First published in 1985. In this revisionist history of comic characterization, Karen Newman argues that, contrary to received opinion, Shakespeare was not the first comic dramatist to create self-conscious characters who seem 'lifelike' or 'realistic'. His comic practice is firmly set within a comic tradition which stretches from Plautus and Menander to playwrights of the Italian Renaissance.

First published in 1957. This edition reprints the second edition of 1962. The originality, vitality and variety of Shakespeare's comedies do not suggest a writer at ease with a formula which works to his own satisfaction and the pleasure of his audience; against first impressions they suggest an artist seeking to express an idea which is always eluding a completely developed presentation. The second edition of this book contains an extensive new chapter on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

First published in 1938. This is a survey of Shakepeare's comedies which illustrates the playwright's increasing grasp on the art and idea of comedy. Themes, characters and plays covered include: Romanticism in Shakespearian comedy; Shakespeare's Jew, Falstaff, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Dark Comedies.

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.

First published in 1980. In this study of Shakespeare's ten early comedies, from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night, the concept of a dynamic of comic form is developed; the Falstaff plays are seen as a watershed, and the emergence of new comic protagonists - the resourceful, anti-romantic romantic heroine and the Fool - as the summit of the achievement. The plays are explored from three complementary perspectives - theoretical, developmental and interpretative which lead to a further understanding of the powerful relation between the plays' formal complexity and their naturalistic verisimilitude.

First published in 1980. At their most successful, Shakespeare's styles are strategies to make plain the limits of thought and feeling which define the significance of human actions. John Baxter analyses the way in which these limits are reached, and also provides a strong argument for the idea that the power of Shakespearean drama depends upon the co-operation of poetic style and dramatic form. Three plays are examined in detail in the text: The Tragedy of Mustapha by Fulke Greville and Richard II and Macbeth by Shakespeare.

First published in 1986. The focus of this book is the dramatic strategies of scenic repetition and character separation. The author traces the way in which Shakesperare often presents recurring gestures, dramatic interactions, and complex scenic structures at widely separated intervals in a play - thereby providing an internal system of cross-reference for an audience. He also examines the way in which Shakespeare increases the dramatic voltage in central relationships by limiting the access key characters have to each other on stage. These strategies, it is argued, are indelible marks of Shakespeare's craftsmanship which survive all attempts to obliterate it in many modern productions.

First published in 1982. Macbeth exercises a strange influence over readers and theatre audiences: the words of the text offer no easy clue to meaning or significance and in dramatic structure the play is very different from other Shakespearean tragedies. Many kinds of study are needed in order to understand the tragedy of Macbeth and this book provides a wide range of studies that respect the individuality of the text and examine it from different viewpoints. Contents include: Themes and Structure; Characterization and Narrative, Visual Effects, Performance in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; Historical and Political Background; Role of Witchcraft; Game Theory. Contributors include: John Russell Brown, Derek Russell Davis, Gareth Lloyd Evans, R A Foakes, Michael Goldman, Robin Grove, Peter Hall, Michael Hawkins, Brian Morris, D J Palmer, Marvin Rosenberg and Peter Stallybrass.

First published in 1951. The edition reprints the second, updated, edition, of 1977. When first published this book quickly established itself as the standard survey of Shakespeare's imagery considered as an integral part of the development of Shakespeare's dramatic art. By illustrating, through the use of examples the progressive stages of Shakespeare's use of imagery, and in relating it to the structure, style and subject matter of the plays, the book throws new light on the dramatist's creative genius. The second edition includes a new preface and an up-to-date bibliography.

First published in 1980. This collection of essays by the first General Editor of the New Arden Shakespeare brings together the best of Ellis-Fermor's Shespearean criticism, in addition to outstanding essays on Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida. Collected and edited by Kenneth Muir, the book is prefaced by an appreciation of Ellis-Fermor's work.

First published in 1952. This volume explores the function of verse in drama and the developing way in which Shakespeare controlled the rhetorical and decorative elements of speech for the dramatic purpose. The Language of Shakespeare's Plays explores the plays chronologically and so covers all the outstanding problems of Shakespearian language in a way that makes reference easy, without any loss of a continuing narrative.

First published in 1971. The only substantial text of a series of lectures on Shakespeare by S T Coleridge is that provided by J P Collier's Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton (1856). His text of these important lectures given by Coleridge in 1811-12 has been the basis of all modern editions. This edition is based on hitherto unpublished transcripts of the lectures made by Collier when, as a young man, he attended Coleridge's lectures. R A Foakes' introduction and appendices demonstrate the extent to which Collier revised and altered Coleridge's words for the edition he published forty-five years later. This volume therefore provides a much more authoritative text of Coleridge's most important Shakespeare lectures.

First published in 1962. This volume gives as complete an account as possible of the Shakespearian experience, particularly in terms of one play, King Lear, but in general against the context of all of Shakespeare's work and that of the age in which it was created. Chapters cover: King Lear in the Renaissance; Providence; Kind; Fortune; Anarchy and Order; Reason and Will; Show and Substance; Redemption and Shakespeare's Poetics.

This edition first published in 1962. The Shakespeare Claimants is a critical survey of the great controversy that has raged over the authorship of the Shakespearean plays. It provides the general reader with an outline history of this controversy and with a full description and analysis of the main anti-Stratfordian arguments. This book concentrates on the four main claimants: Bacon, Oxford, Derby and Marlowe. The book contains an extensive bibliography and footnotes to guide the reader through the text.

First published in 1972. The imagery of field sports - of hawking, hunting, shooting and fishing - and the associated imagery of warfare are a striking feature in Shakespeare's plays. The Living Image examines the nature of this imagery, considering it first in the light of the practices and techniques of Elizabethan field sports and weaponry and then its broader metaphoric significance in relation to the themes of the plays. The contemporary associations of the imagery - the inferences of female sexuality and waywardness from hawking imagery, for example, and the ideals of nobility and courage attached to images of hunting and war are all discussed.

First published in 1971. This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history. Contents include: Spenser and the Allegorists; The Faerie Queene, I and V; The Cave of Mammon; The Banquet of Sense; John Donne; The Patience of Shakespeare; Survival fo the Classic; Shakespeare's Learning; The Mature Comedies; The Final Plays.

This edition first published in 1966. Previous edition published 1965 by the University of California Press.
Perhaps more than any other play of Shakespeare's King Lear has been subjected to almost totally contradictory interpretations. In the first historical section of the book the author describes the varying concepts of the play and the distortions of text and even plot that have been widely used. Garrick's playing of Lear as a pathetic and down-trodden old man. Laughton's and Olivier's versions and Herbert Blaus's theory of the 'subtext' are described and analysed. The central section of the book examines the medieval, folk and romance sources of the play. The final chapter illustrates how the action of the play and its pervading violence and evil are not explained in terms of human motive and rely for their meaning more on their effects than their antecedents. An important theme is the play's examination of society and the ties of service and family love.

This edition first published in 1979. Discussing Shakespeare's sonnets in relation to sonnets by Italian, French and English poets, Kenneth Muir shows how they were influenced by Shakespeare's reading of Sidney, Erasmus and Ovid and discusses their art in terms of construction, sound patterns and imagery. He considers the relationship of the sonnets to Shakespeare's dramatic writing, while stressing the dramatic element in the sonnets themselves. Finally he surveys the changing attitudes to the sonnets during the last three centuries.

First published in 1937. This study argues that the plays of Shakespeare must be studied by comparison with each other and not as separate entities; that they must be related to one another, to the poems and to the Sonnets; that each individual play acquires a deeper significance from its setting in the corpus. Muir and O'Loughlin's critical analysis takes place against the personality of Shakespeare, asserting that that despite all their diversities a single mind and a single hand dominate them and that they are the outcome of one man's critical and emotional reactions to life.

First published in 1969. Critics have in the past described The Winter's Tale as a work of "haphazard structure". More recent criticism has defended the structure of the play and this work shows that the evidence points to the fact that Shakespeare took infinite pains with the choice and disposition of the materials of The Winter's Tale. The scene-by-scene commentary considers The Winter's Tale in isolation, but prologue, epilogue and appendix place it in the context of related plays, and discuss, among others, the problem of genre as it affects the play.

The opening chapter traces the history of the term 'problem plays' as applied to Shakespeare and defines it more clearly and precisely than has been done in the past. Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra are then discussed in separate chapters, not only as problem plays but from various points of view: such matters as themes, structural pattern, character-problems, the play's relation to its sources as well as to other plays in the canon, are all touched upon.

First published in 1979. How do the elements of swearing and perjury work in Shakespeare's plays? What effect did Shakespeare intend when he wrote them? How did they contribute to the delineation of character? These questions are investigated by combining a history of ideas approach with close textual analysis. The book begins by bringing together material from a wide range of contemporary sources in order to create a sense of popular awareness of oaths in Queen Elizabeth's time. Out of this emerges a scale of the relative strength of various oaths, an awareness of the ways in which people regarded perjury, and an appreciation of the attempts to prohibit profanity. Shakespeare's work is then examined against this background.

First published in 1972. Shakespeare's writing abounds with legal terms and allusions and in many of the plays the concept and working of the law is a significant theme. Shakespeare and the Lawyers gives a comprehensive survey of what Shakespeare wrote about the law and lawyers, and what has been written, particularly by lawyers, about Shakespeare's life and works in relation to the law. The book first reviews the recorded facts about Shakespeare's life and works, and his connection with the Inns of Court. It then discusses legal terms, allusions and plots in the plays; Shakespeare's treatment of the problems of law, justice and government; his description of lawyers and officers of the law; his references to actual legal personalities; and his trial scenes. Two further chapters consider the criticisms that have been made of Shakespeare's law, and the contribution to Shakespeare studies by lawyers.

First published in 1968. Shakespeare's Early Tragedies contains studies of six plays: Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. The emphasis is on the variety of the plays, and the themes, a variety which has been too often obscured by the belief in a single 'tragic experience'. The kind of experience the plays create and their quality as dramatic works for the stage are also examined. These essays develop an understanding of Shakespeare's use of the stage picture in relation to the emblematic imagery of Elizabethan poetry.

'Mr Hawkes is a good critic, oriented towards history of ideas. He operates on the formula that Shakespeare was interested in the available distinctions between discursive and intuitive reason, and disliked a growing tendency for the first to be thought of as manly and the second effeminate. One sees how this action-contemplation polarity works, in Hamlet for instance, and Mr Hawkes thinks the kind of choices forced on tragic heroes can be better understood in terms of it.' Frank Kermode, New Statesman. In the seven plays on which the book concentrates, Terence Hawkes finds Shakespeare investigating the operation of two opposed forms of reason, and constructing dramatic metaphors such as the opposition between appearance and reality, or that between true 'manliness' and its false counterpart, which express to the full the tragic nature of the situation.