Readings of Shakespeare were both influenced by and influential in the rise of Gothic forms in literature and culture from the late eighteenth century onwards. Shakespeare's plays are full of ghosts, suspense, fear-inducing moments and cultural anxieties which many writers in the Gothic mode have since emulated, adapted and appropriated. The contributors to this volume consider: Shakespeare's relationship with popular Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century how, without Shakespeare as a point of reference, the Gothic mode in fiction and drama may not have developed and evolved in quite the way it did the ways in which the Gothic engages in a complex dialogue with Shakespeare, often through the use of quotation, citation and analogy the extent to which the relationship between Shakespeare and the Gothic requires a radical reappraisal in the light of contemporary literary theory, as well as the popular extensions of the Gothic into many modern modes of representation. In Gothic Shakespeares, Shakespeare is considered alongside major Gothic texts and writers - from Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley, up to and including contemporary Gothic fiction and horror film. This volume offers a highly original and truly provocative account of Gothic reformulations of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's significance to the Gothic. Contributors include: Fred Botting, Elizabeth Bronfen, Glennis Byron, Sue Chaplin, Steven Craig, John Drakakis, Michael Gamer, Jerrold Hogle, Peter Hutchings, Robert Miles, Dale Townshend, Scott Wilson and Angela Wright.

Readings of Shakespeare were both influenced by and influential in the rise of Gothic forms in literature and culture from the late eighteenth century onwards. Shakespeare's plays are full of ghosts, suspense, fear-inducing moments and cultural anxieties which many writers in the Gothic mode have since emulated, adapted and appropriated. The contributors to this volume consider: Shakespeare's relationship with popular Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century how, without Shakespeare as a point of reference, the Gothic mode in fiction and drama may not have developed and evolved in quite the way it did the ways in which the Gothic engages in a complex dialogue with Shakespeare, often through the use of quotation, citation and analogy the extent to which the relationship between Shakespeare and the Gothic requires a radical reappraisal in the light of contemporary literary theory, as well as the popular extensions of the Gothic into many modern modes of representation. In Gothic Shakespeares, Shakespeare is considered alongside major Gothic texts and writers - from Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley, up to and including contemporary Gothic fiction and horror film. This volume offers a highly original and truly provocative account of Gothic reformulations of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's significance to the Gothic. Contributors include: Fred Botting, Elizabeth Bronfen, Glennis Byron, Sue Chaplin, Steven Craig, John Drakakis, Michael Gamer, Jerrold Hogle, Peter Hutchings, Robert Miles, Dale Townshend, Scott Wilson and Angela Wright.

This is the inside story of the Royal Shakespeare Company - a running historical critique of a major national institution and its location within British culture. It describes what happened to a radical theatrical vision and explores British society's inability to sustain that vision

'Kidnie's study presents original, sophisticated, and profoundly intelligent answers to important questions.' - Lukas Erne, University of Geneva 'This is a fine and productive book, one that will surely draw significant attention and commentary well beyond the precincts of Shakespeare studies.' - W.B. Worthen, Columbia University Shakespeare's plays continue to be circulated on a massive scale in a variety of guises - as editions, performances, and adaptations - and it is by means of such mediation that we come to know his drama. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation addresses fundamental questions about this process of mediation, making use of the fraught category of adaptation to explore how we currently understand the Shakespearean work. To adapt implies there exists something to alter, but what constitutes the category of the 'play', and how does it relate to adaptation? How do 'play' and 'adaptation' relate to drama's twin media, text and performance? What impact might answers to these questions have on current editorial, performance, and adaptation studies? Margaret Jane Kidnie argues that 'play' and 'adaptation' are provisional categories - mutually dependent processes that evolve over time in accordance with the needs of users. This theoretical argument about the identity of works and the nature of text and performance is pursued in relation to diverse examples, including theatrical productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told, the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and recent print editions of the complete works. These new readings build up a persuasive picture of the cultural and intellectual processes that determine how the authentically Shakespearean is distinguished from the fraudulent and adaptive. Adaptation thus emerges as the conceptually necessary but culturally problematic category that results from partial or occasional failures to recognize a shifting work in its textual-theatrical instance.

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.

"The Critical Heritage" gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

"The Critical Heritage" gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material.

"The Critical Heritage" gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

In 1700, Shakespeare was viewed as one of the leading Renaissance playwrights, but not as supreme. By 1800, he was not only widely performed and read but celebrated as a universal genius and a national literary hero. What happened during the intervening years is the subject of this fascinating volume, which brings together Renaissance and eighteenth-century scholars who examine how Shakespeare gradually penetrated, and came to dominate, the culture and intellectual life of people in the English-speaking world. The contributors approach Shakespeare from a wide range of perspectives, to illuminate the way contemporary philosophy, science and medicine, textual practice, theatre studies, and literature both informed and were influenced by eighteenth-century interpretations of his works. Among the topics are Falstaff and eighteenth-century ideas of the sublime, David Garrick's 1756 adaptation of The Winter's Tale and its relationship to medical theories of femininity, the textual practices of George Steevens, Shakespeare's importance in furthering the careers of actors on the eighteenth-century stage, and the influence of Shakespeare on writers as diverse as Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, and Ann Radcliff. Together, the essays paint a vivid picture of the relationship between eighteenth-century Shakespeare and ideas about shared nationhood, knowledge, morality, history, and the self.

'Kidnie's study presents original, sophisticated, and profoundly intelligent answers to important questions.' - Lukas Erne, University of Geneva 'This is a fine and productive book, one that will surely draw significant attention and commentary well beyond the precincts of Shakespeare studies.' - W.B. Worthen, Columbia University Shakespeare's plays continue to be circulated on a massive scale in a variety of guises - as editions, performances, and adaptations - and it is by means of such mediation that we come to know his drama. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation addresses fundamental questions about this process of mediation, making use of the fraught category of adaptation to explore how we currently understand the Shakespearean work. To adapt implies there exists something to alter, but what constitutes the category of the 'play', and how does it relate to adaptation? How do 'play' and 'adaptation' relate to drama's twin media, text and performance? What impact might answers to these questions have on current editorial, performance, and adaptation studies? Margaret Jane Kidnie argues that 'play' and 'adaptation' are provisional categories - mutually dependent processes that evolve over time in accordance with the needs of users. This theoretical argument about the identity of works and the nature of text and performance is pursued in relation to diverse examples, including theatrical productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told, the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and recent print editions of the complete works. These new readings build up a persuasive picture of the cultural and intellectual processes that determine how the authentically Shakespearean is distinguished from the fraudulent and adaptive. Adaptation thus emerges as the conceptually necessary but culturally problematic category that results from partial or occasional failures to recognize a shifting work in its textual-theatrical instance.

First published in 1987.
This study removes some of the critical puzzles that Shakespeare's comedies of love have posed in the past. The author shows that what distinguishes the comedies is not their similarity but their variety - the way in which each play is a new combination of essentially similar ingredients, so that, for example, the boy/girl changes in The Merchant of Venice are seen to have a quite different significance from those in As You Like It.

"The Critical Heritage" gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

'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

The title of this collection, Profiling Shakespeare, is meant strongly, in its double sense. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought so earnestly and eagerly by biographers from his time to our own. And they also show the effects, the ephemera, the clues and cues, welcome and unwelcome, out of which Shakespeare's admirers, citers, fans and dedicated scholars have pieced together a vision of the playwright, whether as sage, lover, psychologist, guidance counselor, or successful businessman. This collection brings together classic pieces, hard-to-find chapters, and two new essays. Here, Garber has produced a series of essays at once serious and highly readable, each one ranging broadly across time periods (early modern to postmodern) and touching upon both high and popular culture.

Contents: Preface 1. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers 2. Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost 3. Macbeth: The Male Medusa 4. Shakespeare as Fetish 5. Character Assassination 6. Out of Joint 7. Roman Numerals 8. Second-Best Bed 9. Shakespeare's Dogs 10. Shakespeare's Laundry List 11. Shakespeare's Faces 12. MacGuffin Shakespeare 13. Fatal Cleopatra 14. What Did Shakespeare Invent? 15. Bartlett's Familiar Shakespeare

The title of this collection, Profiling Shakespeare, is meant strongly, in its double sense. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought so earnestly and eagerly by biographers from his time to our own. And they also show the effects, the ephemera, the clues and cues, welcome and unwelcome, out of which Shakespeare's admirers, citers, fans and dedicated scholars have pieced together a vision of the playwright, whether as sage, lover, psychologist, guidance counselor, or successful businessman. This collection brings together classic pieces, hard-to-find chapters, and two new essays. Here, Garber has produced a series of essays at once serious and highly readable, each one ranging broadly across time periods (early modern to postmodern) and touching upon both high and popular culture.

Contents: Preface 1. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers 2. Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost 3. Macbeth: The Male Medusa 4. Shakespeare as Fetish 5. Character Assassination 6. Out of Joint 7. Roman Numerals 8. Second-Best Bed 9. Shakespeare's Dogs 10. Shakespeare's Laundry List 11. Shakespeare's Faces 12. MacGuffin Shakespeare 13. Fatal Cleopatra 14. What Did Shakespeare Invent? 15. Bartlett's Familiar Shakespeare

Shakespeare and Cognition challenges orthodox approaches to Shakespeare by using recent psychological findings about human decision-making to analyse the unique characters that populate his plays. It aims to find a way to reconnect readers and watchers of Shakespeare's plays to the fundamental questions that first animated them. Why does Othello succumb so easily to Iago's manipulations? Why does Anne allow herself to be wooed by Richard III, the man who killed her husband and father? Why does Macbeth go from being a seemingly reasonable man to a cold-blooded killer? Why does Hamlet take so long to kill Claudius? This book aims to answer these questions from a fresh perspective.

William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (c.1600) is one of his most captivating plays. A comedy of mistaken identities, it has given rise to thought-provoking debates around such issues as gender identity and role-playing, manipulation and deception.

Taking the form of a sourcebook, this guide to Shakespeare's spirited play offers:

• extensive introductory comment on the contexts, critical history and performance of the text, from publication to the present
• annotated extracts from key contextual documents, reviews, critical works and the text itself
• cross-references between documents and sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Twelfth Night and seeking not only aguide to the play, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Shakespeare's text.

"Shakespeare: A Life in Art" brings together in a single volume Fraser's previously published two-volume biography ("Young Shakespeare," 1988, and" Shakespeare: The Later Years," 1992). This volume includes a new introduction, which looks back on the author's lifelong commitment to Shakespeare's work and seeks to find the pattern in his carpet.

Fraser's approach places Shakespeare's work first but shows how the life and art interpenetrate, like "the yolk and white of one shell." What Shakespeare was doing in Stratford and London underlies what he was writing, or more exactly, the two flow together. Most of the book is devoted to Shakespeare the man and artist, but it simultaneously throws light on his literary and personal relations with contemporaries such as Jonson, Marlowe, and others known as the University Wits. His experience as an actor and man of theater is absorbingly recounted here, as well as his relations to well-born patrons like the Earl of Southampton and Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon (England's Lord Chamberlain). In 1603 when James I ascended the throne, the Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, passing under the sovereign's protection. How Shakespeare responded to his ambiguous role--he was both servant to the great and their remorseless critic--is another of Fraser's subjects. In short, Fraser's principal purpose is to advance our understanding of Shakespeare, at the same time throwing light on the work of the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets had the "largest and most comprehensive soul." John Dryden, Shakespeare's first great critic, said that, and Fraser tries to estimate what he meant.

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.

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.

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.

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.