Shakespeare in the Present is a stunning collection of essays by Terence Hawkes, which engage with, explain, and explore 'presentism'. Presentism is a critical manoeuvre which uses relevant aspects of the contemporary as a crucial trigger for its investigations. It deliberately begins with the material present and lets that set the interrogative agenda. This book suggests ways in which its principles may be applied to aspects of Shakespeare's plays.
Hawkes concentrates on two main areas in which Presentism impacts on the study of Shakespeare. The first is the concept of 'devolution' in British politics. The second is presentism's commitment to a reversal of conceptual hierarchies such as primary/secondary and past/present, and the interaction between performance and reference. The result is to sophisticate and expand our notion of performing and to refocus interest on what the early modern theatre meant by the activity it termed 'playing'.

The 'Sound of Shakespeare' reveals the surprising extent to which Shakespeare's art is informed by the various attitudes, beliefs, practices and discourses that pertained to sound and hearing in his culture.
In this engaging study, Wes Folkerth develops listening as a critical practice, attending to the ways in which Shakespeare's plays express their author's awareness of early modern associations between sound and particular forms of ethical and aesthetic experience. Through readings of the acoustic representation of deep subjectivity in Richard III, of the 'public ear' in Antony and Cleopatra, the receptive ear in Coriolanus, the grotesque ear in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the 'greedy ear' in Othello, and the 'willing ear' in Measure for Measure, Folkerth demonstrates that by listening to Shakespeare himself listening, we derive a fuller understanding of why his works continue to resonate so strongly with is today.

The 'Sound of Shakespeare' reveals the surprising extent to which Shakespeare's art is informed by the various attitudes, beliefs, practices and discourses that pertained to sound and hearing in his culture.
In this engaging study, Wes Folkerth develops listening as a critical practice, attending to the ways in which Shakespeare's plays express their author's awareness of early modern associations between sound and particular forms of ethical and aesthetic experience. Through readings of the acoustic representation of deep subjectivity in Richard III, of the 'public ear' in Antony and Cleopatra, the receptive ear in Coriolanus, the grotesque ear in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the 'greedy ear' in Othello, and the 'willing ear' in Measure for Measure, Folkerth demonstrates that by listening to Shakespeare himself listening, we derive a fuller understanding of why his works continue to resonate so strongly with is today.

When critical theory met literary studies in the 1970s and 80s, some of the most radical and exciting theoretical work centred on quasi-sacred figure of Shakespeare. In Alternative Shakespeares, John Drakakis brought together key essays by founding figures in this movement to remake Shakespeare studies.
A new afterword by Robert Weimann outlines the extraordinary impact of Alternative Shakespeares on academic Shakespeare studies. But as yet, the Shakespeare myth continues to thrive both in Stratford and in our schools. These essays are as relevant and as powerful as they were upon publication and with a contributor list that reads like a 'who's who' of modern Shakespeare studies, Alternative Shakespeares demands to be read.

Othello: Critical Essays includes twenty-one groundbreaking chapters that examine one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies, exploring issues of friendship and fealty, love and betrayal, race and gender issues, and much more.

Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the international contributors to Hamlet: New Critical Essays contribute major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of Hamlet. This book is the most up-to-date and comprehensive critical analysis available of one of Shakespeare's best-known and most engaging plays.

Arthur F. Kinney and his international team of ten Shakespearean scholars shine new light on the world's most famous tragedy. With essays covering a wide range of topics, from editorial and production issues to postmodern studies of race and gender dynamics, this volume offers cutting-edge analyses of the play. The refreshing insight and originality of the selections will surprise students new to Shakespeare as well as experts in the field. For anyone interested in what is arguably the most complex tale ever told, Kinney and his contributors have enlivened a fascinating, age-old debate.

One of Shakespeare's later plays, best described as a tragic-comedy, the play falls into two distinct parts. In the first Leontes is thrown into a jealous rage by his suspicions of his wife Hermione and his best-friend, and imprisons her and orders that her new born daughter be left to perish. The second half is a pastoral comedy with the "lost" daughter Perdita having been rescued by shepherds and now in love with a young prince. The play ends with former lovers and friends reunited after the apparently miraculous resurrection of Hermione. John Pitcher's lively introduction and commentary explores the extraordinary merging of theatrical forms in the play and its success in performance. As the recent Sam Mendes production at the Old Vic shows, this is a play that can work a kind of magic in the theatre. For more than a century educators, students and general readers have relied on The Arden Shakespeare to provide the very best scholarship and most authoritative texts available.
The Third Series editions' added emphasis on all aspects of Shakespeare performance extended the Arden editions readership to also become the preferred text for theatre professionals.

A comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, including studies of the play's print, theatre, and performance history. The essay deals primarily with issues of gender, authority, domination, metatheatricality, and privacy. The volume includes a bibliographic introduction, which provides an historical overview of the play's place in Shakespeare's canon and contextualizes the issues historically.

Brian Vickers addresses the fundamental issues of what Shakespeare actually wrote, and how this is determined. In recent years Shakespeare's authorship has been claimed for two poems, the lyric "Shall I die?" and A Funerall Elegye. These attributions have been accepted into certain major editions of Shakespeare's works. Through a new examination of the evidence, Professor Vickers shows that neither poem has the stylistic and imaginative qualities we associate with Shakespeare. He identifies the poet and dramatist John Ford as the actual author of the Elegye.

Series Information:
Shakespeare Criticism

Contents:
General Editor's Introduction, Acknowledgments, Part I. The Tempest and the Critical Legacy Interpreting The Tempest: A History of Its Readings Part II. The Tempest and the Critics Preface to The Tempest or the Enchanted Island Patrick Murphy, Comment on Caliban John Dryden, The Adventurer, Number 83 Joseph Wharton, The Transcript of Lecture 9 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes on The Tempest Colerdige, The Tempest William Hazlitt, Tempest W.J. Birch, The Monster Caliban Daniel Wilson, Shakespeare's Last Plays Edward Dowden, Shakespeare's Tempest as Originally Produced at Court Ernest Law, The Tempest Don Cameron Allen, Romance, Farewell!: The Tempest M.C. Bradbrook, The Day of The Tempest John Bender, The Miranda Trap: Sexism and Racism in Shakespeare's Tempest Lorie Jerrell Leininger, Propsero's Wife Stephen Orgel, "Remember/First to Posses His Books:" The Appropriation of The Tempest, 1700-1800, Michael Dobson, Local Tempest: Shakespeare and the Work of the Early Modern Playhouse Douglas Bruster, Revisiting The Tempest, Fantasy an History in The Tempest Richard Wheeler, Part III. Performances of The Tempest The Tempest at Covent-Garden Hazlitt, Shakespeare Illuminated: Charles Kean's 1857 Production of The Tempest Mary Nillan, The Tempest at the Turn of the Century: Cross Currents in Production Nilan, Peter Brook's Tempest Margaret Croyden, The Tempest (National Theater at Old Vic's on 5 March 1974) Peter Ansorage, Prospero or the Director: Giorgio Strehler's The Tempest Jan Kott, A Brave New Tempest Lois Potter, The Tempest in Bali David E. R. George, Tampering with The Tempest Virginia Mason Vaughn & Alden T. Vaughn, Shakespeare at the Guthrie: The Tempest Through a Glass Darly Randall Louis Anderson, Tempest in a Smokepot Robert Brustein, Part IV. New Essays on The Tempest Listening for the Playwright's Voice, 4.1.139-5.1.32 Robert Hapgood, Alien Habitats in The Tempest Geraldo U de Sousa, Peopling, Profiting, and Pleasure in The Tempest Barbara Ann Sebeck, Print History of The Tempest in Early America, 1623-1787 Christopher Felker, "Their Senses I'll Restore": Montaigne and The Tempest Reconsidered Alan De Gooyer, Drama's "Inward Pinches": The Tempest James Stephans, Modernist Revisions of The Tempest: Auden, Woolf, Tippett Edward O'Shea, The Tempest as Political Allegory Claudia Harris

This volume bears potent testimony, not only to the dense complexity of Hamlet's emotional dynamics, but also to the enduring fascination that audiences, adaptors, and academics have with what may well be Shakespeare's moodiest play. Its chapters explore emotion in Hamlet, as well as the myriad emotions surrounding Hamlet's debts to the medieval past, its relationship to the cultural milieu in which it was produced, its celebrated performance history, and its profound impact beyond the early modern era. Its component chapters are not unified by a single methodological approach. Some deal with a single emotion in Hamlet, while others analyse the emotional trajectory of a single character, and still others focus on a given emotional expression (e.g., sighing or crying). Some bring modern methodologies for studying emotion to bear on Hamlet, others explore how Hamlet anticipates modern discourses on emotion, and still others ask how Hamlet itself can complicate and contribute to our current understanding of emotion.

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of Macbeth provides a thorough reconsideration of one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. In his introduction, A. R. Braunmuller explores Macbeth's immediate theatrical and political contexts, particularly the Gunpowder Plot, and addresses such celebrated questions as: do the Witches compel Macbeth to murder; is Lady Macbeth herself in some sense a witch; is Macduff morally culpable? A new and well-illustrated account of the play in performance examines several cinematic versions, such as those by Kurosawa and Roman Polanski, as well as other dramatic adaptations. Several possible new sources are suggested and the presence of Thomas Middleton's writing in the play is also proposed.

The gods have much to tell us about performance. When human actors portray deities onstage, such divine epiphanies reveal not only the complexities of mortals playing gods but also the nature of theatrical spectacle itself. The very impossibility of rendering the gods in all their divine splendor in a truly convincing way lies at the intersection of divine power and the power of the theater. This book pursues these dynamics on the stages of ancient Athens and Rome as well on those of Renaissance England to shed new light on theatrical performance. The authors reveal how gods appear onstage both to astound and to dramatize the very machinations by which theatrical performance operates. Offering an array of case studies featuring both canonical and lesser-studied texts, this volume discusses work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Plautus as well as Beaumont, Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. This book uniquely brings together the joint perspectives of two experts on classical and Renaissance drama. This volume will appeal to students and enthusiasts of literature, classics, theater, and performance studies.

The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most perfectly realized tragicomedy, as notable for its tragic intensity as for its comic grace and, throughout, for the richness and complexity of its poetry. It concludes, moreover, with the most daring and moving reconciliation scene in all Shakespeare's plays. Though the title may suggest an escapist fantasy, recent criticism has seen in the play a profoundly realistic psychology and a powerful commentary on the violence implicit in family relationships and deep, longlasting friendships. Stephen Orgel's edition considers the play in relation to Renaissance conceptions of both dramatic genre and the family, traced the changing critical and theatrical attitudes towards it, and places its psychological and dramatic conflicts within the Jacobean cultural and political context. The commentary pays special attention to the play's linguistic complexity, and the edition also includes a complete reprint of Shakespeare's source, Pandosto, by Robert Greene.

The creation of the new Globe Theatre in London has heightened interest in Shakespeare performance studies in recent years. The essays in this volume testify to this burgeoning research into issues surrounding contemporary performances of plays by Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists, as well as modern trends and developments in stage and media presentations of these works. Truly international in coverage, the discussion here ranges across the performance and reception of Shakespeare in Japan, India, Germany, Italy, Denmark and the United States as well as in Britain. Dennis Kennedy's introductory essay places the new Globe Theatre in the context of Shakespearean cultural tourism generally. This is followed by five sections of essays covering aspects of Shakespeare on film, the stage history of his plays, Renaissance contexts, the movement of the text from page to stage, and female roles. Exploring many of current issues in Shakespeare studies, this volume provides a global perspective on Renaissance performance and the wide variety of ways in which it has been translated by today's media. About the Editor: Edward J. Esche is a Senior Lecturer in English and Head of Drama at Anglia Polytechnic University. He has published on renaissance drama and twentieth-century modern British and American drama. His most recent publication is an edition of Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris for the Clarendon Press The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe.

Enter the Body offers a series of provocative case studies of the work women's bodies do on Shakespeare's intensely body-conscious stage. Rutter's topics are sex, death, race, gender, culture, politics, and the excessive performative body that exceeds the playtext it inhabits. As well as drawing upon vital primary documents from Shakespeare's day, Rutter offers close readings of women's performance's on stage and film in Britian today, from Peggy Ashcroft's (white) Cleopatra and Whoopi Goldberg's (whiteface) African Queen to Sally Dexter's languorous Helen and Alan Howard's raver 'Queen' of Troy.

Enter the Body offers a series of provocative case studies of the work women's bodies do on Shakespeare's intensely body-conscious stage. Rutter's topics are sex, death, race, gender, culture, politics, and the excessive performative body that exceeds the playtext it inhabits. As well as drawing upon vital primary documents from Shakespeare's day, Rutter offers close readings of women's performance's on stage and film in Britian today, from Peggy Ashcroft's (white) Cleopatra and Whoopi Goldberg's (whiteface) African Queen to Sally Dexter's languorous Helen and Alan Howard's raver 'Queen' of Troy.

This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world.

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essays focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

This anthology examines Love's Labours Lost from a variety of perspectives and through a wide range of materials. Selections discuss the play in terms of historical context, dating, and sources; character analysis; comic elements and verbal conceits; evidence of authorship; performance analysis; and feminist interpretations. Alongside theatre reviews, production photographs, and critical commentary, the volume also includes essays written by practicing theatre artists who have worked on the play.

"Marxist Shakespeares" uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to look at Shakespeare's plays afresh. The essays collected here reveal the continuing power of Marxist thought to address many issues including:
* the relationship of texts to social class
* the historical construction of the aesthetic
* the utopian dimensions of literary production.
This book offers new insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeare's representations of class and gender emerged, and into Shakespeare's role in the global culture industry stretching from Hollywood to the Globe Theatre.
"Marxist Shakespeares" will be a vital resource for students of Shakespeare as it examines Marx's own readings of Shakespeare, Derrida's engagement with Marx, and the importance of Bourdieu, Bataille, Negri, and Alice Clark with a continuing tradition of Marxist thought.

This in-depth collection of essays traces the changing reception of Shakespeare over the past four hundred years, during which time Shakespeare has variously been seen as the last great exponent of pre-modern Western culture, a crucial inaugurator of modernity, and a prophet of postmodernity. This fresh look at Shakespeare's plays is an important contribution to the revival of the idea of 'modernity' and how we periodise ourselves, and Shakespeare, at the beginning of a new millennium.

This in-depth collection of essays traces the changing reception of Shakespeare over the past four hundred years, during which time Shakespeare has variously been seen as the last great exponent of pre-modern Western culture, a crucial inaugurator of modernity, and a prophet of postmodernity. This fresh look at Shakespeare's plays is an important contribution to the revival of the idea of 'modernity' and how we periodise ourselves, and Shakespeare, at the beginning of a new millennium.