This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

A book on the experience of reading Shakespeare's 'dark plays'. As part of the My Reading series, King Lear is a personal meditation on a great literary work. Arthur Frank brings a career of studying illness experience and suffering to consider how King Lear can aid people whose lives need help. Reading King Lear leads Frank to both an encounter with his own old age and a source of consolation-companionship-in his future. This book does not try to minimize vulnerabilities, but it shows what is fully human, and thus shared, in suffering. The book introduces readers to King Lear, and it invites those who know the play to a new consideration for its ability to affect people's lives.

The works of William Shakespeare vividly represent for our admiration and study a pageant of souls with longing in whose wake we ceaselessly follow. Through some of his most memorable characters, Shakespeare illuminates the nature and character-as well as consequences-of our distinctively human passions and ambition, in particular our desire for and pursuit of both honor and love. The contributors to this collaborative volume (scholars in English Literature, Political Philosophy, and the Humanities) argue that Shakespeare has much to teach us about our longing for honor and love in particular, and thus about who we are, what we desire, and why. Through sustained reflection on the Shakespearean portraits of honor and love, which are the focus of the chapters in Souls With Longing, we become more keenly aware of our own humanity and come to know ourselves more profoundly. As the abiding popularity of his works aptly demonstrates, Shakespeare's unforgettable portraits of souls with longing-his representations of honor and love-continue to exert undeniable sway over our political, moral, and romantic imaginations.

Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeare's involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law and well able to negotiate legal and political, even constitutional concerns, Shakespeare's theatre opened up a new perspective on normativity. His plays reflect, even create, "history" in a new sense on the premises of the older conceptions of historical and legal exemplarity: examples, cases, and instances are to be reflected rather than treated as straightforwardly didactic or salvific. Thus, what comes to be recognized, reflected and acknowledged has a disowning, alienating effect, whose enduring aftermath rather than its theatrical immediacy counts and remains effective. In Shakespeare, the law gets hold of its normativity as the problematic efficacy of unsolved -- or rarely ever completely solved -- problems: on the stage of the theatre, the law has to cope with a mortgage of history rather than with its own success story. The exemplary interplay of critical cultural and legal theory in the twentieth-century -- between Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Kantorowicz, Hans Blumenberg and Giorgio Agamben, Robert Cover and Niklas Luhmann -- found in Shakespeare's plays its speculative instruments.

Returning to Shakespeare addresses two broad areas of Shakespeare criticism: the unity of form and meaning, and the history of the plays' reception. Originally published in 1989, the collection represents the best of Brian Vickers' work from the previous fifteen years, in a revised and expanded form. The first part of the book focuses on the connection between a work's structural or formal properties and our experience of it. A new study of the Sonnets shows how personal relationships are literally embodied in personal pronouns. An essay on Shakespeare's hypocrites (Richard III, Iago, Macbeth) analyses the uncomfortable intimacy established between them and the audience by means of soliloquies and asides. Another traces the interplay between politics and the family in Coriolanus, two forms of pressure which combine to push the hero outside society. In the second part Professor Vickers examines some key episodes in the history of Shakespeare criticism. One essay reviews the persistence of drastically altered adaptations of Shakespeare on the London stage from the 1690s to the 1830s, due to the conservatism of both theatre managers and audience. Another reconstructs the debate over Hamlet's character in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in which the Romantic image of a hero lacking control of his faculties emerged for the first time. This is an important collection by an outstanding Shakespeare critic which will interest specialists and general readers alike.

The third edition of Hamlet offers a completely new introduction to this rich, mysterious play, examining Shakespeare's transformation of an ancient Nordic legend into a drama whose philosophical, psychological, political, and spiritual complexities have captivated audiences world-wide for over 400 years. Focusing on the ways in which Shakespeare re-imagined the revenge plot and its capacity to investigate the human experiences of love, grief, obligation, and memory, Heather Hirschfeld explores the play's cultural and theatrical contexts, its intricate textual issues, its vibrant critical traditions and controversies, and its history of performance and adaptation by celebrated directors, actors, and authors. Supplemented by an updated reading list, extensive illustrations and helpful appendices, this edition also features revised commentary notes explicitly designed for the student reader, offering the very best in contemporary criticism of this great tragedy.

The last quarter century has seen a "turn to religion" in Shakespeare studies as well as competing assertions by secular critics that Shakespeare's plays reflect profound skepticism and even dismissal of the truth claims of revealed religion. This divide, though real, obscures the fact that Shakespeare often embeds both readings within the same play. This book is the first to propose an accommodation between religious and secular readings of the plays. Benson argues that Shakespeare was neither a mere debunker of religious orthodoxies nor their unquestioning champion. Religious inquiry in his plays is capacious enough to explore religious orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, everything from radical belief and the need to tolerate religious dissent to the possibility of God's nonexistence. Shakespeare's willingness to explore all aspects of religious and secular life, often simultaneously, is a mark of his tremendous intellectual range. Taking the heterodox as his focus, Benson examines five figures and ideas on the margins of the post-Reformation English church: nonconforming puritans such as Malvolio as well as physical revenants-the walking dead-whom Shakespeare alludes to and features so tantalizingly in Hamlet. Benson applies what Keats called Shakespeare's "negative capability"-his ability to treat both sides of an issue equally and without prejudice-to show that Shakespeare considers possible worlds where God is intimately involved in the lives of persons and, in the very same play, a world in which God may not even exist. Benson demonstrates both that the range of Shakespeare's investigation of religious questions is more daring than has previously been thought, and that the distinction between the sacred and the profane, between the orthodox and the unorthodox, is one that Shakespeare continually engages.

Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Human Umwelt brings together research on Shakespeare, biosemiotics, ecocriticism, epigenetics and actor network theory as it explores the space between nature and narrative in an effort to understand how human bodies are stories told in the emergent language of evolution, and how those bodies became storytellers themselves. Chapters consider Shakespeare's plays and contemporary works, such as those of Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Atwood, or productions for which Shakespeare is a genetic forebear, as evolutionary artefacts which have helped to shape the human umwelt-the species-specific linguistic habitat that humans share in common. The work investigates the juncture where semisphere meets biosphere and illuminates the role that narrative plays in our construction of the world we occupy. The plays of Shakespeare, as works that have had unparalleled cultural diffusion, are uniquely situated to speak to the ways in which ideas and the texts they use as vehicles are always material, always environmental, and always alive. The book discusses Shakespeare's works as vital nodes in our cultural, historical, moral and philosophical networks, but also as environmental actors in and of themselves. Plays are presented alternately as digitally encoded bits of culture awaiting their connection to an analog world, or as bacteria interacting with living organisms in both productive and destructive ways, altering their structure and creating new meaning through movement that is simultaneously biological and poetic. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism looking to model ecocritical readings and bridge gaps between scientific, philosophical and literary thinking.

The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare is a major collaborative book about plays in performance. Thirty authoritative accounts describe in illuminating detail how some of theatre's most talented directors have brought Shakespeare's texts to the stage. Each chapter has a revealing story to tell as it explores a new and revitalising approach to the most familiar works in the English language. A must-have work of reference for students of both Shakespeare and theatre, this book presents some of the most acclaimed productions of the last hundred years in a variety of cultural and political contexts. Each entry describes a director's own theatrical vision, and methods of rehearsal and production. These studies chart the extraordinary feats of interpretation and innovation that have given Shakespeare's plays enduring life in the theatre. Notable entries include: Ingmar Bergman * Peter Brook * Declan Donnellan * Tyrone Guthrie * Peter Hall * Fritz Kortner * Robert Lepage * Joan Littlewood * Ninagawa Yukio * Joseph Papp * Roger Planchon * Max Reinhardt * Giorgio Strehler * Deborah Warner * Orson Welles * Franco Zeffirelli

From the aftermath of World War II to the convulsions of Brexit, festivals have deployed Shakespeare as a model of inclusive and progressive theatre to seek cultural solutions to Europe's multi-faceted crises. Shakespeare on European Festival Stages is the first book to chart Shakespeare's presence at continental European festivals. It examines the role these festivals play in European socio-cultural exchanges, and the impact festivals make on the wider production and circulation of staged Shakespeare across the continent. This collection offers authoritative, lively and informed accounts of the production of Shakespeare at the following festivals: the Avignon Festival and Le Printemps des comediens in Montpellier (France), the Almagro festival (Spain), Shakespeare at Four Castles (Czech Republic and Slovakia), the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova (Romania), the Shakespeare festivals in Elsinore (Denmark), Gdansk (Poland), Gyula (Hungary), Itaka (Serbia), Neuss (Germany), Patalenitsa (Bulgaria), Rome and Verona (Italy). Shakespeare on European Festival Stages is essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners interested in Shakespeare in performance, in translation and in a post-national Shakespeare that knows no borders and belongs to all of Europe.

Throughout World War II, audiences in the United Kingdom craved entertainment, even during the country's darkest days. During this period, actor-manager Donald Wolfit and his theatre troupe toured Great Britain and Europe-often at great risk. After the war, Wolfit broadened his tour, bringing his brand of Shakespearean theatre to North American audiences. Wolfit believed that theatre should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their socioeconomic origins. It was this quality above all that accounted for his huge popularity throughout the fifteen years of his operation. In Theatre of the People: Donald Wolfit's Shakespearean Productions 1937-1953, Laurence Raw looks at this tenacious personality whose determination to serve the nation by performing Shakespeare inspired audiences and fellow actors. Drawing on a series of hitherto unpublished materials-including letters and interviews-this part biography and part social history creates a vivid picture of what life was like for the touring actor during WWII and beyond. Recreating twelve of Wolfit's touring dates throughout Great Britain and North America, this volume also demonstrates theatre's importance as a source of mass entertainment and education, as well as a propaganda tool. Despite Wolfit's popular appeal at the time, he was doomed to remain on the periphery of the theatrical establishment. This book contends that Wolfit deserves to be recognized for his efforts in maintaining public morale during times of stress. Theatre of the People will appeal not only to those interested in drama but also to students and scholars of history and popular entertainment in the 1940s and 1950s.

This collection of original essays provides a selection of current criticism on the Henry VI plays. Topics addressed will include feminist commentaries on the play, the principal of unity in the trilogy, the tradition of illumination of the play, textual variations, and finally, anachronism and allegory.

'Adrian Noble vigorously highlights the extraordinary rhythmic, linguistic patterns Shakespeare gives the speaker. Any actor will find this book invaluable. For any student of Shakespeare it should be essential.' (From the Foreword by Ralph Fiennes)

'How can I bring the text alive, make it vivid, how do I make people hear it for the first time? How can I enter into that world and not feel a stranger. How can I not feel clumsy and inept? ... How can I speak it without sounding artificial or "actory"? In other words, how can I make it real ...?'

Adrian Noble has worked on Shakespeare with everyone from oscar-nominated actors to groups of schoolchildren. Here he draws on several decades of top-level directing experience to shed new light on how to bring some of theatre s seminal texts to life.

He shows you how to approach the perennial issues of performing Shakespeare, including:

• wordplay using colour and playing plain, wit and comedy, making language muscular
• building a character different strategies, using the text, Stanislavski and Shakespeare
• shape and structure headlining a speech, playing soliloquys, determining a speech s purpose and letting the verse empower you
• dialogue building tension, sharing responsibility and passing the ball .

This guided tour of Shakespeare s complex but unfailingly rewarding work stunningly combines instruction and inspiration.

In this book, Stone effects a return to gender, after many years of neglect by Twenty-First-Century critics, via a methodology of close reading that foregrounds moments of sexual decentering and disequilibrium within the text and in the interstices of the dialogue between Shakespeare and his critics. Issues addressed range from the cross dressing of Viola and Imogen to the cross gartering of Malvolio, the sound of "un" and the uncanny lyric narcissism of Richard II, Hamlet's misogyny, androgyny, and the poison of marital/political "union," Othello's fears of impotence, rumors of Antony's emasculation versus the militant yet nurturing triumphalism of Cleopatra's suicide, and Posthumus's hysterical reaction to the "woman's part" in himself and his compensatory fantasies of parthenogenesis. Stone unpacks ideologically powerful but unsustainable male claims to self-identity and sameness, set over against man's type-gendering of women as the origin of divisive sexual difference, discord, and the dissolution of marriage. Men who blame women for the difference that divides and weakens their sense of unity and sameness to oneself are unconscious that the uncanny feminine is not outside the masculine, its reassuring canny opposite; it is inside the masculine, its uncanny difference from itself.

Focusing on plays (Richard II, Henry V, and Hamlet) which appear prominently in the writing of the Irish nationalist movement of the early twentieth century, this study explores how Irish writers such as Sean O'Casey, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney, resisted English cultural colonization through a combination of reappropriation and critique of Shakespeare's work.

This collection recovers the continuities between three forms of romance that have often been separated from one another in critical discourse: early modern prose fiction, the dramatic romances staged in England during the 1570s and 1580s, and Shakespeare's late plays. Although Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest have long been characterized as "romances," their connections with the popular prose romances of their day and the dramatic romances that preceded them have frequently been overlooked. Constructed to explore those connections, this volume includes original essays that relate at least one prose or dramatic romance to an English play written from 1570 to 1630. The introduction explores the use of the term "dramatic romance" over several centuries and the commercial association between print culture, gender, and drama. Eight essays discuss Shakespeare's plays; three more examine plays by Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger. Other authors treated at some length include Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, Chaucer, Sidney, Greene, Lodge, and Wroth. Barbara Mowat's afterword considers Shakespeare's use of Greek romance. Written by foremost scholars of Shakespeare and early modern prose fiction, this book explores the vital cross-currents that occurred between narrative and dramatic forms of Greek, medieval, and early modern romance.

Impressive Shakespeare reassesses Shakespeare's relationship with "print culture" in light of his plays' engagement with the language and material culture of three interrelated "impressing technologies": wax sealing, coining, and typographic printing. It analyses the material and rhetorical forms through which drama was thought to "imprint" early modern audiences and readers with ideas, morals and memories, and-looking to our own cultural moment-shows how Shakespeare has been historically constructed as an "impressive" dramatist. Through material readings of four plays-Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale-Harry Newman argues that Shakespeare deploys the imprint as a self-reflexive trope in order to advertise the value of his plays to audiences and readers, and that in turn the language of impression has shaped, and continues to shape, Shakespeare's critical afterlife. The book pushes the boundaries of what we understand by "print culture", and challenges assumptions about the emergence of concepts now central to Shakespeare's perceived canonical value, such as penetrating characterisation, poetic transformation, and literary fatherhood. Harry Newman's suggestive analysis of techniques and tropes of sealing, coining and printing produces a revelatory account of Shakespearean creative poetics. It's sustainedly startling in its rereading of familiar lines - but the chapter I found most original is on Measure for Measure: Newman is the first critic to attempt to interpret the play's authorial status as part of its own thematic and linguistic interrogation of illegitimacy and counterfeiting. He makes authorship matter in a literary and creative, rather than a quantitative and statistical, sense. Impressive Shakespeare is a brilliant scholarly debut. - Emma Smith Editor, Shakespeare Survey Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College, Oxford

This essay collection offers a lengthy introduction describing trends in criticism and theatrical interpretation of As You Like It. Twenty-six major essays on the play, including several written especially for this volume highlight the work, coupled with twenty-three reviews of various productions, ranging from 1741 to 1919. Edward Tomarken edited this valuable collection with a contents that includes pieces by Samuel Johnson, Charles Gildon, J. Payne Collier, Denton J. Snider, Charles Wingate, Victor O. Freeburg, J.B. Priestly, Cumberland Clark, Margaret Maurer and others.

This book reviews the "playing" of Shakespeare in which there is a re-staging and a re-writing -- through adaptation, appropriation, or acculturation -- of the Western Shakespeare into the gestural, symbolic, stylized, or ritualized worlds of Asian theatre languages. It examines this interface in aesthetic, theatrical, cultural and political terms, looking at key issues in intercultural performance, how it re-configures the text, genre and gender and how it can intervene in the shaping of ethnicity, identity and postcoloniality. Contributors examine how differing cultures negotiate such encounters, and the implications of this worldwide re-playing for Shakespeare's theatre. Focusing specifically on the work of major directors in the central and emerging areas of Asia -- Japan, China, India, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines -- the chapters show how performing Shakespeare in Asia not only revitalizes indigenous theatre forms, but generates an alternate cultural capital which is exploited in the global market.

Shakespeare is now enjoying perhaps his most glorious - certainly his most popular - filmic incarnation. Indeed, the Bard has been splashed across the big screen to great effect in recent adaptations of Hamlet, Henry V, Othello, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and of course in the hugely successful Shakespeare in Love. Unlike previous studies of Shakespeare's cinematic history, Shakespeare in the Movies proceeds chronologically, in the order that plays were written, allowing the reader to trace the development of Shakespeare as an author--and an auteur--and to see how the changing cultural climate of the Elizabethans flowered into film centuries later. Prolific film writer Douglas Brode provides historical background, production details, contemporary critical reactions, and his own incisive analysis, covering everything from the acting of Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, and Gwyneth Paltrow, to the direction of Orson Welles, Kenneth Branagh, and others. Brode also considers the many films which, though not strict adaptations, contain significant Shakespearean content, such as West Side Story and Kurosawa's Ran and Throne of Blood. Nor does Brode ignore the ignoble treatment the master has sometimes received. We learn, for instance, that the 1929 version of The Taming of the Shrew (which featured the eyebrow-raising writing credit: "By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor"), opens not so trippingly on the tongue--PETRUCHIO: "Howdy Kate." KATE: "Katherine to you, mug." For anyone wishing to cast a backward glance over the poet's film career and to better understand his current big-screen popularity, Shakespeare in the Movies is a delightful and definitive guide.

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

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.

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

The Soul of Athens: Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" studies Shakespeare's portrayal of the founding of Athens through a close reading of one of the Bard's most memorable comedies. Through a painstakingly close reading of the play, author Jan H. Blits shows how Shakespeare's portrayal of this legendary first democracy illuminates the natural doubleness of the human soul by emphasizing the lure of both beauty and wisdom.A Midsummer Night's Dream is thus Shakespeare's examination not only of a particular city at a particular time, but of the essential duality of the human soul. Coupling careful attention to detail with interpretive breadth, The Soul of Athens examines the nature of love, the natural doubleness of human thinking and the ambiguous relation of image and reality, as well as patriarchy and democracy, and heroic and moral virtue.