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.

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.

This interdisciplinary study theorizes the interaction of individual performance and social space. Examining three categories of space the urban, the theatrical, and the cartographic this volume considers the role of performance in the production and operation of these spaces during a period in London 's history defined roughly by the life of Shakespeare.

City/Stage/Globe not only organizes a selection of plays, pageants, maps, and masques in the historical and cultural contexts in which they emerged, but also uses performance theory to locate the ways in which these seemingly ephemeral events contributed to lasting change in the spatial concepts and physical topograpy of early modern London.

This richly informed book brings together essays by a leading scholar-critic on both major and less celebrated writers, from Sidney, Shakespeare, and Drummond (a new piece) to the late Restoration, to reconfigure the familiar and help extend the canon. Always alert to the debates that have raged in literary studies, it highlights the distinctive qualities of poetry and drama.

Impossible bequests of the soul; an outlawed younger son who rises to become justice of the king's forests; the artificially-preserved corpse of the heir to an empire; a medieval clerk kept awake at night by fears of falling; a seventeenth-century noblewoman who commissions copies upon copies of her genealogy; Elizabethan efforts to eradicate Irish customs of succession; thoughts of the legacy of sin bequeathed to mankind by our first parents, Adam and Eve. This book explores how inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The writing composed during this period was the product of what the historian Georges Duby has called a 'society of heirs', in which inheritance functioned as a key instrument of social reproduction, acting to ensure that existing structures of status, wealth, familial power, political influence, and gender relations were projected from the present into the future. In poetry, prose, and drama-in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and his Canterbury Tales; in Spenser's Faerie Queene; in plays by Shakespeare such as Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice; and in a host of other works-we encounter a range of texts that attests to the extraordinary imaginative reach of questions of inheritance between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Moving between the late medieval and early modern periods, Imagining Inheritance examines this body of writing in order to argue that an exploration of the ways in which premodern inheritance was imagined can make legible the deep structures of power that modernity wants to forget.

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.

Tolkien and Shakespeare: one a prolific popular dramatist and poet of the Elizabethan era, the other a twentieth-century scholar of Old English and author of a considerably smaller body of work. Though unquestionably very different writers, the two have more in common than one might expect. These essays focus on the broad themes and motifs, which concerned both authors. They seek to uncover Shakespeare's influence on Tolkien through echoes of the playwright's themes and even word choices, discovering how Tolkien used, revised, updated, ""corrected,"" and otherwise held an ongoing dialogue with Shakespeare's works. The depiction of Elves and the world of Faerie, and how humans interact with them, are some of the most obvious points of comparison and difference for the two writers. Both Tolkien and Shakespeare deeply explored the uses and abuses of power with princes, politics, war, and the lessons of history. Magic and prophecy were also of great concern to both authors, and the works of both are full of encounters with the other: masks and disguises, mirrors that hide and reveal, or seeing stones that show only part of the truth.

Lexington, Kentucky, has been called the cradle of the legitimate theatre west of the Appalachians since the opening of its first theatre in 1808. Not long after that opening, a fledgling resident acting company presented Macbeth, the town's first professional production of a Shakespearean play. Since then, the local and traveling stars committed to drama drove Lexington's live theatrical glamour to thrive impressively into the twentieth century. Many of the actors who performed in Lexington in the plays of Shakespeare have been forgotten, but their vivid personalities and devotion to their art were once an integral part of American popular culture. The history of their careers and their lives is an important part of theatre history, of Kentucky history, and of American history. This study presents detailed accounts of individual actors in the order of their first appearances in Lexington. Early chapters explore the range of exposure to Shakespeare's plays and players experienced by the town of Lexington and investigate the cultural climate that affected and was affected by that experience. Because Lexington's theatrical history provides a template for what so many mid-American towns experienced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a section of the book explores how hundreds of American cities connected by the early turnpikes and railroads constituted a community of theatre towns that cherished Shakespeare as a keystone of American culture. Remaining chapters are devoted to the lives and careers of the inspiring performers who brought Shakespeare's words to life over the centuries. Reviews published in Lexington, supplemented with details from newspapers of New York and other cities, have provided source material. In addition, theatrical biographies, histories, historical photographs, programs, advertisements, theatrical journals, scrapbooks, film, and even primitive sound recordings are examined in an attempt to reconstruct something of what Lexington saw and heard of Shakespeare on its local stages.

Think you know Shakespeare? Think again . . .

Was a real skull used in the first performance of Hamlet? Were Shakespeare's plays Elizabethan blockbusters? How much do we really know about the playwright's life? And what of his notorious relationship with his wife? Exploring and exploding 30 popular myths about the great playwright, this illuminating new book evaluates all the evidence to show how historical material--or its absence--can be interpreted and misinterpreted, and what this reveals about our own personal investment in the stories we tell.

This volume in the long-running and acclaimed Shakespeare Dictionary series is a detailed, critical reference work examining all aspects of magic, good and evil, across Shakespeare's works. Topics covered include the representation of fairies, witches, ghosts, devils and spirits.

In revealing patterns of you/thou use in Shakespeare's plays, this study highlights striking and significant shifts from one to the other. Penelope Freedman demonstrates that understanding of the implications of you/thou use in early modern English has been bedevilled by overconcern with issues of power and status, and her careful research, analysing all the plays, reveals how a fuller understanding of Shakespeare's usage can provide a key to unlock puzzles of motive and character, and a glass to clarify relationships and emotions. The work focuses particularly on dialogue between men and women, and sheds new light on male and female language use. The scholarship presented in this volume is augmented with tables and a glossary of linguistic terms.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 75 is 'Othello'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/collections/shakespeare-survey This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic and save and bookmark their results.

At a time when the relevance of literary theory itself is frequently being questioned, Richard Wilson makes a compelling case for French Theory in Shakespeare Studies. Written in two parts, the first half looks at how French theorists such as Bourdieu, Cixous, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault were themselves shaped by reading Shakespeare; while the second part applies their theories to the plays, highlighting the importance of both for current debates about borders, terrorism, toleration and a multi-cultural Europe. Contrasting French and Anglo-Saxon attitudes, Wilson shows how in France, Shakespeare has been seen not as a man for the monarchy, but a man of the mob. French Theory thus helps us understand why Shakepeare's plays swing between violence and hope. Highlighting the recent religious turn in theory, Wilson encourages a reading of plays like Hamlet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelth Night as models for a future peace. Examining both the violent history and promising future of the plays, Shakespeare in French Theory is a timely reminder of the relevance of Shakespeare and the lasting value of French thinking for the democracy to come.

At a time when the relevance of literary theory itself is frequently being questioned, Richard Wilson makes a compelling case for French Theory in Shakespeare Studies. Written in two parts, the first half looks at how French theorists such as Bourdieu, Cixous, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault were themselves shaped by reading Shakespeare; while the second part applies their theories to the plays, highlighting the importance of both for current debates about borders, terrorism, toleration and a multi-cultural Europe. Contrasting French and Anglo-Saxon attitudes, Wilson shows how in France, Shakespeare has been seen not as a man for the monarchy, but a man of the mob. French Theory thus helps us understand why Shakepeare's plays swing between violence and hope. Highlighting the recent religious turn in theory, Wilson encourages a reading of plays like Hamlet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelth Night as models for a future peace. Examining both the violent history and promising future of the plays, Shakespeare in French Theory is a timely reminder of the relevance of Shakespeare and the lasting value of French thinking for the democracy to come.

In Shakespeare in Three Dimensions, Robert Blacker asks us to set aside what we think we know about Shakespeare and rediscover his plays on the page, and as Shakespeare intended, in the rehearsal room and in performance. That process includes stripping away false traditions that have obscured his observations about people and social institutions that are still vital to our lives today. This book explores the verities of power and love in Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, as an example of how to mine the extraordinary detail in all of Shakespeare's plays, using the knowledge of both theatre practitioners and scholars to excavate and restore them.