Frank Harris argues that the way women are presented in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are a reflection of the real-life women in his life, namely his wife, mother, mistress and daughter. Originally published in 1911, The Women of Shakespeare also analyses the traditional criticism of the time and places his own views in this context. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature.

This study of the many poets, musicians and visual artists portrayed or described in Shakespeare's plays and poems reveals a fascination with art and its makers that continued to influence Shakespeare's work throughout his career. It also uncovers unexpected aspects of an enthusiastic Elizabethan consumption of artworks, an enthusiasm that had significant bearing on the quite new profession that Shakespeare himself followed. A high valuation placed on art and artists, and at the same time certain fears of these and fears for these, made for a very complex reception of the figure of the artist, and Shakespeare's treatments were equal to that complexity.

Contents:
Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. The Sexual Politics of Subjectivity in Lucrece Chapter 3. Titus Andronicus: The Daughter's Seduction, or, Writing is the Best Revenge Chapter 4. Mettle and Melting Spirits in Julius Caesar Chapter 5. Antony's Wound Chapter 6. Mother of Battles: Volumnia and Her Son in Coriolanus Postscript: Cymbeline: Paying Tribute to Rome

In the first full-length study of Shakespeare's Roman plays, Coppélia Kahn brings to these texts a startling, critical perspective which interrogates the gender ideologies lurking behind 'Roman virtue'.
Plays featured include:
* Titus Andronicus
* Julius Caesar
* Antony and Cleopatra
* Coriolanus
* Cymbeline
Setting the Roman works in the dual context of the popular theatre and Renaissance humanism, the author identifies new sources which she analyzes from a historicised feminist perspective.
Roman Shakespeare is written in an accessible style and will appeal to scholars and students of Shakespeare and those interested in feminist theory, as well as classicists.

eBook available with sample pages: HB:0415054508

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.

The authors of this book ask how digital research tools are changing the ways in which practicing editors historicize Shakespeare's language. Scholars now encounter, interpret, and disseminate Shakespeare's language through an increasing variety of digital resources, including online editions such as the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), searchable lexical corpora such as the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) or the Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) collections, high-quality digital facsimiles such as the Folger Shakespeare Library's Digital Image Collection, text visualization tools such as Voyant, apps for reading and editing on mobile devices, and more. What new insights do these tools offer about the ways Shakespeare's words made meaning in their own time? What kinds of historical or historicizing arguments can digital editions make about Shakespeare's language? A growing body of work in the digital humanities allows textual critics to explore new approaches to editing in digital environments, and enables language historians to ask and answer new questions about Shakespeare's words. The authors in this unique book explicitly bring together the two fields of textual criticism and language history in an exploration of the ways in which new tools are expanding our understanding of Early Modern English.

Why do the Capulets bite their thumbs at the Montagues? Why do the Venetians spit upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine? What is it about Volumnia's act of kneeling that convinces Coriolanus not to assault the city of Rome? Shakespeare's Body Language is a ground-breaking new study of Shakespearean drama, revealing the previously unseen history of social tensions found within the performance of gestures - and how such gestures are used to shame those within the body politic of early modern England. The first full study of shaming gestures in Shakespearean drama, this book establishes how shame is often rooted in the gendered expectations of the Renaissance era. Exploring how the performance of gestures such as figging, the cuckold's horns, and even the in-action of stillness created shaming spectacles on the early modern stage and its wider society, Shakespeare's Body Language argues that gestures are embodied social metaphors which epitomise the personal as political. It reveals the tensions of everyday life as key motivators behind the actions of Shakespeare's characters, and considers how honour and its opposite, shame, are constructed in terms of gender norms. Featuring in-depth analyses of plays across Shakespeare's career, this book explores how the playwright's understanding of shame and humiliation is rooted in performance anxiety and gender politics, explaining how theatrical gestures can create dramatic tension in a way that words alone cannot. It offers both rich insights into the early modern context of Shakespeare's drama and confirms the startling relevance of his work to modern audiences.

Modern biographies of William Shakespeare abound; however, close scrutiny of the surviving records clearly show that there is insufficient material for a cradle to grave account of his life, that most of what is written about him cannot be verified from primary sources, and that Shakespearean biography did not attain scholarly or academic respectability until long after Samuel Schoenbaum published William Shakespeare A Documentary Life in 1975. This study begins with a short survey of the history and practice of biography and then surveys the very limited biographical material for Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare gradually attained the status as a national hero during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were no serious attempts to reconstruct his life. Any attempt at an account of his life or personality amounts, however, merely to "biografiction". Modern biographers differ sharply on Shakespeare's apparent relationships with Southampton and with Jonson, which merely underlines the fact that the documentary record has to be greatly expanded through contextual description and speculation in order to appear like a Life of Shakespeare.

Alternative Shakespeares, published in 1985, shook up the world of Shakespearean studies, demythologising Shakespeare and applying new theories to the study of his work. Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 investigates Shakespearean criticism over a decade later, introducing new debates and new theorists into the frame.
Both established scholars and new names appear here, providing a broad cross-section of contemporary Shakespearean studies, including psychoanalysis, sexual and gender politics, race and new historicism.
Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 represents the forefront of contemporary Shakespearean studies. This urgently-needed update of a classic work of literary criticism is one which teachers and scholars will welcome.

Literary works, through their very personal means of characterization, reveal the direct effect of politics on individuals in a way a political treatise cannot. The distinguished contributors to this volume share the belief that Shakespeare is the author who most effectively sets forth the multifarious pageant of politics. Shakespeare's rich canon presents monarchy and republic, tyrant and king, thinker and soldier, and Christian and pagan. The twelve essays in Shakespeare's Political Pageant discuss a broad range of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry from the perspective of the political theorist. This innovative book demonstrates the immense value of seeing Shakespeare's plays in the context of political philosophy. It will be an important source for students and scholars of both political science and literature.

Shakespeare's Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter is the first study in Shakespeare criticism to examine the entirety of Shakespeare's dramatic suicides. It addresses all plays featuring suicides and near-suicides in chronological order from Titus Andronicus to Antony and Cleopatra, thus establishing that suicide becomes increasingly pronounced as a vital means of dramatic characterisation. In particular, the book approaches suicide as a gendered phenomenon. By taking into account parameters such as onstage versus offstage deaths, suicide speeches or the explicit denial of final words, as well as settings and weapons, the study scrutinises the ways in which Shakespeare appropriates the convention of suicide and subverts traditional notions of masculine versus feminine deaths. It shows to what extent a gendered approach towards suicide opens up a more nuanced understanding of the correlation between gender and Shakespeare's genres and how, eventually, through their dramatisation of suicide the tragedies query normative gender discourse.

"Post-Hamlet: Shakespeare in an Era of Textual Exhaustion" examines how postmodern audiences continue to reengage with Hamlet in spite of our culture's oversaturation with this most canonical of texts. Combining adaptation theory and performance theory with examinations of avant-garde performances and other unconventional appropriations of Shakespeare's play, Post-Hamlet examines Shakespeare's Hamlet as a central symbol of our era's "textual exhaustion," an era in which the reader/viewer is bombarded by text-printed, digital, and otherwise. The essays in this edited collection, divided into four sections, focus on the radical employment of Hamlet as a cultural artifact that adaptors and readers use to depart from textual "authority" in, for instance, radical English-language performance, international film and stage performance, pop-culture and multi-media appropriation, and pedagogy.

Shakespeare's Extremes is a controversial intervention in current critical debates on the status of the human in Shakespeare's work. By focusing on three flagrant cases of human exorbitance - Edgar, Caliban and Julius Caesar - this book seeks to limn out the domain of the human proper in Shakespeare.

This book is concerned with those patterns, strategies, and systems of organization that determine the shape of a Shakespeare play and are the expression of the deliberate nature of Shakepeare's art. Considering his plays as human documents, the book makes clear how and why Shakespeare composed as he did and demonstrates why Shakespeare is the consummate literary artist. Contents: Shakespeare's Deliberate Art: The Tempest; King John: The Plight of the Bastard; Richard II: The Garden Scene as a Clarification of the End of the Play; Richard II and I Henry IV: An Enlarged Context; ^IAll's Well That Ends Well: The Significance of the First Scene; Readjustment in Much Ado About Nothing; Despair and Shakespearean Affirmation: Twelfth Night; Recapitulative Lists; Roles and Offices; The Redemption of Emilia; The Plight of Coriolanus; The First Scene of Act 2: The Beginning of an Extended Episode; Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear as a Trilogy; Shakespeare's Four Great Tragedies: ''Tis Time to Look About'; Two-Part Design and the Impasse in King Lear; Affirmation in Troilus and Cressida; Thematic Point of View in Troilus and Cressida; Conclusion: Plight-Directed Action; Index.

Arden Shakespeare and Theory provides a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical developments that have dominated Shakespeare studies in recent years, as well as those that are emerging at the present moment. Each volume provides: a clear definition of a particular theory; a survey of its major theorists and critics; an analysis of its significance in Shakespeare studies; a summary of relevant political, social, and economic contexts; a wealth of suggested resources for further investigation. Combining close attention to Shakespearean texts and the conditions of their production with an explicit left-wing political affiliation, cultural materialism offers readers a radical avenue through which to engage with Shakespeare and his world. Shakespeare and Cultural Materialist Theory charts the inception and development of this theory, setting out its central tenets and analysing the work of key thinkers such as Alan Sinfield, Jonathan Dollimore, Raymond Williams and Ania Loomba.

In this text students are introduced to three of Shakespeare's best known plays - "Henry V", "Othello" and "As You Like It" - and a Restoration comedy, Aphra Behn's "The Rover". The aim is to explore the concept of the literary canon and the complex process by which certain authors and works are accorded a high cultural status. Shakespeare personifies the canonical author, while Aphra Behn (the first professional woman writer, whose work was tremendously popular and controversial in the 17th century) has been largely ignored until her recent rediscovery by feminist critics. No previous knowledge of either Shakespeare or Aphra Behn is assumed: both authors are introduced and their works are placed in context. Each chapter offers practical exercises in analyzing key passages of text and criticism, followed by detailed discussion. The text of "The Rover" is included here, fully modernized and with explanatory notes.

(Applause Books). This Applause edtiion allows the reader and student to look beyond the scholarly reading text to the more sensuous, more collaborative, more malleable performance text which emerges in conjunction with the commentary and notes. Readers and students are faced with real theatrical choices in each speech as the editors point out the challenges and opportunities to the actor and director at each juncture. Readers will not only discover an enlivened Shakespeare, they will be empowered to rehearse and direct their own productions of the imagination in the process.

Hamlet's father's Ghost asks his son to 'Remember me!', but how did people remember around 1600? And how do we remember now? Shakespeare and Memory brings together classical and early modern sources, theatre history, performance, material culture, and cognitive psychology and neuroscience in order to explore ideas about memory in Shakespeare's plays and poems. It argues that, when Shakespeare was writing, ideas about memory were undergoing a kind of crisis, as both the technologies of memory (print, the theatre itself) and the belief structures underpinning ideas about memory underwent rapid change. And it suggests that this crisis might be mirrored in our own time, when, despite all the increasing gadgetry at our disposal, memory can still be recovered, falsified, corrupted, or wiped: only we ourselves can remember, but the workings of memory remain mysterious. Shakespeare and Memory draws on works from all stages of Shakespeare's career, with a particular focus on Hamlet, the Sonnets, Twelfth Night, and The Winter's Tale. It considers some little things: what's Hamlet writing on? And why does Orsino think he smells violets? And it asks some big questions: how should the dead be remembered? What's the relationship between memory and identity? And is it art, above all, that enables love and beauty, memory and identity, to endure in the face of loss, time, and death?

This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context. Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.

Contemporary culture is obsessed with the past. And contemporary performance is obsessed with Shakespeare. Why does Shakespeare so often perform the nostalgic role of reviving a better past for modern audiences? And what do radical rewritings of Shakespeare's plays say both to and about their audiences? This is an inquiry into how Shakespeare is reproduced today. It looks at the enduring influence he has on present-day performance, and questions how inter-cultural and cross-cultural productions reconfigure him for alternative performances. An attempt is made to speak across many divides - from literature to theatre, from theory to practice.

Contemporary culture is obsessed with the past. And contemporary performance is obsessed with Shakespeare. Why does Shakespeare so often perform the nostalgic role of reviving a better past for modern audiences? And what do radical rewritings of Shakespeare's plays say both to and about their audiences? This is an inquiry into how Shakespeare is reproduced today. It looks at the enduring influence he has on present-day performance, and questions how inter-cultural and cross-cultural productions reconfigure him for alternative performances. An attempt is made to speak across many divides - from literature to theatre, from theory to practice.

Series Information:
Shakespeare Criticism

Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy is a unique look at the social and religious foundations of the tragic genre. Naomi Liebler asks whether it is possible to regard tragic heroes such as Coriolanus and King Lear as `sacrifical victims of the prevailing social order'.
A fascinating examination of Shakespearean tragedy, this extraordinary book will provoke excitment and controversy alike.

In "Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy" Naomi Conn Liebler offers a trenchant and challenging re-reading of the genre of Shakespearean tragedy. Extending the category of the "festive" to apply to tragedy as well as comedy, Liebler describes Shakespearean tragedy as a celebration of communal survival, and a demonstration of what happens when a community violates the ritual structures that define and preserve it.
Employing the works of drama theorists, such as Aristotle, Brecht and Girard, as well as cultural anthropologists, such as Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner and Mary Douglas, Liebler focuses upon tragedy as the formal representation of real social action and conflict. She views the community as a whole--not just the protagonist--as the real subject of the drama. The festive tragedy is concerned with ritual practice whose function is, as "King Lear's" Tom O'Bedlam put it, "to prevent the fiend and to kill vermin"--that is, to protect and purge. The violation of this ritual practice jeopardizes the survival of the entire community. Through a detailed analysis of a number of Shakespeare's great tragic works, "Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy" provides a series of fresh connections between the rituals of festivity and tragedy.

Series Information:
Shakespeare Criticism