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.

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.

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.

"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.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen provides a lively guide to film and television productions adapted from Shakespeare's plays. Offering an essential resource for students of Shakespeare, the companion considers topics such as the early history of Shakespeare films, the development of 'live' broadcasts from theatre to cinema, the influence of promotion and marketing, and the range of versions available in 'world cinema'. Chapters on the contexts, genres and critical issues of Shakespeare on screen offer a diverse range of close analyses, from 'Classical Hollywood' films to the BBC's Hollow Crown series. The companion also features sections on the work of individual directors Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Vishal Bhardwaj, and is supplemented by a guide to further reading and a filmography.

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 Norton Critical Edition of Richard III is based on the First Quarto (1597) edition of the play with interpolations from the First Folio (1623). The play is accompanied by a preface, explanatory annotations, A Note on the Text, a list of Textual Variants, and eighteen illustrations of seminal scenes from major dramatic productions and film versions of the play.

Contexts provides readers with the sources and analogues that informed Shakespeare s composition of Richard III. These include excerpts from Robert Fabyan s New Chronicles of England and France, Thomas More s The History of King Richard III, Edward Hall s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The True Tragedy of Richard III. A selection from Colley Cibber s eighteenth-century adaptation records the compromised form in which Richard III held the stage for approximately two hundred years before twentieth-century editors brought it back into recognizable shape. A representative selection of commentary on stage and film reproductions of Richard III is also provided, ranging from reviews of nineteenth-century productions by William Hazlitt and George Bernard Shaw, a survey of stage performances by Scott Colley, and in-depth analyses of twentieth-century film adaptations by Saskia Kossak, Barbara Hodgdon, and Peter S. Donaldson.

Criticism collects eight major pieces of scholarship, including early accounts of the play s major themes by William Richardson and Edward Dowden, modern critical assessments by Wilbur Sanders, Elihu Pearlman, Linda Charnes, Katherine Maus, and Ian Moulton, and an essay by Harry Berger Jr. especially commissioned for this volume.

A Selected Bibliography is also included."

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!

First published in 1982, this volume responds to the attribution of numerous plays to Shakespeare which were not his own and selects four plays which have been ascribed in whole or in part to Shakespeare by responsible, talented scholars: The Reign of King Edward III, Sir Thomas More, The History of Cardenio and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Included in the bibliography are all the books, chapters and appendices of books, articles, review articles, reviews and notices of stage productions and a limited number of the more substantial discussions dealing with the four plays and published since 1930. The bibliography is organized by play with an initial section listing items dealing with two or more plays.

Published in 1979: This is a play based on the reign of King John with notes.

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.

For this updated edition of one of Shakespeare's most problematic plays, Tom Lockwood has added a new introductory section on the latest scholarly trends, performance and adaptation practices which have occurred over the last two decades. Investigating the latest critical frames through which the play has been interpreted, the updated introduction also focuses on recent international performances on stage and screen (including Al Pacino's performances on film and in Daniel Sullivan's production in New York, the Habima National Theatre's production for the Globe to Globe Festival, Jonathan Munby's touring production for the Globe performed in London, New York and Venice, and Rupert Goold's production for the Royal Shakespeare Company). Finally, new forms of adaptation are considered: a performance transposed to the different generic mode of a New York auction room, and the remaking of the play in Howard Jacobson's 2016 novel, Shylock Is my Name.

"Sources" helps readers navigate King Lear's rich history and includes the nine essential primary sources from which Shakespeare borrowed significantly in creating his play, along with two additional likely sources. "Criticism"provides thirteen major critical interpretations and three provocative adaptations and responses to King Lear. Critical interpretation is provided by Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, Peter Brook, Michael Warren, Lynda E. Boose, Janet Adelman, and R. A. Foakes, among others. The adaptations and responses are by Nahum Tate, John Keats, and Edward Bond. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of "Much Ado About Nothing" on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right. Each No Fear Shakespeare contains

• The complete text of the original play
• A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday language
• A complete list of characters with descriptions
• Plenty of helpful commentary