakespeare, and also directing critical attention to many unfamiliar texts which need to be better known for our fuller understanding of sixteenth-century English literature. This volume makes a very particular contribution to current thinking on Anglo-continental literary relations in the sixteenth century. Maintaining a breadth and balance of concerns and approaches, Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century represents the academic throughout Europe: essays are contributed by scholars working in Hungary, Greece, Italy, and France, as well as in the UK. Arthur Kinney's introduction to the collection provides an North American overview of what is perhaps a uniquely comprehensive index to contemporary European criticism and scholarship in the area of early modern travel and translation.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.