First published in 1951. G B Harrison here recognizes that Shakespeare's tragedies were intended for performance in a theatre and that the playwright's conspicuous gift among his contemporaries was a sympathy for joy and sorrow, pity and terror, and right and wrong of his people. The plays covered are: Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens.

First published in 1961. Critiquing the critics, and examining the vocabulary of twentieth century criticism of the Shakespearean tragedies, John Holloway's book covers Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens and the themes of Shakespearean Tragedy and the idea of human sacrifice and the concepts of myth and ritual in literature.

First published in 1927. The main argument in this book is that Shakespeare's work is of such intense vitality that it is always modern and that although historical associations may have grown up round it, considerations of the works that grew out of it, or the works that it derives from, are pure irrelevancies. The author maintains that the quality of Shakespeare's achievement has never been surpassed and that all other considerations - date, time, place, conditions of production and historical significance of his plays - have no bearing whatsoever.

What is the nature of romantic love and erotic desire in Shakespeare's work? In this erudite and yet accessible study, David Schalkwyk addresses this question by exploring the historical contexts, theory and philosophy of love. Close readings of Shakespeare's plays and poems are delivered through the lens of historical texts from Plato to Montaigne, and modern writers including Jacques Lacan, Jean-Luc Marion, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou and Stanley Cavell. Through these studies, it is argued that Shakespeare has no single or overarching concept of love, and that in Shakespeare's work, love is not an emotion. Rather, it is a form of action and disposition, to be expressed and negotiated linguistically.

In this distinctive study, Nicholas Luke explores the abiding power of Shakespeare's tragedies by suggesting an innovative new model of his character creation. Rather than treating characters as presupposed beings, Luke shows how they arrive as something more than functional dramatis personae - how they come to life as 'subjects' - through Shakespeare's orchestration of transformational dramatic events. Moving beyond dominant critical modes, Luke combines compelling close readings of Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear with an accessible analysis of thinkers such as Badiou, Zizek, Bergson, Whitehead and Latour, and the 'adventist' Christian tradition flowing from Saint Paul through Luther to Kierkegard. Representing a significant intervention into the way we encounter Shakespeare's tragic figures, the book argues for a subjectivity which is not singular or abiding, but perilous and leaping.

In the past two decades, Othello has tried out for the basketball team, Macbeth has taken over a fast food joint, and King Lear has moved to an lowa farm - Shakespeare is everywhere in popular culture. This collection of essays addresses the use of Shakespearean narratives, themes, imagery, and characterizations in non-Shakespearian cinema. The essays explore how Shakespeare and his work are manipulated within the popular media and explore topics such as racism, jealousy, misogyny and nationality. The question of whether a contemporary production is influenced by Shakespeare or by an earlier piece that influenced Shakespeare is also addressed. The submissions concentrate on film and television programs that are adaptations of Shakespearean plays, including My Own Private Idaho, CSI-Miami, A Thousand Acres, Prospero's Books, O, 10 Things I Hate About You, Withnail and I, Get Over It, and The West Wing. Each chapter includes notes and a list of works cited. A full bibliography completes the work; it is divided into bibliographies and filmographies, general studies and essays, derivatives based on a single play, derivatives based on several, and derivatives based on Shakespeare as a character.

This eye-opening study draws attention to the largely neglected form of the early modern prologue. Reading the prologue in performed as well as printed contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann take us beyond concepts of stability and autonomy in dramatic beginnings to reveal the crucial cultural functions performed by the prologue in Elizabethan England. While its most basic task is to seize the attention of a noisy audience, the prologue's more significant threshold position is used to usher spectators and actors through a rite of passage. Engaging competing claims, expectations and offerings, the prologue introduces, authorizes and, critically, straddles the worlds of the actual theatrical event and the 'counterfeit' world on stage. In this way, prologues occupy a unique and powerful position between two orders of cultural practice and perception. Close readings of prologues by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Peele and Lyly, demonstrate the prologue's role in representing both the world in the play and playing in the world. Through their detailed examination of this remarkable form and its functions, the authors provide a fascinating perspective on early modern drama, a perspective that enriches our knowledge of the plays' socio-cultural context and their mode of theatrical address and action.

This book explores traditional approaches to the play, which includes an examination of the play in light of current history, in the context of Renaissance England, and in relation to Shakespeare's other Roman plays as well as structural examination of plot, language, character, and source material. Julius Caesar: Critical Essays also examines the current debates concerning the play in Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, queer, and gender contexts.

This major new edition of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy of love argues that that play is ultimately Juliet's. The play text is expertly edited and the on-page commentary notes discuss issues of staging, theme, meaning and Shakespeare's use of his sources to give the reader deep and engaging insights into the play. The richly illustrated introduction looks at the play's exceptionally beautiful and complex language and focuses on the figure of Juliet as being at its centre. Rene Weis discusses the play's critical, stage and film history, including West Side Story and Baz Luhrmann's seminal film Romeo + Juliet. This is an authoritative edition from a leading scholar, giving the reader a penetrating and wide-ranging insight into this ever popular play.

This book explores the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation on the plays of William Shakespeare. Taking three fundamental Protestant concerns of the era - (double) predestination, conversion, and free will - it demonstrates how Protestant theologians, in England and elsewhere, re-imagined these longstanding Christian concepts from a specifically Protestant perspective. Shakespeare utilizes these insights to generate his distinctive view of human nature and the relationship between humans and God. Through in-depth readings of the Shakespeare comedies 'The Merry Wives of Windsor', 'Much Ado About Nothing', 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', and 'Twelfth Night', the romance 'A Winter's Tale', and the tragedies of 'Macbeth' and 'Hamlet', this book examines the results of almost a century of Protestant thought upon literary art.

Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical is the first book-length study of a growing performance phenomenon: musical adaptations of Shakespeare's plays in which characters sing existing popular songs as one of their modes of communication. John Severn shows how these highly allusive works give rise to the pleasures of collaborative reception, and also lend themselves to political work, particularly in terms of identity politics and a valorisation of diversity. Drawing on musical theatre history, adaptation theory, Shakespeare studies and musicology, the book develops a critical approach that allows jukebox-musical versions of Shakespeare to be understood and valued both for their political potential and for the experiences they offer to audiences as artistic responses to Shakespeare. Case studies from the USA, the UK and Australia demonstrate how these works open new windows on Shakespeare's plays and their performance traditions, on the wider jukebox musical trend, and on adaptation as an art form.

This book presents comparative and interdisciplinary essays that demonstrate the value of thinking with Shakespeare, either as embodied in Shakespeare's own creative programme or in our use of philosophical paradigms as an approach to his works.

Reading Shakespeare in the Movies: Non-Adaptations and Their Meaning analyzes the unacknowledged, covert presence of Shakespearean themes, structures, characters, and symbolism in selected films. Writers and directors who forge an unconscious, unintentional connection to Shakespeare's work create non-adaptations, cinema that is unexpectedly similar to certain Shakespeare plays while remaining independent as art. These films can illuminate core semantic issues in those plays in ways that direct adaptations cannot. Eric S. Mallin explores how Shakespeare illuminates these movies, analyzing the ways that The Godfather, Memento, Titanic, Birdman, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre take on new life in dialogue with the famous playwright. In addition to challenging our ideas about adaptation, Mallin works to inspire new awareness of the meanings of Shakespearean stories in the contemporary world.

A new biography of William Shakespeare that explores his private life in Stratford-upon-Avon, his personal aspirations, his self-determination, and his relations with the members of his family and his neighbours. The Private Life of William Shakespeare tells the story of Shakespeare in Stratford as a family man. The book offers close readings of key documents associated with Shakespeare and develops a contextual understanding of the genres from which these documents emerge. It reconsiders clusters of evidence that have been held to prove some persistent biographical fables. It also shows how the histories of some of Shakespeare's neighbours illuminate aspects of his own life. Throughout, we encounter a Shakespeare who consciously and with purpose designed his life. Having witnessed the business failures of his merchant father, he determined not to follow his father's model. His early wedding freed him from craft training to pursue a literary career. His wife's work, and probably the assistance of his parents and brothers, enabled him to make the first of the property purchases that grounded his life as a gentleman. With his will, he provided for both his daughters in ways that were suitable to their circumstances; Anne Shakespeare was already protected by dower rights in the houses and lands he had acquired. His funerary monument suggests that the man of 'small Latin and less Greek' in fact had some experience of an Oxford education. Evidences are that he commissioned the monument himself.

In exploring links between the early modern English theatre and France, Richard Hillman focuses on Shakespeare's deployment of genres whose dominant Italian models and affinities might seem to leave little scope for French ones. The author draws on specific and unsuspected points of contact, whilst also pointing out a broad tendency by the dramatist, to draw on French material, both dramatic and non-dramatic, to inflect comic forms in potentially tragic directions. The resulting internal tensions are evident from the earliest comedies to the latest tragicomedies (or 'romances'). While its many original readings will interest specialists and students of Shakespeare, this book will have broader appeal: it contributes significantly, from an unfamiliar angle, to the contemporary discourse concerned with early modern English culture within the European context. At the same time, it is accessible to a wide range of readers, with translations provided for all non-English citations. -- .

Demonstrating and defending a method of close reading and historical contextualisation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this collection of essays by Tom McAlindon combines a number of previously published pieces with original studies. The volume includes six interpretative studies, all but one of which involve challenges to radical readings of the plays involved, including Henry V, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and Doctor Faustus. The other three essays are critiques of the claims and methods of radical, postmodernist criticism (new historicism and cultural materialism especially); they illustrate the author's conviction that some leading scholars in the field of Renaissance literature and drama, who deserve credit for shifting attention to new areas of interest, must also be charged with responsibility for a marked decline in standards of analysis, interpretation, and argument. Likely to provoke considerable debate, this stimulating collection is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies.

Fiction transports us. We inhabit new worlds in our imagination, adopt perspectives not our own, and even respond emotionally to persons and events that we know are not real.

The very nature of our emotional engagement with fiction, says E. M. Dadlez, attests to the possibility of its moral significance, just as the nature of our imaginative engagement makes us collaborators in the creation of the worlds we imagine.

This book engages contemporary debate over the seeming irrationality or inauthenticity of our emotional response to fiction, examining the many positions taken in this debate and arguing that we can understand the relation between cognition and emotion without devaluing our emotional responses to fiction. It takes Hamlet's famous query as the first step in an analytic philosophical inquiry and, by considering some of the answers that derive from that question, arrives at a set of necessary conditions for an emotional response to fiction.

What Hamlet's player feels for Hecuba, proposes Dadlez, is no more illusory than what we feel for Hamlet; that the actor weeps for Hecuba reflects both our capacity to envision and understand a seemingly limitless variety of human situations--to empathize with others--and the capacity of fiction to facilitate such understanding. What's Hecuba to Him? is an enticingly written work that opens an entire philosophical arena to literary scholars and illuminates the significance that literature has for our moral life.

The true story of how the First Folio creators made 'Shakespeare' 2023 marks the 400-year anniversary of Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known today simply as the First Folio. It is difficult to imagine a world without The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and Macbeth, but these are just some of the plays which were only preserved thanks to the astounding labour of love that went into creating the first collection. Without the First Folio, Shakespeare was unlikely to acquire his towering international stature and become the legend that inspired so much of language, art, education and public institution. But who were the personalities behind the project and did Shakespeare himself play a role in its inception? Shakespeare's Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio charts, for the first time, the manufacture of the First Folio against a turbulent backdrop of seismic political events and international tensions which intersected with the lives of its creators and which left their indelible marks on this ambitious publication-project. This transporting book uncovers the friendships, bonds, social ties and professional networks which facilitated the production of Shakespeare's book, as well as the personal challenges, tragedies and dangers which threw obstacles in its way. And it reveals how Shakespeare himself, before his death, may have influenced the ways in which his own public identity would come to be enshrined in the First Folio, shaping the transmission of his legacy to future generations and determining how the world would remember him 'not of an age, but for all time'.

Author Biography:
Colin Chambers is Senior Research Fellow in Theatre at De Montfort University. A former journalist and critic, he was Literary Manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1981-1997. His books include the award-winning Peggy: The Life of Margaret Ramsay, Play Agent (1997) and he is the editor of The Continuum Guide to Twentieth Century Theatre (2002).

In this expanded analysis of "Macbeth" in performance, Bernice W. Kliman examines a number of major productions of the play on stage and screen, inviting the reader to contemplate and compare directors' and actors' choices for what is arguably Shakespeare's most compelling play. Kliman's in-depth analysis of Orson Welles's 1948 film version as well as his earlier stage production, Roman Polanski's famous film, and several different television versions from America and Britain offers an invaluable guide to the most prominent performances across a range of media. She also considers Yukio Ninagawa's staging, which provides an exciting and novel Japanese perspective on the play for Western audiences.

"Making Shakespeare" gives a lively introduction to the major issues of the stage and print history of the plays, and discusses what a Shakespeare play actually is. Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, the book reveals how the plays were written and printed, and how they have been influenced by London, the theatres where they played and the actors who played in them. It describes how the texts evolved between composition, performance and printing, and how they retain clues to their original productions. It presents a variety of background material and tools to allow readers to contextualise Shakespeare's plays for themselves.

With Shylock's pound of flesh and Portia's golden ring, The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's most controversial, disturbing and unforgettable plays.
Combining accessible commentary with a range of reprinted materials, S. P. Cerasano:
*explores the contexts of the play, including early modern images of Venice, the commercialism of the play, Shakespeare's theatre and London, and images of Jewishness
*samples modern criticism of Shakespeare's Merchant, grouped into sections on The Economic Framework, Choosing and Risking, and Shylock and Other Strangers
*offers an invaluable discussion of the play in performance, considering crucial staging issues and changing interpretations of the roles of Portia and Shylock
*closely examines key passages of the work, providing both commentary and extensively annotated sections of play text
*prepares readers for additional study of the play with a useful guide to further reading.
Assuming no prior knowledge of the play, this Routledge Literary Sourcebook is the essential guide to one of the most haunting works of English drama.

Yukio Ninagawa (1935-2016) was Japan's foremost director of Shakespeare whose productions were acclaimed around the world. His work was lauded for its spectacular imagery, its inventive use of Japanese iconography and its striking fusion of Eastern and Western theatre traditions. Over a career spanning six decades, Ninagawa directed 31 of Shakespeare's plays, many of them, including Hamlet, on multiple occasions. His productions of Macbeth, The Tempest, Pericles, Twelfth Night and Cymbeline became seminal events in world Shakespeare production during the last 30 years. This is the first English-language book dedicated exclusively to Ninagawa's work. Featuring an overview of his extraordinary output, this study considers his Shakespearean work within the context of his overall career. Individual chapters cover Ninagawa's approach Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, in particular his landmark productions of Macbeth and Medea, and his eight separate productions of Hamlet. The volume includes a detailed analysis of the Sai-no-Kuni Shakespeare Series - in which Ninagawa set out to stage all of Shakespeare's plays in his hometown of Saitama, north of Tokyo. Written by Conor Hanratty, who studied with Ninagawa for over a year, it offers a unique and unprecedented glimpse into the work and approach of one of the world's great theatre directors.

At first consideration, it would seem that Shakespeare and Monty Python have very little in common other than that they're both English. Shakespeare wrote during the reign of a politically puissant Elizabeth, while Python flourished under an Elizabeth figurehead. Shakespeare wrote for rowdy theatre whereas Python toiled at a remove, for television. Shakepeare is The Bard; Python is well-not. Despite all of these differences, Shakespeare and Monty are in fact related; this work considers both the differences and similarities between the two. It discusses Shakespeare's status as England's National Poet and Python's similar elevation. It explores various aspects of theatricality (troupe configurations, casting and writing choices, allusions to classical literature) used by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Monty Python. It also covers the uses and abuses of history in Shakespeare and Python, humour, especially satire, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker and Python, and the concept of the the ""other"" in Shakespearian and Pythonesque creations.