Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences brings together the voices of those who make productions of Shakespeare come to life. It shines a spotlight on the relationship between actors and audiences and explores the interplay that makes each performance unique. We know much about theatre in Shakespeare's time but very little about the audiences who attended his plays. Even today the audience's voice remains largely ignored. This volume places the role of the audience at the centre of how we understand Shakespeare in performance. Part One offers an overview of the best current audience research and provides a critical framework for the interviews and testimony of leading actors, theatre makers and audience members that follow in Part Two, including Juliet Stevenson and Emma Rice. Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences offers a fascinating insight into the world of theatre production and of the relationship between actor and audience that lies at the heart of theatre-making.

Shakespeare's Last Plays was the first of E. M. W. Tilyard's influential works on Shakespeare. In it, Dr Tilyard argues that the last plays - Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest - develop patterns found in the earlier works. He shows how Shakespeare intertwines reconciliation (the final phase of the tragedies) with an awareness of possible worlds (where the 'natural' and supernatural have equal status), and concludes that The Tempest, by subordinating his tragic pattern, is his greatest achievement.

Hamlet is one of the best known works of English literature throughout the world, and its central character one of Shakespeare's most recognisable and enduring creations. Hamlet's first critics in the seventeenth century were, however, concerned with the play's apparent lack of decorum, whilst the Romantics revelled in the melancholy prince's isolation. Caught between a dead father and a remarried mother, Hamlet inevitably provided scope for Freud and the psychoanalytic writers of the twentieth century. The play has retained its fascination for more recent critics and every new interpretation provides fuel for further study. In this Guide, Huw Griffiths traces the history of the play's criticism from the 1660s through to the present day. Readers are provided with substantial excerpts from all the key critical readings - including accounts of the interaction between film versions and critical interpretations. Griffiths places each reading of the play within its own historical context and within the history of literary criticism, offering both students and teachers an approachable introduction to the critical fortunes of this most influential text.

First published in 2002. This is Volume II of the collected works of G.Wilson Knight and this revised looks at the Shakespearian Tempest and includes a Chart of Shakespeare's Dramatic Universe.

That Shakespeare thematized time thoroughly, almost obsessively, in his plays is well established: time is, among other things, a 'devourer' (Love's Labour's Lost), one who can untie knots (Twelfth Night), or, perhaps most famously, simply 'out of joint' (Hamlet). Yet most critical commentary on time and Shakespeare tends to incorporate little focus on time as an essential - if elusive - element of stage praxis. This book aims to fill that gap; Wagner's focus is specifically performative, asking after time as a stage phenomenon rather than a literary theme or poetic metaphor. His primary approach is phenomenological, as the book aims to describe how time operates on Shakespearean stages. Through philosophical, historiographical, dramaturgical, and performative perspectives, Wagner examines the ways in which theatrical activity generates a manifest presence of time, and he demonstrates Shakespeare's acute awareness and manipulation of this phenomenon. Underpinning these investigations is the argument that theatrical time, and especially Shakespearean time, is rooted in temporal conflict and 'thickness' (the heightened sense of the present moment bearing the weight of both the past and the future). Throughout the book, Wagner traces the ways in which time transcends thematic and metaphorical functions, and forms an essential part of Shakespearean stage praxis.

First published in 2002. This book is a collection of essays on the interpretation of Shakespeare's final plays and includes works on Pericles, A Winter's Tale; Cymbeline, The Tempest and Henry VIII.

Why do Shakespeare and the English Bible seem to have an inherent relationship with each other? How have these two monumental traditions in the history of the book functioned as mutually reinforcing sources of cultural authority? How do material books and related reading practices serve as specific sites of intersection between these two textual traditions? This collection makes a significant intervention in our understanding of Shakespeare, the Bible, and the role of textual materiality in the construction of cultural authority. Departing from conventional source study, it questions the often naturalized links between the Shakespearean and biblical corpora, examining instead the historically contingent ways these links have been forged. The volume brings together leading scholars in Shakespeare, book history, and the Bible as literature, whose essays converge on the question of Scripture as source versus Scripture as process -- whether that scripture is biblical or Shakespearean -- and in turn explore themes such as cultural authority, pedagogy, secularism, textual scholarship, and the materiality of texts. Covering an historical span from Shakespeare's post-Reformation era to present-day Northern Ireland, the volume uncovers how Shakespeare and the Bible's intertwined histories illuminate the enduring tensions between materiality and transcendence in the history of the book.

This book surveys Shakespeare's comedies, charting the influence upon them of the ancient playwrights, Plautus and Terence. Robert S. Miola analyses these sources, and places the comedies in their Renaissance context, as well as in the larger context of European theatre. Discovering new indebtedness, and discerning new patterns in previously attested borrowings, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy presents an integrated and comprehensive assessment of the complex interactions of the Classical, Shakespearean, and other Renaissance theatres. Robert S. Miola re-evaluates Plautus and Terence in the light of their Greek antecedents, and gives special attention to Renaissance translations and commentaries, Italian theorists, and playwrights, as well as contemporary dramatists such as Middleton, Jonson, Heywood, and Chapman. Four broad categories organize the discussion - New Comedic errors, intrigue, alazoneia (pretension), and romance - and each is illustrated by illuminating readings of individual Shakespearean plays. The author keeps in view Shakespeare's eclecticism, his habit of combining disparate sources and traditions, as well as the rich history of literary criticism and theatrical interpretation. The book concludes by discussing the presence of New Comedy in tragedy, in Hamlet and King Lear. Robert S. Miola's thoroughly researched book ranges over a vast amount of European drama, from Aristophanes to Beckett and Ionesco. It makes an important contribution to our understanding not only of Shakespeare and his foremost antecedents, but also of Renaissance theatre, and its complex adaptations of ancient texts and traditions.

What do audiences do as they watch a Shakespearean play? What makes them respond in the ways that they do? This book examines a wide range of theatrical productions to explore the practice of being a modern Shakespearean audience. It surveys some of the most influential ideas about spectatorship in contemporary performance studies, and analyses the strategies employed both in the texts themselves and by modern theatre practitioners to position audiences in particular ways.

First published in 2002. This is the final Volume IV of the five G. Wilson Knight collected works series and focuses on Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism together with related essays and indexes to earlier volumes. The emphasis in this volume is the shift from Shakespeare as the poet of England to Shakespeare as the poet of royalism, in a wide sense.

First Published in 2002. Part of the G.Wilson Knight collection, the essays included in this volume constitute a fairly consistent record of his attempts over a period of some forty years to explore the deeper significances of Shakespearian poetry and drama.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This 14-volume set contains titles originally published between 1926 and 1992. An eclectic mix, this collection examines Shakespeare's work from a number of different perspectives, looking at history, language, performance and more it includes references to many of his plays as well as his sonnets.

Originally published in 1989, this book focuses on the handling of the relationship between the onstage world and the offstage world, between the world that Shakespeare shows us and the one he tells us about. It is developed in two parts. Initially examined is the way reports are used in Shakespeare to relate the offstage and onstage worlds, building from simple examples within individual scenes in various plays to related sequences of reports which can be evaluated as part of broader strategies effecting the structure of a whole play. In the second part the author examines the ways in which several, or all, of these strategies work in individual plays, and what combined effect the prominent employment of them has in shaping the effect of the plays. In all cases the author is concerned to indicate why Shakespeare chose to handle matters as he does rather than in other ways available in the sources or in the speculative alternative methods which can be imaginatively constructed.

Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance examines how contemporary performances of Shakespeare's texts on stage and screen engage with violent events and histories. The book attempts to account for - but not to rationalize - the ongoing and pernicious effects of various forms of violence as they have emerged in selected contemporary performances of Shakespeare's texts, especially as that violence relates to apartheid, colonization, racism, homophobia and war. Through a series of wide-ranging case studies, which are informed by debates in Shakespeare, trauma and performance studies and developed from extensive archival research, the book examines how performances and their documentary traces work variously to memorialize, remember and witness violent events and histories. In the process, Silverstone considers the ethical and political implications of attempts to represent trauma in performance, especially in relation to performing, spectatorship and community formation. Ranging from the mainstream to the fringe, key performances discussed include Gregory Doran's Titus Andronicus (1995) for Johannesburg's Market Theatre; Don C. Selwyn's New Zealand-made film, The Maori Merchant of Venice (2001); Philip Osment's appropriation of The Tempest in This Island's Mine for London's Gay Sweatshop (1988); and Nicholas Hytner's Henry V (2003) for the National Theatre in London.

Can reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare contribute to the health of the planet? To what degree are Shakespeare's plays anthropocentric or ecocentric? What is the connection between the literary and the real when it comes to ecological conduct? This collection, engages with these pressing questions surrounding ecocritical Shakespeare, in order to provide a better understanding of where and how ecocritical readings should be situated. The volume combines multiple critical perspectives, juxtaposing historicism and presentism, as well as considering ecofeminism and pedagogy; and addresses such topics as early modern flora and fauna, and the neglected areas of early modern marine ecology and oceanography. Concluding with an assessment of the challenges-and necessities-of teaching Shakespeare ecocritically, Ecocritical Shakespeare not only broadens the implications of ecocriticism in early modern studies, but represents an important contribution to this growing field.

The 'infinite variety' of Shakespeare's Roman plays is reflected in the diversity of critical commentary to which they have given rise. Originally published in 1989, the distinguishing feature of this study is that it endeavours to convey a clear idea of the relationship between the characters and events in Shakespeare's plays and the main narrative sources on which the four Roman plays are based, while simultaneously undertaking a critical analysis of the plays through the perspective of Shakespeare's Roman worlds, particularly the creation and operation of the value system. Hence these plays are perceived as political plays, histories and tragedies.

Originally published in 1926, this title was edited from a series of lectures the author gave to raise money for her theatre group the Lena Ashwell Players. Through her work as a producer the author gained a deeper knowledge of a number of Shakespeare's plays and in order to support her work gave a number of lectures on "Women in Shakespeare". This title was perhaps the first book by a woman of the profession, appealing to the public for a larger and deeper understanding of Shakespeare: the man, his life, and that group of tragedies in which he fathomed Hell, then scaled the Heavens.

'What's in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.' So says Juliet in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet but, originally published in 1978, Murray Levith shows just how wrong Juliet was. Shakespeare was extremely careful in his selection of names. Not only the obvious Hotspur or the descriptive Bottom or Snout, but most names in Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays had a more than superficial significance. Beginning with what has been written previously, Levith illustrates how Shakespeare used names - not only those he invented in the later comedies, but those names bequeathed to him by history, myth, classical literature, or the Bible. Levith moves from the histories through the tragedies to the comedies, listing each significant name play by play, giving the allusions, references, and suggestions that show how each name enriches interpretations of action, character, and tone. Dr. Levith examines Shakespeare's own name, and speculates upon the playwright's identification with his characters and the often whimsical naming games he played or that were played upon him. A separate alphabetical index is provided to facilitate the location of individual names and, in addition, cross references to plays are given so that each name can be considered in the context of all the plays in which it appears.

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.

Throwing fresh light on a much discussed but still controversial field, this collection of essays places the presence of Italian literary theories against and alongside the background of English dramatic traditions, to assess this influence in the emergence of Elizabethan theatrical convention and the innovative dramatic practices under the early Stuarts. Contributors respond anew to the process of cultural exchange, cultural transaction, and generic intertextuality involved in the debate on dramatic theory and literary kinds in the Renaissance, exploring, with special emphasis on Shakespeare's works, the level of cultural appropriation, contamination, revision, and subversion characterizing early modern English drama. Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories offers a wide range of approaches and critical viewpoints of leading international scholars concerning questions which are still open to debate and which may pave the way to further groundbreaking analyses on Shakespeare's art of dramatic construction and that of his contemporaries.

This edition celebrates King Henry VI Part 2 as one of the most exciting and dynamic plays of the English renaissance theatre, with its exploration of power politics and social revolution and its focus on the relationship between divine justice and sin. An extensive discussion of performance history traces the play's progress on stage from abridgement and adaptation to full historical epic. A survey of criticism discusses the wide range of responses provoked by the play's handling of its historical theme, and concludes by focusing on the element of burlesque in the attempted social revolution portrayed.

In partnerships with the website sonnetsofshakespeare.com, which contains video recordings of the author reciting each sonnet, The Wit and Wisdom of Shakespeare thoroughly demystifies 32 of Shakespeare's sonnets. Each is presented and illuminated by a short Essence Statement, clarified in a Diagram for Greater Understanding, and described in a unique and entertaining narrative description. Embedded within the descriptions are tidbits of interesting information about Shakespeare, his associates, and cultural circumstances of the time-along with writing techniques and word play in which Shakespeare indulged, and observations from Shakespeare scholars.

Making innovative use of digital and library archives, this book explores how Shakespeare used language to interact with the verbal marketplace of early modern England. By also combining word history with book history, Jonathan P. Lamb demonstrates Shakespeare's response to the world of words around him, in and through the formal features of his works. In chapters that focus on particular rhetorical features in Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida, Lamb argues that we can best understand Shakespeare's writing practice by scrutinizing how the formal features of his works circulated in an economy of imaginative writing. Shakespeare's interactions with this verbal market preceded and made possible his reputation as a playwright and dramatist. He was, in his time, a great buyer and seller of words.

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.