This innovative edition of Richard III emphasizes the play as a theatre work, and this understanding informs every aspect of the editing. The choice of the 1597 quarto text brings us close to the play as it would have been performed in Shakespeare's theatre. The play's long performance history is described and illustrated in an introduction that is also responsive to recent historicist and gender-based critical approaches. The commentary gives full and balanced treatment to matters of language, performance, text, and historical and cultural contexts.

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.

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.

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.

Even the most explicitly political contemporary approaches to Shakespeare have been uninterested by his tyrants as such. But for Shakespeare, rather than a historical curiosity or psychological aberration, tyranny is a perpetual political and human problem. Mary Ann McGrail's recovery of the playwright's perspective challenges the grounds of this modern critical silence. She locates Shakespeare's expansive definition of tyranny between the definitions accepted by classical and modern political philosophy. Is tyranny always the worst of all possible political regimes, as Aristotle argues in his Politics? Or is disguised tyranny, as Machiavelli proposes, potentially the best regime possible? These competing conceptions were practiced and debated in Renaissance thought, given expression by such political actors and thinkers as Elizabeth I, James I, Henrie Bullinger, Bodin, and others. McGrail focuses on Shakespeare's exploration of the conflicting and contradictory passions that make up the tyrant and finds that Shakespeare's dramas of tyranny rest somewhere between Aristotle's reticence and Machiavelli's forthrightness. Literature and politics intersect in Tyranny in Shakespeare, which will fascinate students and scholars of both.

Shakespeare and Asia brings together innovative scholars from Asia or with Asian connections to explore these matters of East-West and global contexts then and now. The collection ranges from interpretations of Shakespeare's plays and his relations with other authors like Marlowe and Dickens through Shakespeare and history and ecology to studies of film, opera or scholarship in Japan, Russia, India, Pakistan, Singapore, Taiwan and mainland China. The adaptations of Kozintsev and Kurosawa; Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare's plays; different Shakespearean dramas and how they are interpreted, adapted and represented for the local Pakistani audience; the Peking-opera adaptation of Hamlet ; Feng Xiaogang's The Banquet as an adaptation of Hamlet; the ideology of the film, Shakespeare Wallah. Asian adaptations of Hamlet will be at the heart of this volume. Hamlet is also analyzed in light of Oedipus and the Sphinx. Shakespeare is also considered as a historicist and in terms of what influence he has on Chinese writers and historical television. Lear is Here and Cleopatra and Her Fools, two adapted Shakespearean plays on the contemporary Taiwanese stage, are also discussed. This collection also examines in Shakespeare the patriarchal prerogative and notion of violence; carnival and space in the comedies; the exotic and strange; and ecology. The book is rich, ranging and innovative and will contribute to Shakespeare studies, Shakespeare and media and film, Shakespeare and Asia and global Shakespeare.

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

Series Information:
Shakespeare Criticism

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.

Shakespeare's great tragedies portray through their richly imagined worlds the inescapable fact of human mortality. As the work of a great creative genius, they are so diverse that critical formulas used to describe their overall impact tend to be somewhat suspect. Their impact follows from a response to the entire dramatic action, what is felt at the end with the weight or experience of the whole play behind it. It draws on how our feelings and judgement are exercised and engaged throughout the drama. Shakespeare portrays what life can be like, without pandering to the wish for something easier to contemplate. Something more invigorating than consolation is provided, such art at its greatest achieving the strength of truth. What it compels is a complex acceptance, reflected in Edgar's words, "The weight of this sad time we must obey". Not only implicit positives give value to these plays. Their significance finally results from what they imaginatively invite their audience to experience and witness. This gives a sense not only of the value of life, but also of what can threaten it.

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.

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 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.

Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre offers an account of Shakespeare's presence on the Spanish stage, from a production of the first Spanish rendering of Jean-Francois Ducis's Hamlet in 1772 to the creative and controversial work of directors like Calixto Bieito and Alex Rigola in the early 21st century. Despite a largely indirect entrance into the culture, Shakespeare has gone on to become the best and known and most widely performed of all foreign playwrights. What is more, by the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century there have been more productions of Shakespeare than of all of Spain's major Golden Age dramatists put together. This book explores and explains this spectacular rise to prominence and offers a timely overview of Shakespeare's place in Spain's complex and vibrant culture.

Pericles: Critical Essays brings together the most essential critical essays and theatrical reviews of Shakespeare's play from the late 17th century to the present, providing a representative gathering of critical opinion of Pericles over the centuries. David Skeele's introduction identifies the critical issues and problems the play has raised, cites and evaluates significant critical works, and gives readers a guide to research on the play.

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.

Shakespeare continues to articulate the central problems of our intellectual inheritance. The plays of a Renaissance playwright still seem to be fundamental to our understanding and experience of modernity. Key philosophical questions concerning value, meaning and justice continue to resonate in Shakespeare's work.
In the course of rethinking these issues, "Philosophical Shakespeares" focuses on and encourages the growing dissolution of boundaries between literature and philosophy.
"Philosophical Shakespeares" includes contributions from the first rank of contemporary criticism, drawing together original and previously unpublished essays by leading European and US scholars. The approach throughout is interdisciplinary and ranges from problem-centered readings of particular plays to more general elaborations on the significance of Shakespeare in relation to individual thinkers or philosophical traditions.

Shakespeare continues to articulate the central problems of our intellectual inheritance. The plays of a Renaissance playwright still seem to be fundamental to our understanding and experience of modernity.
Key philosophical questions concerning value, meaning and justice continue to resonate in Shakespeare's work. In the course of rethinking these issues, Philosophical Shakespeares actively encourages the growing dissolution of boundaries between literature and philosophy. The approach throughout is interdisciplinary, and ranges from problem-centred readings of particular plays to more general elaborations of the significance of Shakespeare in relation to individual thinkers or philosophical traditions.

Shakespeare Without Women is a controversial study of female impersonation and the connections between dramatic and political representation in Shakespeare's plays.

The vitality of our culture is still often measured by the status Shakespeare has within it. Contemporary readers and writers continue to exploit Shakespeare's cultural afterlife in a vivid and creative way. This collection of essays shows how writers' efforts to intimate, contradict, compete with and reproduce Shakespeare keep him in the cultural conversation. The contributors analyze the methods and motives of Shakespearean appropriation by looking at a wide range of works and people including: Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet"; "A Thousand Acres" by Jane Smiley; "Mama Day" by Gloria Naylor; Robert Browning; the Disney films "The Little Mermaid" and "The Lion King"; and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.