The startling central idea behind this study is that the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics in the sixteenth century ultimately had a profound impact on almost every aspect of Shakespeare's late plays"their sources, subject matter and thematic concerns. Shakespeare's Poetics reveals the generic complexity of Shakespeare's late plays to be informed by contemporary debates about the tonal and structural composition of tragicomedy. Author Sarah Dewar-Watson re-examines such plays as The Winter's Tale, Pericles and The Tempest in light of the important work of reception which was undertaken in Italy by pioneering theorists such as Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio (1504-73) and Giambattista Guarini (1538-1612). The author demonstrates ways in which these theoretical developments filtered from their intellectual base in Italy to the playhouses of early modern England via the work of dramatists such as Jonson and Fletcher. Dewar-Watson argues that the effect of this widespread revaluation of genre not only extends as far as Shakespeare, but that he takes a leading role in developing its possibilities on the English stage. In the course of pursuing this topic, Dewar-Watson also engages with several areas of current scholarly debate: the nature of Shakespeare's authorship; recent interest in and work on Shakespeare's later plays; and new critical work on Italian language-learning in Renaissance England. Finally, Shakespeare's Poetics develops current critical thinking about the place of Greek literature in Renaissance England, particularly in relation to Shakespeare.

Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume's tripartite structure considers instead the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare's oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting's cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

Drawing on the later writings of Martin Heidegger, the book traces the correspondence between the philosopher's concept of technology and Shakespeare's poetics of human and natural productivity in the Sonnets.

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.

This remarkable volume challenges scholars and students to look beyond a dominant European and North American "metropolitan bank" of Shakespeare knowledge. As well as revealing the potential for a new understanding of Shakespeare's plays, Martin Orkin explores a fresh approach to issues of power, where "proximations" emerge from a process of dialogue and challenge traditional notions of authority.
Since their first performances, Shakespeare's plays and their audiences or readers have journeyed to one another across time and space, to and from countless and always different historical, geographical and ideological locations. Engagement with a Shakespeare text always entails in part, then, cultural encounter or clash, and readings are shaped by a reader's particular location and knowledge. Part I of this book challenges us to recognize the way in which "local" or "non-metropolitan" knowledges and experiences might extend understanding of Shakespeare's texts and their locations. Part II demonstrates the use of local as well as metropolitan knowledges in exploring the presentation of masculinity in Shakespeare's late plays. These plays themselves dramatize encounters with different cultures and, crucially, challenges to established authority.
Challenging the authority of metropolitan scholarship, twenty-first-century global capitalism and the masculinist imperatives that drive it, Orkin's daring, powerful work will have reverberations throughout but also well beyond the field of Shakespeare studies.

Now available in paperback, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory is an up-to-date guide to contemporary debates in postcolonial studies and how these shape our understanding of Shakespeare's politics and poetics. Taking a historical perspective, it covers early modern discourses of colonialism, 'race', gender and globalization, through to contemporary intercultural appropriations and global adaptations of Shakespeare. Showing how the dialogue between Shakespeare criticism and postcolonial studies has evolved, this book offers a critical vocabulary that connects contemporary and early modern cultural struggles. Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory also provides guides to further reading and online resources which make this an essential resource for students and scholars of Shakespeare.

'Beginning Shakespeare' introduces students to the study of Shakespeare, and grounds their understanding of his work in theoretical discourses. After an introductory survey of the dominant approaches of the past, seven chapters examine the major current critical approaches to Shakespeare; psychoanalysis, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial criticism and performance criticism. A further chapter looks at the growing roles of biography, attribution studies and textual studies. Each chapter analyses the strengths and weaknesses of a particular perspective, allowing students to gain a clear critical purchase on the respective approaches, and to make informed choices between them. Each chapter ends with a list of suggested further reading and interactive exercises based on the key issues raised. An invaluable introduction, essential for anyone studying Shakespeare, 'Beginning Shakespeare' offers students a map of the current critical practices, and a sense of the possibilities for developing their own approaches. -- .

First published in 1977. This book ascertains what sources Shakespeare used for the plots of his plays and discusses the use he made of them; and secondly illustrates how his general reading is woven into the texture of his work. Few Elizabethan dramatists took such pains as Shakespeare in the collection of source-material. Frequently the sources were apparently incompatible, but Shakespeare's ability to combine a chronicle play, one or two prose chronicles, two poems and a pastoral romance without any sense of incongruity, was masterly. The plays are examined in approximately chronological order and Shakespeare's developing skill becomes evident.

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.