A new section of the Introduction to this updated edition considers important professional theater productions and the large output of scholarly criticism on the play which have appeared in recent years. The Reading List has been revised and augmented to reflect the scope of the revised edition. First Edition Hb (1985): 0-521-22194-3 First Edition Pb (1985): 0-521-29389-8

With an Introduction by Tim Cook. Shakespeare's sonnets have an intensity of both feeling and meaning unmatched in English sonnet form. They divide into two parts; the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a fair youth for whom the poet has an obsessive love and the second chronicles his love for the notorious 'Dark Lady'. In addition to the sonnets, this volume includes Shakespeare's two lengthy narrative poems on classical themes, The Rape of Lucrece which looks forward to the dark imagery of Macbeth, and Venus and Adonis which mixes ribaldry and tragedy in unique Shakespearean manner. The Phoenix and the Turtle is a beautiful metaphysical and allegorical short elegy, and takes its place with Shakespeare's better-known poetry.

Written by a team of leading international scholars, this Companion is designed to illuminate Shakespeare's works through discussion of the key topics of Shakespeare studies. Twenty-one essays provide lively and authoritative approaches to recent scholarship and criticism for readers keen to expand their knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare. The book contains stimulating chapters on traditional topics such as Shakespeare's biography and the transmission of his texts. Individual readings of the plays are given in the context of genre as well as through the cultural and historical perspectives of race, sexuality and gender, and politics and religion. Essays on performance survey the latest digital media as well as stage and film. Throughout the volume, contributors discuss Shakespeare in a global as well as a national context, a dramatist with a long and constantly mutating history of reception and performance.

A fresh look at a play usually regarded as the first component of a three-part historical epic, this edition argues that Henry VI Part 1 is a 'prequel', a freestanding piece that returns for ironic and dramatic effect to a story already familiar to its audience. The play's ingenious use of stage space is closely analysed, as is its manipulation of a series of setpiece combats to give a coherent syntax of action. Discussion of the dramatic structure created by the opposing figures of Talbot and Jeanne la Pucelle, and exploration of the critical controversies surrounding the figure of Jeanne, lead to a reflection on the nature of the history play as genre in the 1590s.

The entire play translated into plain English! "The course of true love never did run smooth;" With its mix of real people who stumble into a fairy kingdom (with it's own problems!) it's little wonder that this play is one of the best loved and most performed of all Shakespeare's masterpieces.

First published in 1978, this book represents a study of the ways in which Shakespeare exploits the possibilities of metaphor. In a series of studies ranging from the early to the mature Shakespeare, the author concentrates on metaphor as a controlling structure - the extent to which a certain metaphoric idea informs and organises the drama. These studies turn constantly to the relations between symbol and metaphor, literal and figurative, and examine key plays such as Richard III, King John, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus. They also provide a key to The Tempest which is analysed in terms of power and possession - the dominant motif.

The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts--and ghost writing. In "Shakespeare's Ghost Writers, " Marjorie Garber begins with an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghostwritten. Garber asks what is at stake in the imputation that "Shakespeare" did not write the plays and argues that the plays themselves both thematize and theorize that controversy.

Canadians have enjoyed a long history of encounters with Shakespeare, from the visual arts to creative new adaptations, from traditional and nontraditional interpretations to distinguished critical scholarship. We have in over two centuries remade Shakespeare in ways that are distinctly Canadian. The Oxford Shakespeare Made in Canada series offers a unique vantage on these histories of production and encounter with attention to accessibility and presentation. These editions explore how a given country can inform the interpretation and pedagogy associated with individual plays. Canadians, or more properly British North Americans from both Upper and Lower Canada, have been interacting with Shakespeare since no less than the 1760s in a tradition that is at once rich and robust, indigenous and international. The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare project at the University of Guelph has created a multimedia database of hundreds of adaptations, developed from Guelph's world-class theatre archives and a host of independent sources that reflect on a long tradition - from pre-Confederation times and heading vibrantly into the future - of playing Shakespeare in Canada.These are the first editions of the plays of William Shakespeare to place key insights from the world's best scholarship alongside the specific contexts associated with a dynamic Canadian tradition of productions and adaptations. Specially research images, never printed before, from a range of Canadian productions of Shakespeare will be featured in every play In additional to a scholarly edition of the playtext complete with original new annotation, these books will include both short introductions by noted scholars and prefaces by well-known Canadians who have experience with Shakespeare. In addition, each play will include act and scene summaries, dramatis personal, and recommended reading/resources.

'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

Shakespeare has made the big time. No less than the Beatles or Liberace, Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger, Shakespeare is big-time in the idiomatic sense of cultural success and widespread notoriety. Not only has he achieved canonical status, Shakespeare is a contemporary celebrity. His artistic distinction and aptitude for controversy constantly keeps his name in the public eye.
Bristol debates Shakespeare's cultural authority, and clarifies the semantics of his name in our culture. Big-Time Shakespeare suggests his plays represent the pathos of our civilisation with extraordinary force and clarity. Shakespeare's contradictory understanding of the social and cultural past is also examined with close analysis of The Winter's Tale, Othello, and Hamlet.

Shakespeare has made the big time in the idiomatic sense of cultural success and widespread notoriety. Other literary figures may achieve canonical status within the academic community based on claims for artistic distinction, but Shakespeare is unusual in that he has also achieved contemporary celebrity. His aptitude for controversy constantly keeps his name in the public eye. Bristol discusses the supply side of cultural producation and argues that Shakepeare retains his authority, at least in part, because suppliers of cultural goods have been skilful at generating a social desire for products that bear his trademark and in creating merchandise to satisfy that desire. This book suggests that his plays represent the pathos of our civilization with extraordinary force and clarity. His characters remain interesting because we recognize what they are going through. Shakespeare's contradictory understanding of the social and cultural past is also examined through readings of The Winter's Tale, Othello and Hamlet. Bristol attempts to bridge the gap between conservative demands for unreflective affirmation of the ideals and achievements of Western civilisation.

(Applause Books). This Applause edtiion allows the reader and student to look beyond the scholarly reading text to the more sensuous, more collaborative, more malleable performance text which emerges in conjunction with the commentary and notes. Readers and students are faced with real theatrical choices in each speech as the editors point out the challenges and opportunities to the actor and director at each juncture. Readers will not only discover an enlivened Shakespeare, they will be empowered to rehearse and direct their own productions of the imagination in the process.

Reading Shakespeare Historically is a passionate, provocative book by one of the most renowned and popular Renaissance scholars writing today. Charting ten years of critical development, these challenging, witty essays shed new light on Renaissance studies. It also raises intriguing questions about how the culture and history of the past illuminates the key social and political issues of today. Lisa Jardine re-reads Renaissance drama in its historical and cultural context, from laws of defamation in Othello to the competing loyalties of companionate marriage and male friendship in The Changeling. In doing so she reveals a wealth of new insights, sometimes surprising but always original and engrossing. At the same time, these essays also provide a fascinating account of the rise of feminist scholarship since the 1980s and the diversifying of new historicist' approaches over the same period.

Reading Shakespeare Historically will fascinate and provoke students of shakespeare and his historical age, and general readers with an urge to understand how the culture and history of our past illuminates the key scoial and political issues of today.

Contents:
Introduction 1. `Why should he call her whore?': Defamation and Desdemona's case 2. `No offence i' th' world': Unlawful marriage in Hamlet 3. Cultural confusion and Shakespeare's learned heroines: `These are old paradoxes' 4. Twins and travesties: Gender, dependency and sexual availability in Twelfth Night 5. Reading and the technology of textual affect Eramus's familiar letters and Shakespeare's King Lear 6. Alien intelligence: Mercantile exchange and knowledge transactions in Marlowe's Jew of Malta 7. Companionate marriage versus male friendship: Anxiety for the lineal family in Jacobean drama Coda: Unpicking the tapestry - The scholar of women's history as Penelope among her suitors Conclusion: What happens in Hamlet? Notes

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of "Richard III" 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

A knowledge of the history and evolution of the tales on which Shakespeare drew in the composition of his plays is essential for the understanding of his work. In re-telling a particular story, a Renaissance writer was not simply reshaping the structure of the narrative but participating in a species of debate with earlier writers and the meanings their tales had accrued. The stories upon which Shakespeare's plays are constructed did not descend to him as innocent collections of incidents, but brought with them considerable cultural baggage, substantially lost to the modern spectator but an essential component, for a contemporary audience, of the meaning of the work.Shakespeare's Alternative Tales explores this literary dialogue, focusing on those plays in which the expectations generated by an inherited story are in some way overthrown, setting up a tension for a Renaissance spectator between 'received' and 'alternative' readings of the text. Each chapter opens with a familiar story, supplying a context for the subsequent discussion, and exhibits the way in which the dramatist's reworking of a traditional motif interrogates the assumptions implicit in his source.While offering the twentieth-century reader a fresh perspective from which to view the plays, the approach also supplies an introduction to contemporary readings of the Shakespearean canon. The tales Leah Scragg considers may be seen as 'alternative' in more than one sense: they radically rework conventional situations, while lending themselves to analysis in terms of new critical methodologies.The text will be of interest to both students of Shakespeare and the general reader. In conjunction with the author's companion volume, Shakespeare's Mouldy Tales, it provides an ideal introduction to contemporary developments in source studies.

The first in a series on Shakespeare's original texts, including facsimile pages, this version of "Hamlet" 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. This text has been rejected by scholars as a "bad Quarto" - corrupt and pirated text printed without the permission of the playwright or his company. Nonetheless, it was the first version of the play to be published and it has been produced in the modern theatre with success. This new edition of that Quarto seeks to acknowledge the play's distinctive poetic and dramatic qualities, instead of comparing them unfavourably to one of the other versions.

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of Macbeth provides a thorough reconsideration of one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. In his introduction, A. R. Braunmuller explores Macbeth's immediate theatrical and political contexts, particularly the Gunpowder Plot, and addresses such celebrated questions as: do the Witches compel Macbeth to murder; is Lady Macbeth herself in some sense a witch; is Macduff morally culpable? A new and well-illustrated account of the play in performance examines several cinematic versions, such as those by Kurosawa and Roman Polanski, as well as other dramatic adaptations. Several possible new sources are suggested and the presence of Thomas Middleton's writing in the play is also proposed.

Originally published in 1984. The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a time of considerable change in the English theatre. Victorian attitudes were shocked or shattered by the new drama of Ibsen; the major figure of George Bernard Shaw dominated the period; theatre censorship was the subject of a long and furious contest; and staging conventions changed from the spectacular stylings of Irving and Beerbohm Tree to the masking and statuesque styles of Isadora Duncan and the inner realism of Stanislavsky. This book traces the activities of the leading figures in the English theatre, notably William Archer who introduced Ibsen to this country and who became one of the main promoters of the idea of a National Theatre. Other personalities discussed include Harley Granville Barker, particularly his association with Shaw at the Court Theatre and his part in campaigns against censorship and for changes in the staging of Shakespeare, and Edward Gordon Craig, whose rebellion against the Victorian theatre took and anti-realist direction. This is a stimulating account of the background to the modern English theatre which can only increase appreciation of its standard and variety.

Originally published in 1978. Henry Irving achieved an astounding success in Britain and America as an actor; yet he lacked good looks, had spindly legs, and did not have a good voice. He said so himself. Today Irving is regarded as the archetype of the old-time actor, but in his own time he was regarded as a great theatrical innovator. Even Bernard Shaw, who attacked him pitilessly, even unto death, called him 'modern' when he first saw him act. Irving, the man, with his tenacious, obsessive talent, his human limitations and weaknesses, and his ephemeral glory is brought most sympathetically to life in this biography. It is written from contemporary sources, and from criticisms, lampoons, caricatures and gossip columns. If Irving reflected certain aspects of his age, this book underlines the Victorian ethic to which he appealed and the backcloths against which it was set - the extraordinary lavishness of the Lyceum productions and the incredible extravagance of social entertaining. Not the least absorbing aspect of this biography is the fascinating account of the long partnership between Irving and Ellen Terry, still in many respects an enigmatic one, but here portrayed with lively insight into character combined with understanding and deep knowledge of the social and theatrical context of the Victorian age.

Originally published in 1971. Nineteenth-century theatre in England has been greatly neglected, although serious study would reveal that the roots of much modern drama are to be found in the experiments and extravagancies of the nineteenth-century stage. The essays collected here cover a range of topics within the world of Victorian theatre, from particular actors to particular theatres; from farce to Byron's tragedies, plus a separate section about Shakespearean productions.

Though representations of alien languages on the early modern stage have usually been read as mocking, xenophobic, or at the very least extremely anxious, listening closely to these languages in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Marianne Montgomery discerns a more complex reality. She argues instead that the drama of the early modern period holds up linguistic variety as a source of strength and offers playgoers a cosmopolitan engagement with the foreign that, while still sometimes anxious, complicates easy national distinctions. The study surveys six of the European languages heard on London's commercial stages during the three decades between 1590 and 1620-Welsh, French, Dutch, Spanish, Irish and Latin-and the distinct sets of cultural issues that they made audible. Exploring issues of culture and performance raised by representations of European languages on the stage, this book joins and advances two critical conversations on early modern drama. It both works to recover English relations with alien cultures in the period by looking at how such encounters were staged, and treats sound and performance as essential to understanding what Europe's languages meant in the theater. Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 contributes to our emerging sense of how local identities and global knowledge in early modern England were necessarily shaped by encounters with nearby lands, particularly encounters staged for aural consumption.

Reviews of the First Edition
`...valuable and enjoyable reading for all studying Shakespeare's plays.'
Following in the patternestablished by John Russell Brown for the excellent series (Theatre and Production Studies), he provides first an account of Shakespeare's company, then a study of three individual plays Twelfth Night, Hamlet and Macbeth as performed by the company. Peter Thomson writes in a crisp, sharp, enlivening style.' TLS
'`...the best analysis yet of Elizabethan acting practices, excavated form the texts themselves rather than reconstructed on basis of one monolithic theory, and an essay on Hamlet that is a model of Critical intelligence and theatrical invention.' Yearbook of English Studies
`Synthesizes the important facts and summarizes projects with a vigorous prose style, and expertly applies his experience in both practical drama and academic teaching to his discussion.' Review of English Studies

Professor Hussey looks at the vocabulary, syntax and register of Renaissance English, following this with a more detailed analysis of particular kinds of language in the plays such as prose, verse, rhetoric and the soliloquy. For this new edition, the text has been revised throughout with, in particular, a completely new chapter providing detailed readings of selected plays, illustrating the ways particular aspects of language can be studied in practice.