"The Death of the Actor" reveals the tragicomic impotence of the actor confronting Shakespeare's dramatic text. Because actors are absent from the site of Shakespeare's meaning, Martin Buzacott argues, the illusion of their centrality is sustained only by a rhetoric of heroism, violence, and imperialism. This book examines those myths through which Shakespearean actors sustain their authority, and launches an all out attack on contemporary theatre practice and performance theory which identify the actor, rather than the director, as the key creative force in the performance of Shakespeare.
Contemporary studies of Shakespeare in performance are influenced, Buzacott suggests, by the current vogue for identifying actors as respectable social and political figures, rather than thieves and vagabonds, as they were viewed in Shakespeare's time. In contrast, he defends Romantic critics like Lamb and Coleridge for their presumed preference for reading Shakespeare's plays rather than seeing them performed.

The purpose of this book is to honor the scholarly legacy of Charles R. Forker with a series of essays that address the problem of literary influence in original ways and from a variety of perspectives. The emphasis throughout is on the sort of careful, exhaustive, evidence-based scholarship to which Forker dedicated his entire professional life. Although wide-ranging and various by design, the essays in this book never lose sight of three discrete yet overlapping areas of literary inquiry that create a unity of perspective amid the diversity of approaches: 1) the formation of play texts, textual analysis, and editorial practice; 2) performance history and the material playing conditions from Shakespeare's time to the present, including film as well as stage representations; and 3) the world, both cultural and literary, in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked and to which they bequeathed an artistic legacy that continues to be re-interpreted and re-defined by a whole new set of cultural and literary pressures. Eschewing any single, predetermined ideological perspective, the essays in this book call our attention to how the simplest questions or observations can open up provocative and unexpected scholarly vistas. In so doing, they invite us into a subtly re-configured world of literary influence that draws us into new, often unexpected, ways of seeing and understanding the familiar.

An original reading of Shakespeare's plays illuminating his negotiations with mothers, present and absent, and tracing the genesis of Shakespearean tragedy and romance to a psychologized version of the Fall.

Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.

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.

This book is a study of four of Shakespeare's major tragedies - "Hamlet", "Othello", "King Lear" and "Macbeth". It looks at these plays in a variety of contexts - both in isolation and in relation to each other and to the cultural, ideological, social and political contexts which produced them.

Part of the Heinemenn Advanced Shakespeare series of plays for A Level students, this version of Hamlet includes notes which should bridge the gap between GCSE and A Level, and space for students' own annotation. The text includes activities and assignments after each act.

This title was first published in 2002: An intensive study of Shakespeare's most ambitious and complex achievement in the historical mode. The book offers an account of the play's critical history from 1700 until the 1980s, deals with the aspects of Tudor history relevant to an understanding, and offers close readings of the text structured around what the author believes to be the play's three dominant concepts: time; truth; and grace. In an attempt to correct what he sees as a certain falsification of critical history, the author aligns his account of the play's reception with one of its major preoccupations - the inescapable and informing presence of the past.

We traditionally assume that the `meaning' of each of Shakespeares plays is bequeathed to it by the Bard. It is as if, to the information which used to be given in theatrical programmes, `Cigarettes by Abdullah, Costumes by Motley, Music by Mendelssohn', we should add `Meaning by Shakespeare'. These essays rest on a different, almost opposite, principle. Developing the arguments of the same author's That Shakespearean Rag (1986), they put the case that Shakespeare's plays have no essential meanings, but function as resources which we use to generate meaning. A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure, Coriolanus and King Lear, amongst other plays, are examined as concrete instances of the covert process whereby, in the twentieth century, Shakespeare doesn't mean: we mean by Shakespeare. Meaning by Shakespeare concludes with `Bardbiz', a review of recent critical approaches to Shakespeare, which initiated a long-running debate (1990-1991) when it first appeared in The London Review of Books.

In 1600, after a decade spent establishing himself as the most popular and successful playwright of his generation, Shakespeare found himself having to compete with new and younger writers. At the same time he had to face the challenge of new theatres designed for a better class of audience, which looked as though they might cream off some of his most valued customers. Difficult as it may be to believe that Shakespeare faced such commercial and artistic pressures, common sense and hard historical fact tell us that he did not work in isolation from the theatrical world in which he was so spectacular a success. In "Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights" David Farley-Hills gives an interpretation of seven of Shakespeare's plays from 1600 to 1606 in the light of pressures exerted by his major stage rivals. He argues that Shakespeare responded to the problem with a double strategy; attempting to compete with the new fashions of the covered theatres with plays such as "Troilus and Cressida", "All's Well That Ends Well", and "Measure for Measure"; and rivalling the work of the open theatres with the tragedies "Hamlet", "Othello", and "King Lear".

This book deals with Shakespeare's role in contemporary culture. It looks in detail at the way that Shakespeare's plays inform modern ideas of cultural value and the work required to make Shakespeare part of modern culture. It is unique in using social policy, anthropology and economics, as well as close readings of the playwright, to show how a text from the past becomes part of contemporary culture and how Shakespeare's writing informs modern ideas of cultural value. It goes beyond the twentieth-century cultural studies debates that argued the case for and against Shakespeare's status, to show how he can exist both as a free artistic resource and as a branded product in the cultural marketplace. It will appeal not only to scholars studying Shakespeare, but also to educators and any reader interested in contemporary cultural policy. -- .

This book explores how humans in the Renaissance lived with, attended to, and considered the minds, feelings, and sociality of other creatures. It examines how Renaissance literature and natural history display an unequal creaturely world: all creatures were categorized hierarchically. However, post-Cartesian readings of Shakespeare and other Renaissance literature have misunderstood Renaissance hierarchical creaturely relations, including human relations. Using critical animal studies work and new materialist theory, Bach argues that attending closely to creatures and objects in texts by Shakespeare and other writers exposes this unequal world and the use and abuse of creatures, including people. The book also adds significantly to animal studies by showing how central bird sociality and voices were to Renaissance human culture, with many believing that birds were superior to some humans in song, caregiving, and companionship. Bach shows how Descartes, a central figure in the transition to modern ideas about creatures, lived isolated from humans and other creatures and denied ancient knowledge about other creatures' minds, especially bird minds. As significantly, Bach shows how and why Descartes' ideas appealed to human grandiosity. Asking how Renaissance categorizations of creatures differ so much from modern classifications, and why those modern classifications have shaped so much animal studies work, this book offers significant new readings of Shakespeare's and other Renaissance texts. It will contribute to a range of fields, including Renaissance literature, history, animal studies, new materialism, and the environmental humanities.

Created when James I granted royal patronage to the former Chamberlain's Men in 1603, the King's Men were the first playing company to exercise a transformative influence on Shakespeare's plays. Not only did Shakespeare write his plays with them in mind, but they were also the first group to revive his plays, and the first to have them revised, either by Shakespeare himself or by other dramatists after his retirement. Drawing on theatre history, performance studies, cultural history and book history, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men reappraises the company as theatre artists, analysing in detail the performance practices, cultural contexts and political pressures that helped to shape and reshape Shakespeare's plays between 1603 and 1642. Reconsidering casting and acting styles, staging and playing venues, audience response, influence and popularity, and local, national and international politics, the book presents case-studies of performances of Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Richard II, Henry VIII, Othello and Pericles alongside a broader reappraisal of the repertory of the company and the place of Shakespeare's plays within it.

Eating and drinking-vital to all human beings-were of central importance to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Culinary Shakespeare, the first collection devoted solely to the study of food and drink in Shakespeare's plays, reframes questions about cuisine, eating, and meals in early modern drama. As a result, Shakespearean scenes that have long been identified as important and influential by scholars can now be considered in terms of another revealing cultural marker-that of culinary dynamics. Renaissance scholars, as David Goldstein and Amy Tigner point out, have only begun to grapple with the importance of cuisine in literature. An earlier generation of criticism concerned itself principally with cataloguing the foodstuffs in the plays. Recent analyses have operated largely within debates about humoralism and dietary literature, consumption, and interiority, working to historicize food in relation to the early modern body. The essays in Culinary Shakespeare build upon that prior focus on individual bodily experience but also transcend it, emphasizing the aesthetic, communal, and philosophical aspects of food, while also presenting valuable theoretical background. As various essays demonstrate, many of the central issues in Shakespeare studies can be elucidated by turning our attention to the study of food and drink. The societal and religious associations of drink, for example, or the economic implications of ingredients gathered from other lands, have meaningful implications for our understanding of both early modern and contemporary periods-including aspects of community, politics, local and global food production, biopower and the state, addiction, performativity, posthumanism, and the relationship between art and food. Culinary Shakespeare seeks to open new interpretive possibilities and will be of interest to scholars and students of Shakespeare and the early modern period as well as to those in food studies, food history, ecology, gender and domesticity, and critical theory.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203359046

Originally published in 1991. Essays here are arranged chronologically within sections: 'The Play as Text', 'Shylock' and 'The Play in the Theatre.' Collecting previously published important commentaries and scholarly articles, this volume in the Shakespearean Criticism set looks at one of the Bard's most disturbing plays. These historical critical pieces give witness to the changing attitudes to the play and the characters and provide readers with a wide range of material relating both to performances and to textual readings.

Shakespeare and the Future of Theory convenes internationally renowned Shakespeare scholars, and scholars of the Early Modern period, and presents, discusses, and evaluates the most recent research and information concerning the future of theory in relation to Shakespeare's corpus. Original in its aim and scope, the book argues for the critical importance of thinking Shakespeare now, and provides extensive reflections and profound insights into the dialogues between Shakespeare and Theory. Contributions explore Shakespeare through the lens of design theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, Derrida and Foucault, amongst others, and offer an innovative interdisciplinary analysis of Shakespeare's work. This book was originally published as two special issues of English Studies.

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the Western world and most certainly its greatest playwright. His actual relationship to Western civilization has not, however, been thoroughly investigated. At a time when that civilization, as well as its premier dramatist, is subjected to severe and increasing criticism for both its supposed crimes against the rest of the world and its fundamental principles, a reassessment of the culture of the West is overdue. Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization offers an unprecedented account of how the playwright draws upon his civilization's unique culture and illuminates its basic features. Rather than a treatment of all the works, R.V. Young focuses on how some of Shakespeare's best and most well-known plays dramatize the West's conception of social institutions and historical developments such as love and marriage, ethnic and racial prejudice, political order, colonialism, and religion. Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization provides a spirited defense of the West and its greatest poet at a time when both are the object of virulent academic and political hostility.

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.

The twenty-eight essays of this collection, first published in 1962, are the work of distinguished British, Canadian, and American scholars. The essays range widely over the field of Elizabethan drama, concentrating attention on Shakespeare and Marlowe but not neglecting earlier dramatists such as Kyd and Greene or later ones such as Heywood and Massinger. Among the general topics treated are the staging of the interludes, intrigue in Elizabethan tragedy, and Jacobean stage pastoralism. This title will be of interest to students of English literature.

The problem of justice seems to have haunted Shakespeare as it haunted Renaissance Christendom. In this book, first published in 1963, four aspects of the problems of justice in action in Shakespeare's great tragedies are explored. This study is based on the lifetime's research of Elizabethan habits of mind by one of the most distinguished Shakespearean scholars, and will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.

The genius of Shakespeare is not always accessible or easily understandable to readers and audiences. Leon Kellner points out that sometimes Shakespeare's languages does not make sense at all but this is not necessarily because his metaphors are too complex. Rather, the printing of his works is often filled with errors. Originally published in 1925, Kellner's work explores the reasons and potential mistakes which may account for the unintelligible passages in Shakespeare such as handwriting, abbreviations, and the confusing of pronouns. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature and Linguistics.

The question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays has been the subject of furious debate among scholars for over 150 years. Everything known about the facts of William Shakespeare's life seems incompatible with the extraordinary genius of his writing. How could a man who left school at the age of 13, and apparently never travelled abroad have authored the incomparable Sonnets or so intricately described Renaissance Venice? Shakespeare 'candidates' abound, among them Sir Francis Bacon, The Earl of Oxford, even Queen Elizabeth I herself, but none have stood up to serious scrutiny. Until now.... This remarkable, intriguing, and provocative book offers a completely plausible new candidate; Sir Henry Neville.

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina Leon Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female sexuality that recur in the form of a slander narrative throughout William Shakespeare's work. She argues that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. While men's accusations are built on a foundation of political, religious, legal, and domestic discourses about men's superiority to, and rule over, women, whose weaker natures render them perpetually suspect, women's bonds with other women animate defenses of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of patrilineal power that undergirds masculine privileges in marriage, and signify a discursive shift that constitutes the site of agency within a system of oppression that ought to prohibit such agency. That women's agency in the early modern period must be tied to the formations of power that officially demand their subjection need not undermine their acts. In what Alfar calls Shakespeare's cuckoldry plays, women's rhetoric of defense is both subject to the discourse of sexual honor and finds a ground on which to "shift it" as women take control of and replace sexual slander with their own narratives of marital betrayal.

Shakespeare Left and Right brings together critics, strikingly different in their politics and methodologies, who are acutely aware of the importance of politics on literary practice and theory. Should, for example, feminist criticism be subjected to a critique by voices it construes as hostile to its political agenda? Is it possible to present a critique of feminist criticism without implicitly impeding its politics? And, in the light of recent political events should the Right pronounce the demise of Marxism as a social science and interpretive tool? The essays in Shakespeare Left and Right, first published in 1991, present a tug of war about ideology, acted out over the body of Shakespeare. Part One focuses on the challenge thrown down by Richard Levin's widely discussed "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy". Part Two considers these issues in relation to critical practice and the reading of specific plays. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics interested in Shakespeare studies.