The most familiar assertion of Shakespeare scholarship is that he is our contemporary. Shakespeare After Theory provocatively argues that he is not, but what value he has for us must at least begin with a recognition of his distance from us. David Scott Kastan compellingly restores Shakespeare's plays to the rich densities of the world in which and to which they were created.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203901657

The most familiar assertion of Shakespeare scholarship is that he is our contemporary. Shakespeare After Theory provocatively argues that he is not, but what value he has for us must at least begin with a recognition of his distance from us. David Scott Kastan compellingly restores Shakespeare's plays to the rich densities of the world in which and to which they were created.

World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright's insight into bad (and often mad) rulers. Examining the psyche-and psychoses-of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear and Coriolanus, Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the disasters visited upon the societies over which these characters rule. Tyrant shows that Shakespeare's work remains vitally relevant today, not least in its probing of the unquenchable, narcissistic appetites of demagogues and the self-destructive willingness of collaborators who indulge them.

Published in 1999. Shakespeare is 'the great author of America' declared James Fenimore Cooper in 1828. The ambiguous resonance of this claim is fully borne out in this collection of writings on Shakespeare by over forty prominent Americans, spanning the period between the War of independence and the outbreak of the First World War. Featured writers include: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. The essays, many of which are reprinted here for the first time, are arranged in chronological order and provide a fascinating conspectus of American attitudes to Shakespeare, from Revolutionary and Transcendentalist approaches through to the influential interventions of professional American critics in the early twentieth century. The extraordinary and bizarre contribution to the Shakespeare debut by Delia Bacon is exemplified by the inclusion of her 1856 article which is reprinted in its entirety. Americans on Shakespeare charts the emergence of an American literary tradition, and the gradual appropriation of Shakespeare as part of the American search for cultural identity; an identity whose domination is set to continue into the twenty-first century.

Rome and the Spirit of Caesar, providing a fresh interpretation of Julius Caesar, is a thorough examination of Shakespeare's presentation of the final throes of republican Rome's political decay and demise and the rise of Caesarism. As in his previous studies of Shakespeare's plays, Blits, pursuing his distinctive approach, follows Caesar through, scene by scene, speech by speech, line by line, reaching his conclusions by closely examining Shakespeare's text. Approaching the play as a coherent whole, he examines the whole in the light of its parts and the parts in the light of the whole. Since each presupposes the other, he considers the whole and its parts together. He carefully relates the play's details to its major themes and grounds the themes in, and supports them by, the details. While intruding no literary theory on the play, Blits brings out the historical and perennial political substance that Shakespeare deliberately put into it. He shows that Caesar is a work of historical poetry, shaped by Shakespeare's mastery of the Roman histories and the Hellenistic philosophies bearing directly on his subject. Topics include the love of honor and fame, heroic ambition and glory, virtue and honor, civic strife, political murder, the role of political oratory, public versus private interests, Caesarism, the decay of liberty, loyalty, demagoguery, luxury, spiritedness, superstition, Stoicism and Epicureanism, manliness, friendship, moral intimidation, political imprudence, foreign and civil war, universal empire, and the advent of Christianity.

This volume bears potent testimony, not only to the dense complexity of Hamlet's emotional dynamics, but also to the enduring fascination that audiences, adaptors, and academics have with what may well be Shakespeare's moodiest play. Its chapters explore emotion in Hamlet, as well as the myriad emotions surrounding Hamlet's debts to the medieval past, its relationship to the cultural milieu in which it was produced, its celebrated performance history, and its profound impact beyond the early modern era. Its component chapters are not unified by a single methodological approach. Some deal with a single emotion in Hamlet, while others analyse the emotional trajectory of a single character, and still others focus on a given emotional expression (e.g., sighing or crying). Some bring modern methodologies for studying emotion to bear on Hamlet, others explore how Hamlet anticipates modern discourses on emotion, and still others ask how Hamlet itself can complicate and contribute to our current understanding of emotion.

In How and Why We Teach Shakespeare, 19 distinguished college teachers and directors draw from their personal experiences and share their methods and the reasons why they teach Shakespeare. The collection is divided into four sections: studying the text as a script for performance; exploring Shakespeare by performing; implementing specific techniques for getting into the plays; and working in different classrooms and settings. The contributors offer a rich variety of topics, including: working with cues in Shakespeare, such as line and mid-line endings that lead to questions of interpretation seeing Shakespeare's stage directions and the Elizabethan playhouse itself as contributing to a play's meaning using the "gamified" learning model or cue-cards to get into the text thinking of the classroom as a rehearsal playing the Friar to a student's Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet teaching Shakespeare to inner-city students or in a country torn by political and social upheavals. For fellow instructors of Shakespeare, the contributors address their own philosophies of teaching, the relation between scholarship and performance, and-perhaps most of all-why in this age the study of Shakespeare is so important. Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780367190798_oachapter10.pdf

This book explores ways in which Shakespeare's writing strategies shape our embodied perception of objects - both real and imaginary - in four of his plays. Taking the reader on a series of perceptual journeys, it engages in an exciting dialogue between the disciplines of phenomenology, cognitive studies, historicist research and modern acting techniques, in order to probe our sentient and intuitive responses to Shakespeare's language. What happens when we encounter objects on page and stage; and how we can imagine that impact in performance? What influences might have shaped the language that created them; and what do they reveal about our response to what we see and hear? By placing objects under the phenomenological lens, and scrutinising them as vital conduits between lived experience and language, this book illuminates Shakespeare's writing as a rich source for investigation into the way we think, feel and communicate as embodied beings.

This work offers an assessment of appropriations of Shakespeare that respond to the enduring impositions of colonialism. Through a range of readings, Thomas Cartelli illuminates texts and events that position themselves in relation or response to Shakespeare, such as: polemical essays by Walt Whitman; the 19th-century play, "Jack Cade", commissioned and staged by the first major American Shakespeare actor; an essay on labour-management reform by social activist Jane Addams; novels by Aphra Behn, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Michelle Cliff, Tayeb Salih, Nadine Gordimer and Robert Stone; the 1849 Astor Place Riot; and a 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary celebration performance at the City College Campus of New York. Divided into three sections, Part One examines US contentions with Shakespeare and argues that they witness a failure to develop models of subjectivity that break from the heroic, and paternalist bias of Shakespearean drama. Part Two focuses on the role of "The Tempest" in postcolonial formulations of power and identity, and the efforts to write postcolonial subjectivities that extend beyond its orbit. Part Three treats the colonial afterlife and postcolonial career of the so-called "O

Repositioning Shakespeare offers an original assessment of a broad range of texts and cultural events that appropriate Shakespeare. Examining these materials within the context of 'the nation' in a postcolonial era, Thomas Cartelli considers:
* essays by Walt Whitman
* the nineteenth-century play, 'Jack Cade'
* novels by Aphra Behn, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Michelle Cliff, Tayeb Salih, Nadine Gordimer and Robert Stone
* the 1849 Astor Place Riot
Cartelli places particular emphasis on redefining the 'postcolonial' in order to find a place for America. In doing so, Repositioning Shakespeare makes a considerable contribution to the continuing debate about the uses we make of Shakespeare.

This volume is a comprehensive overview of scholarship on this play. It includes chapters on criticism, sources and background, textual studies, bibliographies, editions, and translations. Also covered are the stage history and major productions of the play, and films, music, television, and adaptations and synopses.

Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays is the essential Sonnets anthology for our time. This important collection focuses exclusively on contemporary criticism of the Sonnets, reprinting three highly influential essays from the past decade and including sixteen original analyses by leading scholars in the field. The contributors' diverse approaches range from the new historicism to the new bibliography, from formalism to feminism, from reception theory to cultural materialism, and from biographical criticism to queer theory. In addition, James Schiffer's introduction offers a comprehensive survey of 400 years of criticism of these fascinating, enigmatic poems.

The period between 1585 (when Elizabeth formally committed her military support to the Dutch wars against Spain) and 1604 (when James at last brought it to an end) was one in which English life was preoccupied by the menace and actuality of war. The same period spans English drama's coming of age, from Tamburlaine to Hamlet. In this thought-provoking book, Nick de Somogyi draws on a wide range of contemporary military literature (news-letters and war-treatises, maps and manuals), to demonstrate how deeply wartime experience influenced the production and reception of Elizabethan theatre. In a series of vivid parallels, the roles of soldier and actor, the setting of battlefield and stage, and the context of playhouse and muster are shown to have been rooted in the common experience of war. The local armoury served as a props department; the stage as a military lecture-hall. News from the front line has always been shrouded in the fog of war. Shakespeare's Rumour is here seen as kindred to such equally dubious messengers as his Armado, Falstaff or Pistol; soldiers have always told tall tales, military ghost-stories that are here shown to have seeped into such narratives as The Spanish Tragedy and Henry V. This book concludes with a sustained account of Hamlet, a play which both dramatises the Elizabethan context of war-fever, and embodies in its three variant texts the war and peace that shaped its production. By affording scrutiny to each of its title's components, Shakespeare's Theatre of War provides a compelling argument for reassessing the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries within the enduring context of the military culture and wartime experience of his age.

This study analyses concepts and representations of the soul in the poetry of William Shakespeare and John Donne. It shows how the soul becomes a linking element between the genres of poetry and drama, and how poetry becomes dramatic whenever the soul is at its focus. This double movement can be observed in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and Donne's Holy Sonnets: in these texts, the connection between interiority and performance, psychology and religious self-care can be found, which is central to the understanding of early modern drama and its characteristic development of the soliloquy. The study thus offers a new reading of the poems by Shakespeare and Donne by analysing them, in different ways, as staged dialogues within the soul. It contributes to research on the soliloquy as much as on concepts of inwardness during the early modern period. The book is aimed at readers studying early modern literature and culture. -- .

Postcolonial Shakespeares is an exciting step forward in the dialogue between postcolonial studies and Shakespearean criticism. This unique volume features original work by some of the leading critics within the growing field of Shakespeare studies and is the most authoritative collection on this topic to date.
This study explores:
* the colonial and racial discourses emerging in early modern Britain
* how the Shakespearean text later became a colonial battlefield
* how Shakespeare circulates in our post- and neo-colonial world today
This collection of new essays traces the connections between early modern and contemporary vocabularies of colonization, 'race' and nationhood.

This book is a concise single volume guide to studying Shakespeare, covering practical as well as theoretical issues. The text deals with the major topics on a chapter-by-chapter basis, starting with why we study Shakespeare, through Shakespeare and multimedia, to a final chapter on Shakespeare and Theory. Current trends and recent developments in Shakespearean studies are also discussed, with an emphasis on the contextualisation of Shakespeare, historical appropriations of his work and the debate concerning his place in the literary canon. Extensive reference is made to a variety of developing media, e.g. film, audio cassette, video, CD-Rom and global digital networks, bringing the study of Shakespeare into the twentieth century.

A fresh look at a play usually regarded as the first component of a three-part historical epic, this edition argues that Henry VI Part 1 is a 'prequel', a freestanding piece that returns for ironic and dramatic effect to a story already familiar to its audience. The play's ingenious use of stage space is closely analysed, as is its manipulation of a series of setpiece combats to give a coherent syntax of action. Discussion of the dramatic structure created by the opposing figures of Talbot and Jeanne la Pucelle, and exploration of the critical controversies surrounding the figure of Jeanne, lead to a reflection on the nature of the history play as genre in the 1590s.

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, with marginal notes and explanations and full descriptions of each character.

The chapters in this book constitute a timely response to an important moment for early modern cultural studies: the academy has been called to attend to questions of social justice. It requires a revision of the critical lexicon to be able to probe the relationship between Shakespeare studies and the intractable forms of social injustice that infuse cultural, political and economic life. This volume helps us to imagine what radical and transformative pedagogy, theatre-making and scholarship might look like. The contributors both invoke and invert the paradigm of Global Shakespeare, building on the vital contributions of this scholarly field over the past few decades but also suggesting ways in which it cannot quite accommodate the various 'global Shakespeares' presented in these pages. A focus on social justice, and on the many forms of social injustice that demand our attention, leads to a consideration of the North/South constructions that have tended to shape Global Shakespeare conceptually, in the same way the material histories of 'North' and 'South' have shaped global injustice as we recognise it today. Such a focus invites us to consider the creative ways in which Shakespeare's imagination has been taken up by theatre-makers and scholars alike, and marshalled in pursuit of a more just world.

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.

Drawing upon the work of anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists, Marjorie Garber examines the rites of passage and maturation patterns--"coming of age"--in Shakespeare's plays. Citing examples from virutally the entire Shakespeare canon, she pays particular attention to the way his characters grow and change at points of personal crisis. Among the crises Garber discusses are: separation from parent or sibling in preparation for sexual love and the choice of husband or wife; the use of names and nicknames as a sign of individual exploits or status; virginity, sexual initiation and the acceptance of sexual maturity, childbearing and parenthood; and, finally, attitudes toward death and dying.
In this fascinating and original analysis, Marjorie Garber explores the ways in which the Shakespearean protagonist is challenged to change as his or her circumstances change--to adapt to the world and the people around him, and to come to terms with the nature and finitude of the human condition.

Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism examines Yeats s writing on Shakespeare in the context of his work on behalf of the Irish Literary Revival. While Shakespeare s verse drama provides a source of inspiration for Yeats s poetry and plays, Yeats also writes about Shakespeare in essays and articles promoting the ideals of the Revival, and on behalf of Irish literary nationalism. These prose pieces reveal Yeats thinking about Shakespeare s art and times throughout his career, and taken together they offer a new perspective on the contours of Yeats s cultural politics. This book identifies three stages of Yeats s cultural nationalism, each of which appropriates England s national poet in an idiosyncratic manner, while reflecting contemporary trends in Shakespeare reception. Thus Yeats s fin-de-siecle Shakespeare is a Symbolist poet and folk-artist whose pre-modern sensibility detaches him from contemporary English culture and aligns him with the inhabitants of Ireland s rural margins. Next, in the opening decade of the twentieth century, following his visit to Stratford to see the Benson history cycle, Yeats s work for the Irish National Theatre adopts an avant-garde, occultist stagecraft to develop an Irish dramatic repertoire capable of unifying its audience in a shared sense of nationhood. Yeats writes frequently about Shakespeare during this period, locating on the Elizabethan stage the kind of transformational emotional affect he sought to recover in the Abbey Theatre. Finally, as Ireland moves towards political independence, Yeats turns again to Shakespeare to register his disappointment with the social and cultural direction of the nascent Irish state. In each case, Yeats s thinking about Shakespeare responds to the remarkable conflation of aesthetic and religious philosophies constituting his cultural nationalism, thus making a unique case of Shakespearean reception. Taken together, Yeats s writings deracinate Shakespeare, and so contribute significantly to the process by which Shakespeare has come to be seen as a global artist, rather than a specifically English possession."

Engendering a Nation adopts a sophisticated feminist analysis to examine the place of gender in contesting representations of nationhood in early modern England. Plays featured include:
* King John
* Henry VI, Part I
* Henry VI, Part II
* Henry, Part III
* Richard III
* Richard II
* Henry V
Engendering a Nation
It will be a must for students and scholars interested in the cultural and social implications of Shakespeare today.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203205103

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