Read Shakespeare’s plays in all their brilliance—and understand what every word means!

Don’t be intimidated by Shakespeare! These popular guides make the Bard’s plays accessible and enjoyable.

Each No Fear guide contains:

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

The Shakespeare Book is the perfect primer to the works of William Shakespeare, packed with witty illustrations and inspirational quotes.

This bold book covers every work, from the comedies of Twelfth Night and As You Like It to the tragedies of Julius Caesar and Hamlet, plus lost plays and less well-known works of poetry. Easy-to-understand graphics and illustrations bring the themes, plots, characters and language of Shakespeare to life, including illustrated timelines which offer an at-a-glance summary of the action for each play. With detailed plot summaries and an in-depth analysis of the major characters and themes, this is a brilliant, innovative exploration of the entire canon of Shakespeare plays, sonnets and poetry.

Whether you're a Shakespeare scholar or a student of the great Bard, The Shakespeare Book offers a fuller appreciation of his phenomenal talent and lasting legacy.

Shakespeare everyone can understand--now in new DELUXE editions! Why fear Shakespeare? By placing the words of the original play next to line-by-line translations in plain English, these popular guides make Shakespeare accessible to everyone. They introduce Shakespeare's world, significant plot points, and the key players. And now they feature expanded literature guide sections that help students study smarter, along with links to bonus content on the Sparknotes.com website. A Q&A, guided analysis of significant literary devices, and review of the play give students all the tools necessary for understanding, discussing, and writing about Othello. The expanded content includes: Five Key Questions: Five frequently asked questions about major moments and characters in the play. What Does the Ending Mean?: Is the ending sad, celebratory, ironic . . . or ambivalent? Plot Analysis: What is the play about? How is the story told, and what are the main themes? Why do the characters behave as they do? Study Questions: Questions that guide students as they study for a test or write a paper. Quotes by Theme: Quotes organized by Shakespeare's main themes, such as love, death, tyranny, honor, and fate. Quotes by Character: Quotes organized by the play's main characters, along with interpretations of their meaning.

An introductory guide to "King Lear" in performance offering a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key productions, a survey of film and TV adaptations, a sampling of critical opinion and annotated further reading.

From Shakespeare's Hamlet to Burton's Anatomy to Hilliard's miniatures, melancholy has long been associated with the emotional life of Renaissance England. But what other forms of sadness existed alongside, or even beyond, melancholy, and what kinds of selfhood did they help create? Beyond Melancholy explores the vital distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow, despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul. While most medical and philosophical writings emphasized the physiological and moral dangers of the 'dis-ease' of sadness, warning that in its most extreme form it could damage the body and even cause death, new Protestant teachings about the nature of devotion and salvation suggested that sadness could in fact be a positive, even transformative, experience, helping to humble believers' souls and bring them closer to God. The result of such dramatically conflicting paradigms was a widespread ambiguity about the value of sadness and a need to clarify its significance through active and wilful interpretation - something this book calls 'emotive improvisation'. Drawing on a wide range of Renaissance medical, philosophical, religious, and literary texts - including, but not limited to, moral treatises on the passions, medical text books, mortality records, doctors' case notes, sermons, theological tracts, devotional and elegiac poetry, letters, life-writings, ballads, and stage-plays - Beyond Melancholy explores the emotional codes surrounding the experience of sadness and the way writers responded to and reinterpreted them. In doing so it demonstrates the value of working across source materials too often divided along disciplinary lines, and the special importance of literary texts to the study of the emotional past.

What happens when we engage with fictional characters? How do our imaginative engagements bear on our actions in the wider world? Moving between the literary and the philosophical, Sophie Ratcliffe considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling. On Sympathy uses dramatic monologues based on The Tempest as its focus, and broaches questions about fictional belief, morality, and the dynamics between readers, writers, and fictional characters. The book challenges conventionally accepted ideas of literary identification and sympathy, and asks why the idea of sympathy has been seen as so important to liberal humanist theories of literary value. Individual chapters on Robert Browning, W. H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett, who all drew on Shakespeare's late play, offer new readings of some major works, while the book's epilogue tackles questions of contemporary sympathy. Ranging from the nineteenth century to the present day, this important new study sets out to clarify and challenge current assumptions about reading and sympathetic belief, shedding new light on the idea and ideal of sympathy, the workings of affect and allusion, and the ethics of reading.

Paul Hammond explores how sexual relationships between men were represented in English literature during the seventeenth century. Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester is built around two principal themes: firstly the literary strategies through which writers created imagined spaces for the expression of homosexual desire; and secondly the ways in which such texts were subsequently edited and adapted to remove these references to sex between men. The author begins with a wide-ranging analysis of the forms in which both homosexual desire and homophobic hatred were expressed in the period, focusing on the problems of defining male relationships, the erotic dimension to male friendships, and the uses of classical settings. Subsequent chapters offer four case studies. The first focuses on how Shakespeare adapted his sources to introduce the possibility of sexual relations between male characters, with special attention to Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and the Sonnets, and shows how these elements were removed in later adaptations of his plays and poems. Subsequent chapters chart the often satirical representation of homosexual rulers from James I to William III; the ambiguous sexuality figured in the poetry of Andrew Marvell; and the libertine homoeroticism of the poetry of the Earl of Rochester. Paul Hammond draws on a wide range of poems, plays, letters, and pamphlets, and discusses a substantial amount of previously unknown material from both printed and manuscript sources.

No Hamlets is the first critical account of the role of Shakespeare in the intellectual tradition of the political right in Germany from the founding of the Empire in 1871 to the 'Bonn Republic' of the Cold War era. In this sustained study, Andreas Hoefele begins with Friedrich Nietzsche and follows the rightist engagement with Shakespeare to the poet Stefan George and his circle, including Ernst Kantorowicz, and the literary efforts of the young Joseph Goebbels during the Weimar Republic, continuing with the Shakespeare debate in the Third Reich and its aftermath in the controversy over 'inner emigration' and concluding with Carl Schmitt's Shakespeare writings of the 1950s. Central to this enquiry is the identification of Germany and, more specifically, German intellectuals with Hamlet. The special relationship of Germany with Shakespeare found highly personal and at the same time highIy political expression in this recurring identification, and in its denial. But Hamlet is not the only Shakespearean character with strong appeal: Carl Schmitt's largely still unpublished diaries of the 1920s reveal an obsessive engagement with Othello which has never before been examined. Interest in German philosophy and political thought has increased in recent Shakespeare studies. No Hamlets brings historical depth to this international discussion. Illuminating the constellations that shaped and were shaped by specific appropriations of Shakespeare, Hoefele shows how individual engagements with Shakespeare and a whole strand of Shakespeare reception were embedded in German history from the 1870s to the 1950s and eventually 1989, the year of German reunification.

This introductory guide to "Othello" in performance offers a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key productions, a survey of screen adaptations, a sampling of critical opinion and further reading.

In 1589 the Privy Council encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take steps to control the theatres, which had offended authority by putting on plays which addressed 'certen matters of Divinytie and of State unfitt to be suffred'.
How had questions of divinity and state become entangled? The Reformation had invested the English Crown with supremacy over the Church, and religious belief had thus been transformed into a political statement. In the plentiful chronicle literature of the sixteenth-century, questions of monarchical legitimacy and religious orthodoxy became intertwined as a consequence of that demand for a usable national past created by the high political developments of the 1530s.
Divinity and State explores the consequences of these events in the English historiography and historical drama of the sixteenth century. It is divided into four parts. In the first, the impact of reformed religion on narratives of the national past is measured and described. Part II examines how the entanglement of the national past and reformed religion was reflected in historical drama from Bale to the early years of James I, and focuses on two paradigmatic characters: the sanctified monarch and the martyred subject. Part III considers Shakespeare's history plays in the light of the preceding discussion, and finds that Shakespeare's career as a historical dramatist shows him eventually re-shaping the history play with great audacity. Part IV corroborates this reading of Shakespeare's later history plays by reference to the dramatic ripostes they provoked.

Editors of Shakespeare's Complete Works must decide what to include. Although not in the First Folio collection of 1623, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III have now entered the canon as plays co-authored by Shakespeare. Determining the Shakespeare Canon makes the case for lifting Arden of Faversham, first published in 1592, over the same threshold. A wealth of evidence indicates that Shakespeare was wholly or largely responsible for several of its central scenes (constituting Act III in editions divided into acts), and that the domestic tragedy can thus be added to the mounting list of his dramatic collaborations. Shakespeare's beginnings as a playwright are due for reconsideration. The second half of this volume provides solid grounds for accepting that publisher Thomas Thorpe's inclusion of A Lover's Complaint within the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare Sonnets was justified. While A Lover's Complaint has long been part of the Shakespeare canon, according to most editors, the poem's authenticity has been vigorously challenged in recent years. Its status is crucial to how critics assess the authority of the quarto's ordering of sonnets and interpret the structure of the sequence as a whole. These two problems of attribution are each addressed in five separate chapters that describe the converging results of different approaches and rebut counter-arguments. Stylometric techniques, using the resources of computers and electronic databases, are applied and the research methodologies of other scholars explained and evaluated. Quantitative tests are supplemented with traditional literary-critical analysis.

This "York Notes Companion "brings Renaissance drama to life by considering such classic plays as "Hamlet," "Othello" and "Dr Faustus "from the perspective of contemporary theatre-goers.

This "York Notes Companion "brings Renaissance drama to life by considering such classic plays as "Hamlet," "Othello" and "Dr Faustus "from the perspective of contemporary theatre-goers.

• Part of the first literature study guides to cover key literary periods and texts and combine them with historical and cultural contexts
• Contains essential information on relevant literary criticism
• Dr Hugh Mackay is an experienced lecturer who has also written extensively in the field
• Contains various helpful features such as extented commentaries, additional notes, timelines and annotated further reading
  

The Face of Mammon studies the gold and silver coins of sixteenth-century England as they are articulated in literary writing. Landreth argues that the coinage of the sixteenth century is a very different object from the money that we know-- not only formally but conceptually, in that modern money is the object proper to a discourse, economics, that had not yet taken shape in the sixteenth century. Instead, a Renaissance coin is an arena contested among multiple early modern discourses that each seek to encompass it, such as ontology, ethics, and politics. The writers central to this study--among them Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, and Donne--use the coin to demonstrate the interdependence of these competing discourses as they converge upon a single, ubiquitous object. For these authors, an understanding of the world that humans make for themselves relies upon understanding how the material world is made. The small circumference of the coin brings these contending worlds into contact.

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to help students track their learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping students to reach their potential.

Shakespeare's late plays are usually seen in terms of courtliness and escapism. But the critical tradition has been too decorous. Neither neo-Christian pieties nor high-political allegory can account for the works' audacity and surprise, or the popular investment in both their form and meaning. Post-structuralist and historicist approaches show the indeterminacy and materiality of language, but rarely identify how particular figures (words and characters) capture and energise contested history. Recent criticism tends to put a pre-emptive `master-paradigm' above all else; a more sinuous, minutely attentive critical vocabulary is needed to apprehend Shakespeare's turbulent, precise, teeming metaphorical discourse. Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words reappraises the origins of authority, language, and decorum, and the prospects for each. Through his portrayal of `popular' desire--in his rustics, clowns, rogues, slaves, women--Shakespeare presents worlds which explore the meaning of the `subject', and the potential for effective transformatory agency. Rather than a Jonsonian (or perhaps earlier Shakespearian) verisimilitude, with each person discrete and verifiable, Shakespeare's characters embody metaphor-in-process; like the revamped romance genre itself, they `take on' surrounding turbulence. The plays show the stormy consequences of hegemonic violence. The subsequent exile to wilderness allows for contingent novelty: new liberties are tested amid the wreckage or recapitulation of old forms. The plays pit possible sources of regeneration (romantic pastoral, semi-populist humanism) against more primal violence and rebelliousness. Finally, the book argues against a conventional sense of the plays' movement towards divinely sanctioned closure; mischief, irony, polysemy remain; romance's political problems are competitive, multiple, and tumescently unpredictable.

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of Othello on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right. Each No Fear Shakespeare containsThe complete text of the original playA line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday languageA complete list of characters with descriptionsPlenty of helpful commentary

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools - poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities - to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders. Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour - and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe.