Raphael Holinshed's account of English history from 1377-1485 in the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland is most well-known as the source of Shakespeare's English history plays. Although the Chronicles are widely read and studied, published scholarly opinion, with a few exceptions, has been limited to the discipline of history. This book explores the historiographic materials of the Chronicles through a literary lens, focusing on how Renaissance men and women read historical texts, framed by these questions: How did Holinshed understand and view history? What were his motives in composing the Chronicles? What did sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English readers learn from the work? Igor Djordjevic explores both the lexical and semantic dimensions as well as lessons in both foreign and domestic policy in the 1577 and 1587 texts and in writers who used or appropriated the Chronicles, including Shakespeare, Daniel, Heywood, and Milton. This study revaluates our understanding of Renaissance chronicle history and the impact of Holinshed on Tudor, Jacobean, and Caroline political discourse; the Chronicles emerge not as a series of rambling, digressive episodes characteristic to a dying medieval genre, but as the preserver of national memory, the teacher of prudent policy, and a builder of the commonwealth ideal.

Brings a fresh and contemporary approach to study of classic texts and plays so will appeal to students Easy to adapt to courses as looks at canonical plays which are frequently studied (Hamlet, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice) Written in a personal and accessible style so easy for readers of all levels to understand The author has a high media profile and is well-known and well-connected in the area, as well as being an award-winning academic

The playwrights composing for the London stage between 1580 and 1642 repeatedly staged plays-within and other metatheatrical inserts. Such works present fictionalized spectators as well as performers, providing images of the audience-stage interaction within the theatre. They are as much enactments of the interpretive work of a spectator as of acting, and as such they are a potential source of information about early modern conceptions of audiences, spectatorship and perception. This study examines on-stage spectatorship in three plays by Philip Massinger, head playwright for the King's Men from 1625 to 1640. Each play presents a different form of metatheatrical inset, from the plays-within of The Roman Actor (1626), to the masques-within of The City Madam (1632) to the titular miniature portrait of The Picture (1629), moving thematically from spectator interpretations of dramatic performance, the visual spectacle of the masque to staged 'readings' of static visual art. All three forms present a dramatization of the process of examination, and allow an analysis of Massinger's assumptions about interpretation, perception and spectator response.

For fans of the Bard is a deluxe box set of our three classic Shakespeare mini books: William Shakespeare: The Complete Plays in One Sitting, Shakespeare: The Bard's Guide to Abuses and Affronts, and Love Sonnets of Shakespeare. With this collection, readers will have access to comprehensive summaries of each of Shakespeare's 36 famous plays, the most eloquent of Shakespeare's insults, and love sonnets to woo the most sought-after lover. The publication of this box set coincides with the BBC's Shakespeare Project 2016, which celebrates the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.

Shakespeare and Wales offers a 'Welsh correction' to a long-standing deficiency. It explores the place of Wales in Shakespeare's drama and in Shakespeare criticism, covering ground from the absorption of Wales into the Tudor state in 1536 to Shakespeare on the Welsh stage in the twenty-first century. Shakespeare's major Welsh characters, Fluellen and Glendower, feature prominently, but the Welsh dimension of the histories as a whole, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline also come in for examination. The volume also explores the place of Welsh-identified contemporaries of Shakespeare such as Thomas Churchyard and John Dee, and English writers with pronounced Welsh interests such as Spenser, Drayton and Dekker. This volume brings together experts in the field from both sides of the Atlantic, including leading practitioners of British Studies, in order to establish a detailed historical context that illustrates the range and richness of Shakespeare's Welsh sources and resources, and confirms the degree to which Shakespeare continues to impact upon Welsh culture and identity even as the process of devolution in Wales serves to shake the foundations of Shakespeare's status as an unproblematic English or British dramatist.

Idioms of Self-Interest uncovers an emerging social integration of economic self-interest in early modern England by examining literary representations of credit relationships in which individuals are both held to standards of communal trust and rewarded for risk-taking enterprise. Drawing on women's wills, merchants' tracts, property law, mock testaments, mercantilist pamphlets and theatrical account books, and utilizing the latest work in economic theory and history, the book examines the history of economic thought as the history of discourse. In chapters that focus on The Merchant of Venice, Eastward Ho!, and Whitney's Wyll and Testament, it finds linguistic and generic stress placed on an ethics of credit that allows for self-interest. Authors also register this stress as the failure of economic systems that deny self-interest, as in the overwrought paternalistic systems depicted in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. The book demonstrates that Renaissance interpretive formations concerning economic behaviour were more flexible and innovative than appears at first glance, and it argues that the notion of self-interest is a coherent locus of interpretation in the early seventeenth century.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's bleakest and most profound tragedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of King Lear in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with three leading directors - Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner and Trevor Nunn - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

Contributors to this collection delve into the relationship between Rome and Shakespeare. They view the presence of Rome in Shakespeare's plays not simply as an unquestioned model of imperial culture, or a routine chapter in the history of literary influence, but rather as the problematic link with a distant and foreign ancestry which is both revered and ravaged in its translation into the terms of the Bard's own cultural moment. During a time when England was engaged in constructing a rhetoric of imperial nationhood, the contributors demonstrate that Englishmen used Roman history and the classical heritage to mediate a complex range of issues, from notions of cultural identity and gender to the representation of systems of exchange with Otherness in the expanding ethnic space of the nation. This volume addresses matters of concern not only for Shakespeare scholars but also for students interested in issues connected with gender, postcolonialism and globalization. Drawing implicitly or explicitly on recent criticism (intertextual studies, postcolonial theory, Derrida's conceptualization of hospitality, gender studies, global studies) the essayists explore how the Roman Shakespeare of an emerging early modern empire asks questions of our present as well as of our past.

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

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, with marginal notes and explanations and full descriptions of each character.

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

These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss, consume.

When Romeo first lays eyes on the bewitching Juliet, it's love at first sight. But though their love runs true and deep, it is also completely forbidden. With family and fate determined to keep them apart, will Romeo and Juliet find a way to be together?

William Shakespeare's masterpiece is one of the most enduring stories of star-crossed love of all time. Beautifully presented for a modern teen audience with both the original play and a prose retelling of the beloved story, this is the must-have edition of a timeless classic.

Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism examines Shakespeare in relation to ongoing conversations that interrogate the vulnerability of Black and brown people amid oppressive structures that aim to devalue their worth. By focusing on the way these individuals are racialized, politicized, policed, and often violated in our contemporary world, it casts light on dimensions of Shakespeare's work that afford us a better understanding of our ethical responsibilities in the face of such brutal racism. Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism is divided into seven short chapters that cast light on contemporary issues regarding racism in our day. Some salient topics that these chapters address include the murder of unarmed Black men and women, the militarization of the U.S. Mexico border, anti-immigrant laws, exclusionary measures aimed at Syrian refugees, inequities in healthcare and safety for women of color, international trends that promote white nationalism, and the dangers of complicity when it comes to racist paradigms. By bringing these contemporary issues into conversation with a wide range of plays that span the many genres in which Shakespeare wrote throughout his career, these chapters demonstrate how the widespread racism and discord within our present moment stands to infuse with urgent meaning Shakespeare's attention to the (in)humanity of strangers, the ethics of hospitality, the perils of insularity, abuses of power, and the vulnerability of the political state and its subjects. The book puts into conversation Shakespeare with present-day events and cultural products surrounding topics of race, ethnicity, xenophobia, immigration, asylum, assimilation, and nationalism as a means of illuminating Shakespeare's cultural and literary significance in relation to these issues. It should be an essential read for all students of literary studies and Shakespeare.

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.

'By far the best edition of King Lear - in respect of both textual and other matters - that we now have.' John Lyon, English Language Notes 'This volume is a treasure-trove of precise information and stimulating comments on practically every aspect of the Lear-universe. I know of no other edition which I would recommend with such confidence: to students, professional colleagues and also the 'educated public'.' Dieter Mehl, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol 134

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

Part of Prufrock's new series for the upper level classroom, Advanced Placement Classroom: Hamlet allows teachers to take a fresh approach on one of Shakespeare's most famous plays, by moving beyond basic history and memorization of quotes. Students will study cultural variations of the Hamlet story, recreate the tale's events in a news show format, rewrite scenes using modern-day perspectives, and create their own blogs to discuss the play's relationship to contemporary life. The author also provides easy-to-use discussions of Shakespeare's life and times and the ways Hamlet can be studied from a critical perspective. Prufrock's new line of innovative teaching guides is designed to engage students with creative learning activities that ensure Advanced Placement success. The Teaching Success Guide for the Advanced Placement Classroom series helps teachers motivate students above and beyond the norm by introducing investigative, hands-on activities including debates, role-plays, experiments, projects, and more, all based on Advanced Placement and college-level standards for learning. Grades 7-12

David Farley-Hills argues that Shakespeare did not work in splendid isolation, but responded as any other playwright to the commercial and artistic pressures of his time. In this book he offers an interpretation of seven of Shakespeare's plays in the light of pressures exerted by his major contemporary rivals. The plays discussed are Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Othello, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, and King Lear.

The Self-Centred Art is a study of the plays of Ben Jonson and the actors who first performed in them. Jakub Boguszak shows how the idiosyncrasies of Jonson's comic characters were thrown into relief in actors' part-scripts-scrolls containing a single actor's lines and cues-some five hundred of which are reconstructed here from Jonson's seventeen extant plays. Reading Jonson's spectating parts, humorous parts, apprentice parts, and plotting parts, Boguszak argues that the kind of self-absorption which defines so many of Jonson's famous comic creations would have come easily to actors relying on these documents. Jonson's actors would have moreover worked on their cues, studied their speeches, and thought about the information excluded from their parts differently, depending on the type they had to play. Boguszak thus shows that Jonson brilliantly adapted his comedies to the way the actors worked, making the actors' self-centredness serve his art. This book addresses Jonson's dealings with the actors as well as the printers of his plays and supplements the discussion of different types of parts with a colourful range of case studies. In doing so, it presents a new way of understanding not just Ben Jonson, but early modern theatre at large.

In Cymbeline, Ancient Britain's female heir to the throne is slandered by a decadent Italian while the Romans invade Britain to retain it as part of their empire. Shakespeare's late romance is full of unpredictable conjunctions that are explored in the comprehensive introduction to this new, fully-illustrated Arden edition. Valerie Wayne takes a transformative look at the play's critical and performance history by examining its attention to gender, calumny and sexuality together with nationhood, colonialism and British identities. The authoritative play text is amply annotated to clarify its language and allusions, and three appendices delineate the play's textual history, its rich use of music and its casting. Offering students and scholars alike a wealth of insight and new research, this edition maintains the rigorous standards of the Arden Shakespeare.

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

First published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Bringing together some of the best current practitioners of historical and formal criticism, Reading Renaissance Ethics assesses the ethical performance of renaissance texts as historical agents in their time and in ours.

Exploring the nature and mechanics of cultural agency, the book explains with greater clarity just what is at stake when canon-formation, aesthetic evaluation and curricular reform are questioned and revised. Taking seriously the question of what to read requires us to consider exactly what it is that we do when we read and when we write about our reading. Reading Renaissance Ethics asks what sorts of events took place when Renaissance texts were first read and how this differs from the way we read and teach them now.

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 75 is 'Othello'. 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.

"Presentist Shakespeares "constitutes the first extended exposition and exploration of the principles and the practice of presentism. Although an emphasis on history or historical context has been very important in recent Shakespeare scholarship, no critic is able to make direct contact with a past uncontaminated by their own contemporary concerns. By the same token, all experience of the present is moulded by the past. "Presentism," as elaborated in this volume, takes account of the never-ending dialogue between past and present, scrupulously seeking out salient aspects of the present as a crucial trigger for its investigations and arguing that an intrusive, shaping awareness of ourselves deserves our closest attention.
The distinguished team of contributors to this volume demonstrate the way in which presentist readings make possible a fuller engagement with the ironies generated by our inescapable involvement in time. These ironies, the contributors argue, are a fruitful, necessary and inescapable aspect of any text's being, which also function as agents of change, flowing unstoppably back into the events of the past, coloring how we perceive them, modifying our sense of what they signify. In respect of Shakespeare, they point to shades of implication suddenly available here and now within the wide range of plays examined, subtly challenging, changing and adding to our sense of what they are able to tell us. Perhaps, it is suggested, they offer the only effective purchase on these texts that we are able to make.
Presentist criticism is an open-ended and on-going project, located at a particularly interesting and demanding juncture in modern Shakespeare studies. Its boundariesremain to be defined. It is envisaged, however, that the new essays of this collection will establish a landmark: one which reflects, develops and even rejoices in this indeterminacy.