First published in 1951. The edition reprints the second, updated, edition, of 1977. When first published this book quickly established itself as the standard survey of Shakespeare's imagery considered as an integral part of the development of Shakespeare's dramatic art. By illustrating, through the use of examples the progressive stages of Shakespeare's use of imagery, and in relating it to the structure, style and subject matter of the plays, the book throws new light on the dramatist's creative genius. The second edition includes a new preface and an up-to-date bibliography.

First published in 1961. This study analyses Shakespeare's treatment of the universal themes of Beauty, Love and Time. He compares Shakespeare with other great poets and sonnet writers - Pindar, Horace and Ovid, with Petrarch, Tasso and Ronsart, with Shakespeare's own English predecessors and contemporaries, notably Spenser, Daniel and Drayton and with John Donne. By discussing their resemblances and differences, a not altogether orthodox picture of Shakespeare's attitude to life is presented, which suggests that he was not as phlegmatic and equable a person as critics have often supposed.

This unique study investigates the ways in which the staging convention of direct address - talking to the audience - can construct selfhood, for Shakespeare's characters. By focusing specifically on the relationship between performer and audience, Talking to the Audience examines what happens when the audience are in the presence of a dramatic figure who knows they are there. It is a book concerned with theatrical illusion; with the pleasures and disturbances of seeing 'characters' produced in the moment of performance.
Through analysis of contemporary productions Talking to the Audience serves to demonstrate how the study of recent performance helps us to understand both Shakespeare's cultural moment and our own. Its exploration of how theory and practice can inform each other make this essential reading for all those studying Shakespeare in either a literary or theatrical context.

This unique study investigates the ways in which the staging convention of direct address - talking to the audience - can construct selfhood, for Shakespeare's characters. By focusing specifically on the relationship between performer and audience, Talking to the Audience examines what happens when the audience are in the presence of a dramatic figure who knows they are there. It is a book concerned with theatrical illusion; with the pleasures and disturbances of seeing 'characters' produced in the moment of performance.
Through analysis of contemporary productions Talking to the Audience serves to demonstrate how the study of recent performance helps us to understand both Shakespeare's cultural moment and our own. Its exploration of how theory and practice can inform each other make this essential reading for all those studying Shakespeare in either a literary or theatrical context.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This eye-opening study draws attention to the largely neglected form of the early modern prologue. Reading the prologue in performed as well as printed contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann take us beyond concepts of stability and autonomy in dramatic beginnings to reveal the crucial cultural functions performed by the prologue in Elizabethan England. While its most basic task is to seize the attention of a noisy audience, the prologue's more significant threshold position is used to usher spectators and actors through a rite of passage. Engaging competing claims, expectations and offerings, the prologue introduces, authorizes and, critically, straddles the worlds of the actual theatrical event and the 'counterfeit' world on stage. In this way, prologues occupy a unique and powerful position between two orders of cultural practice and perception. Close readings of prologues by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Peele and Lyly, demonstrate the prologue's role in representing both the world in the play and playing in the world. Through their detailed examination of this remarkable form and its functions, the authors provide a fascinating perspective on early modern drama, a perspective that enriches our knowledge of the plays' socio-cultural context and their mode of theatrical address and action.

In this book, renowned Renaissance drama critic Arthur F. Kinney argues that Shakespeare's method of composing plays through networks of meanings can be seen as a harbinger of today's information technology. Drawing upon hypertext and cognitive theory--areas that have for some time promised to take on more importance in the sphere of Shakespeare Studies--as well as the central metaphor of the Routledge collection The Renaissance Computer, Kinney looks in detail at four objects/images in Shakespeare's plays--mirrors, maps, clocks, and books--and explores the ways in which they make up networks of meaning within single plays and across the dramatist's body of work that anticipate in some ways the networks of meaning or "information" now possible in the computer age.

The One-Hour Shakespeare series is a collection of abridged versions of Shakespeare's plays, designed specifically to accommodate both small and large casts. This volume, The Tragedies, includes the following plays: Hamlet Julius Caesar Macbeth Othello Romeo and Juliet These accessible and versatile scripts are supported by: an introduction with emphasis on the evolution of the series and the creative process of editing; the One-Hour projects in performance, a chapter on implementing money-saving ideas and suggestions for production, whether in or outside a classroom setting; specific lesson plans to incorporate these projects successfully into an academic course; and cross-gender casting suggestions. These supplementary materials make the plays valuable not only for actors, directors and professors, but for any environment, cast or purpose. Ideal for both academics and professionals, One-Hour Shakespeare is the perfect companion to teaching and staging the most universally read and performed playwright in history.

Published in 1908, this book considers the work of William Shakespeare. Providing notes and commentaries on some of his poems and plays, as well as context from English history, and analysis from his contemporaries and successors, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger, this book will be an interesting read for those interested in his work.

Merely Players? marks a groundbreaking departure in Shakespeare studies by giving direct voice to the Shakespearean performer. It draws on three centuries worth of actors' written reflections on playing Shakespeare and brings together the dual worlds of performance and academia, providing a unique resource for the student and theatre-lover alike.

For nearly three centuries, actors have set down in print their reflections on the experience of performing Shakespeare's plays, resulting in a vast, heterogeneous and - remarkably - almost entirely unexamined body of material. Merely Players? brings together the diverse voices of actors writing about their experiences of playing Shakespeare, exploring the ways in which they discuss their embodiment with the performance and their own particular negotiations with the authority and tradition of the Shakespeare name. It should be useful for scholars of Shakespeare, drama and theatre studies, practitioners and theatre-lovers alike.

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

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.

This volume is a collection of all-new original essays covering everything from feminist to postcolonial readings of the play as well as source queries and analyses of historical performances of the play. The Merchant of Venice is a collection of seventeen new essays that explore the concepts of anti-Semitism, the work of Christopher Marlowe, the politics of commerce and making the play palatable to a modern audience. The characters, Portia and Shylock, are examined in fascinating detail. With in-depth analyses of the text, the play in performance and individual characters, this book promises to be the essential resource on the play for all Shakespeare enthusiasts.

Including twenty-one groundbreaking chapters that examine one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies. Othello:Critical Essays explores issues of friendship and fealty, love and betrayal, race and gender issues, and much more.

One of the most intense and painful of our human passions, shame is typically seen in contemporary culture as a disability or a disease to be cured. Shakespeare's ultimately positive portrayal of the emotion challenges this view. Drawing on philosophers and theorists of shame, Shame in Shakespeare analyzes the shame and humiliation suffered by the tragic hero, providing not only a new approach to Shakespeare but a committed and provocative argument for reclaiming shame.
The volume provides:
· an account of previous traditions of shame and of the Renaissance context
· a thematic map of the rich manifestations of both masculine and feminine shame in Shakespeare
· detailed readings of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear
· an analysis of the limitations of Roman shame in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus
· a polemical discussion of the fortunes of shame in modern literature after Shakespeare.
The book presents a Shakespearean vision of shame as the way to the world outside the self. It establishes the continued vitality and relevance of Shakespeare and offers a fresh and exciting way of seeing his tragedies.

One of the most intense and painful of our human passions, shame is typically seen in contemporary culture as a disability or a disease to be cured. Shakespeare's ultimately positive portrayal of the emotion challenges this view. Drawing on philosophers and theorists of shame, Shame in Shakespeare analyses the shame and humiliation suffered by the tragic hero, providing not only a new approach to Shakespeare but a committed and provocative argument for reclaiming shame.
The volume provides:
· an account of previous traditions of shame and of the Renaissance context
· a thematic map of the rich manifestations of both masculine and feminine shame in Shakespeare
· detailed readings of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear
· an analysis of the limitations of Roman shame in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus
· a polemical discussion of the fortunes of shame in modern literature after Shakespeare.
The book presents a Shakespearean vision of shame as the way to the world outside the self. It establishes the continued vitality and relevance of Shakespeare and offers a fresh and exciting way of seeing his tragedies.

The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most perfectly realized tragicomedy, as notable for its tragic intensity as for its comic grace and, throughout, for the richness and complexity of its poetry. It concludes, moreover, with the most daring and moving reconciliation scene in all Shakespeare's plays. Though the title may suggest an escapist fantasy, recent criticism has seen in the play a profoundly realistic psychology and a powerful commentary on the violence implicit in family relationships and deep, longlasting friendships. Stephen Orgel's edition considers the play in relation to Renaissance conceptions of both dramatic genre and the family, traced the changing critical and theatrical attitudes towards it, and places its psychological and dramatic conflicts within the Jacobean cultural and political context. The commentary pays special attention to the play's linguistic complexity, and the edition also includes a complete reprint of Shakespeare's source, Pandosto, by Robert Greene.

Starting from the early modern presumption of the incorporation of role with authority, Jean Lambert explores male teachers as representing and engaging with types of authority in English plays and dramatic entertainments by Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth century. This book examines these theatricalized portraits in terms of how they inflect aspects of humanist educational culture and analyzes those ideas and practices of humanist pedagogy that carry implications for the traditional foundations of authority. Teachers in Early Modern English Drama is a fascinating study through two centuries of teaching Shakespeare and his contemporaries and will be a valuable resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, writing, and culture.

How do performances of Shakespeare change the meanings of the plays?
In this controversial new book, Sarah Werner argues that the text of a Shakespeare play is only one of the many factors that give a performance its meaning. By focusing on The Royal Shakespeare Company, Werner demonstrates how actor training, company management and gender politics fundamentally affect both how a production is created and the interpretations it can suggest.
Werner concentrates particularly on:
The influential training methods of Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg
The history of the RSC Women's Group
Gale Edwards' production of The Taming of the Shrew
She reveals that no performance of Shakespeare is able to bring the plays to life or to realise the playwright's intentions without shaping them to mirror our own assumptions.
By examining the ideological implications of performance practices, this book will help all interested in Shakespeare's plays to explore what it means to study them in performance.

The link between psychoanalysis as a mode of interpretation and Shakespeare's works is well known. But rather than merely putting Shakespeare on the couch, Philip Armstrong focuses on the complex and fascinatingly fruitful mutual relationship between Shakespeare's texts and psychoanalytic theory. He shows how the theories of Freud, Rank, Jones, Lacan, Erikson, and others are themselves in a large part the product of reading Shakespeare.
Armstrong provides an introductory cultural history of the relationship between psychoanalytic concepts and Shakespearean texts. This is played out in a variety of expected and unexpected contexts, including:
*the early modern stage
*Hamlet and The Tempest *Freud's analytic session
*the Parisian intellectual scene
*Hollywood
*the virtual space of the PC

The link between psychoanalysis as a mode of interpretation and Shakespeare's works is well known. But rather than merely putting Shakespeare on the couch, Philip Armstrong focuses on the complex and fascinatingly fruitful mutual relationship between Shakespeare's texts and psychoanalytic theory. He shows how the theories of Freud, Rank, Jones, Lacan, Erikson, and others are themselves in a large part the product of reading Shakespeare.
Armstrong provides an introductory cultural history of the relationship between psychoanalytic concepts and Shakespearean texts.
This is played out in a variety of expected and unexpected contexts, including:
*the early modern stage
*Hamlet and The Tempest
*Freud's analytic session
*the Parisian intellectual scene
*Hollywood
*the virtual space of the PC.

Shakespeare's works are now performed for an increasingly diversified cultural market. At the start of the twenty-first century, film, video and live performance have overtaken the printed book as the main ways in which people are introduced to Shakespeare. Therefore, is there any reason to ask people to read Shakespeare's plays anymore?
The essays in this volume explore this question and the institutional practices that shape contemporary performances of Shakespeare's plays. The book gathers together a particularly strong line-up of contributors from across the literary-performative divide to examine the relationship between Shakespeare, the 'culture industries', modernism and live performance.

'It reads as freshly today as it did fifty years ago, when it surprised everyone with its originality and daring, an intriguing blend of personal insight and solid detective-work. If ever a word-book deserved to be called a classic, it is this.' - David Crystal

Shakespeare's works are now performed for an increasingly diversified cultural market. At the start of the twenty-first century film, video and live performance have overtaken the printed book as the main ways in which people are introduced to Shakespeare. Therefore, is there any reason to ask people to read Shakespeare's plays anymore?
The essays in this volume explore this question and the institutional practices that shape contemporary performances of Shakespeare's plays. The book gathers together a particularly strong line-up of contributors from across the literary-performative divide to examine the relationship between Shakespeare, the 'culture industries', modernism and live performance.