'No one of Shakespeare's plays is harder to characterize', said Coleridge of Troilus and Cressida. Over the centuries, generations of critics have faced the challenge of determining exactly what sort of play Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is. Described by Victorian commentators as 'dark', 'decadent' and 'bitter', the work has, until now, retained its designation as a 'problem play'. In this ground-breaking study, leading Shakespeare scholar, W R Elton attempts to dismantle this presumption. His research places the play in the historical context of the Inns of Court law-revels tradition. By close analysis of the text, Elton demonstrates his belief that Troilus and Cressida was written specifically for an audience of law students and lawyers and that the play manifests many elements of a law-revel, including misrule, inversion, mock rhetoric and logic, and mock trials. In so doing, he provides explanations for many of the puzzling and mysterious elements that have previously baffled critics.

The 71st in the annual series of volumes devoted to Shakespeare study and production. The articles, like those of volume 70, are drawn from the World Shakespeare Congress, held 400 years after Shakespeare's death, in July/August 2016 in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. The theme is 'Re-Creating Shakespeare'.

Alongside Spenser, Sidney and the early Donne, Shakespeare is the major poet of the 16th century, largely because of the status of his remarkable sequence of sonnets. Professor Cousins' new book is the first comprehensive study of the Sonnets and narrative poems for over a decade. He focuses in particular on their exploration of self-knowledge, sexuality, and death, as well as on their ambiguous figuring of gender. Throughout he provides a comparative context, looking at the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries. The relation between Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse and his plays is also explored.

Philippa Berry draws on feminist theory, postmodern thought and queer theory, to challenge existing critical notions of what is fundamental to Shakespearean tragedy. She shows how, through a network of images clustered around feminine or feminized characters, these plays 'disfigure' conventional ideas of death as a bodily end, as their figures of women are interwoven with provocative meditations upon matter, time, the soul, and the body. The scope of these tragic speculations was radical in Shakespeare's day; yet they also have a surprising relevance to contemporary debates about time and matter in science and philosophy.

In the course of exploring the theatrical cultures of South and East Asia, eminent Shakespeareanist John Russell Brown developed some remarkable theories about the nature of performance, the state of Western 'Theatre' today, and the future potential of Shakespeare's plays.
In New Sites for Shakespeare he outlines his passionate belief in the power of theatre to reach mass audiences, based on his experiences of popular Asian performances. It is a personal polemic, but it is also a carefully argued and brilliantly persuasive study of the kind of theatrical experience Shakespeare's own contemporaries enjoyed.
This is a book which cannot be ignored by anyone who cares about the live performing arts today. Separate chapters consider staging, acting, improvisation, ceremonies and ritual, and an analysis of the experience of the audience is paramount throughout.

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.

This book introduces the students and the general reader to Shakespeare's tragedies and to the problems of interpreting them. Traditional questions and answers regarding the texts, as well as their realization in performance, are examined, and it is shown how the plays do not offer easy of final solutions to the tragic dilemmas presented, but engage the reader and spectator in a debate with more than one possible outcome. Each of the tragedies is examined separately, with discussions of its provenance, its stage history and critical history, and of the problems associated with its categorization as part of the 'tragic' genre. He refers widely to a representative body of Shakespearian criticism, and provides a useful bibliography which indicates the best sources for a reader wishing to pursue individual themes further. The book is carefully written and should serve as a valuable introduction for anyone wanting to gain a sense of the richness of the plays and the diversity of debate and interpretation that has surrounded them.

This is a survey of the small supporting roles, such as foils, feeds, attendants and messengers, that feature in Shakespeare's plays. Exploring topics such as how bit players should conduct themselves within a scene, and how blank verse or prose may be spoken to bring out the complexities of character definition, the book aims to bring insights to the dynamic of scenic construction in Shakespeare's work.;The author explores the different functions of minimal characters, from clearing the stage to epitomizing the overall effect of the comedy or tragedy, and discusses how they can extend the audience's knowledge of the social world of the play. She goes on to describe the entire corpus of minimal roles in a selection of six plays: "Richard III", "The Tempest", "King Lear", "Antony & Cleopatra", "Measure for Measure" and "Julius Caesar".;This edition has an appendix designed to aid directors in making decisions about the speaking parts of the minimal characters. It also includes an index of characters (including line references), as well as a detailed general index.

This is the first collection of critical essays devoted exclusively to Shakespeare's first published work, his long narrative poem Venus and Adonis, which established his reputation as the literary darling of London and the heir of Ovid. Particularly important is the book's coverage of the little-known presence of Venus and Adonis on stage.

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.

The Shakespearean Originals Series takes as its point of departure the question: "What is it that we read Shakespeare?" The answer may seem self-evident: we read the words that Shakespeare wrote. But do we? In the case of all the major editions of Shakespeare available in the market, the fact of the matter is that many of the words that we read in an edition of, say, Hamlet, never appeared in the text as it was printed during or shortly after Shakespeare's own lifetime. They are the interpetations and interpolations of a series of editors who have been systematically changing Shakespeare's text from the eighteenth century onwards. This volume offers the text of Measure for Measure, as printed in the 1623 First Folio.

A knowledge of the history and evolution of the tales on which Shakespeare drew in the composition of his plays is essential for the understanding of his work. In re-telling a particular story, a Renaissance writer was not simply reshaping the structure of the narrative but participating in a species of debate with earlier writers and the meanings their tales had accrued. The stories upon which Shakespeare's plays are constructed did not descend to him as innocent collections of incidents, but brought with them considerable cultural baggage, substantially lost to the modern spectator but an essential component, for a contemporary audience, of the meaning of the work. Shakespeare's Alternative Tales explores this literary dialogue, focusing on those plays in which the expectations generated by an inherited story are in some way overthrown, setting up a tension for a Renaissance spectator between 'received' and 'alternative' readings of the text. Each chapter opens with a familiar story, supplying a context for the subsequent discussion, and exhibits the way in which the dramatist's reworking of a traditional motif interrogates the assumptions implicit in his source. While offering the twentieth-century reader a fresh perspective from which to view the plays, the approach also supplies an introduction to contemporary readings of the Shakespearean canon. The tales Leah Scragg considers may be seen as 'alternative' in more than one sense: they radically rework conventional situations, while lending themselves to analysis in terms of new critical methodologies. The text will be of interest to both students of Shakespeare and the general reader. In conjunction with the author's companion volume, Shakespeare's Mouldy Tales, it provides an ideal introduction to contemporary developments in source studies.

The International Shakespeare Association meeting, held in Tokyo in August of 1991, was regarded by many of the participating academics as a milestone in terms of the quality of the papers given and extent to which the intercultural and cross-cultural study of Shakespeare had been developed. This volume contains the principal contributions (10) to the panel on Acting and Language in Shakespeare and Eastern Drama, specially edited for publication by Minoru Fujita who teaches at the Graduate School of Culture, University of Osaka, and Leonard Pronko, Professor of Theatre at Pomona College, Claremont, California. The papers are presented in three sections: Playhouses and Performances, Literary History, and Interpretation and Theoretical Issues.

This stimulating and accessible book is intended for instructors at the junior high school, high school, and undergraduate levels who present Shakespeare's most familiar tragedies to students who are largely unfamiliar with them. Acclaimed teacher of drama Victor L. Cahn begins with a general introduction, then examines six of Shakespeare's tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. With attention always directed towards inspiring student interest and response, Professor Cahn provides an overview or "spine" for each work, then proceeds scene by scene, focusing on salient characters, details of language, and major themes. The volume not only is entertaining and clear, but also raises provocative points of interpretation as well as numerous questions for discussion. Underlying the project is the conviction that although the plays are most effective in performance, they can nonetheless prove compelling in the classroom, where students can appreciate that although these works are set in a distant time and place, their issues and implications remain universal.

For Jeffrey Masten, the history of sexuality and the history of language are intimately related. In Queer Philologies, he studies particular terms that illuminate the history of sexuality in Shakespeare's time and analyzes the methods we have used to study sex and gender in literary and cultural history. Building on the work of theorists and historians who have, following Foucault, investigated the importance of words like "homosexual," "sodomy," and "tribade" in a variety of cultures and historical periods, Masten argues that just as the history of sexuality requires the history of language, so too does philology, "the love of the word," require the analytical lens provided by the study of sexuality. Masten unpacks the etymology, circulation, transformation, and constitutive power of key words within the early modern discourse of sex and gender-terms such as "conversation" and "intercourse," "fundament" and "foundation," "friend" and "boy"-that described bodies, pleasures, emotions, sexual acts, even (to the extent possible in this period) sexual identities. Analyzing the continuities as well as differences between Shakespeare's language and our own, he offers up a queer lexicon in which the letter "Q" is perhaps the queerest character of all.

This book explores the multiple portrayals of the actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber, king of the dunces, professional fop, defacer of Shakespeare and the cruel and unforgiving father of Charlotte Charke. But these portraits of Cibber are doubly partial, exposing even as they paper over gaps and biases in the archive while reflecting back modern desires and methodologies. The Colley Cibber 'everybody knows' has been variously constructed through the rise of English literature as both a cultural enterprise and an academic discipline, a process which made Shakespeare the 'nation's poet' and canonised Cibber's enemies Pope and Fielding; theatre history's narrative of the birth of naturalism; and the reclamation and celebration of Charlotte Charke by women's literary history. Each of these stories requires a Colley Cibber to be its butt, antithesis, and/or bete noir. This monograph challenges these partial histories and returns the theatre manager, playwright, poet laureate and bon viveur to the centre of eighteenth-century culture and cultural studies.

The meanings originally communicated by Elizabethan and Jacobean dress have long been confined to history. Why, then, have doublets, hose, ruffs and farthingales featured in many Shakespeare productions staged since the turn of the 21st century? This book scrutinizes the popular practice of costuming Shakespeare's plays in Elizabethan and Jacobean dress. It considers why this approach to design appeals to contemporary directors, designers and audiences, and how it has shaped the meaning of Shakespeare's works in specific performance contexts. Informed by original interviews with several prominent theatre practitioners, including Emma Rice, Gregory Doran, Jenny Tiramani, Simon Godwin, Stephen Brimson Lewis and Tom Piper, Shakespeare in Elizabethan Costume explores how various 21st-century Shakespeare productions have drawn on myths and desires associated with early modern clothing. Its discussions range from the practicalities of historical reconstruction to the appeal of early modern sartorial culture as an embodiment of wonder, spectacle and the supernatural. Productions discussed include Shakespeare's Globe's production of Henry V (1997), the National Theatre's Twelfth Night (2017) and the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Tempest (2016). Ella Hawkins examines the minutiae of modern design -- how seams are sewn, whence fabrics are sourced -- as well as the widespread cultural movements that have produced our modern relationship with the period of Shakespeare's lifetime. This is the first book to explore fully the significance of Elizabethan-inspired design in contemporary Shakespearean performance. Shakespeare in Elizabethan Costume reframes so-called 'period' costuming as a dynamic collection of practices capable of refashioning textual meanings, reflecting present-day political and societal shifts and confronting contemporary injustices.

One of a series on Shakespeare's original texts, including facsimile pages, this version of "Henry V" is claimed to be, in some ways, the most authentic version of the play that we have. Included are an introduction, notes, and a theoretical, historical and contextual critique. The original text - or First Quarto - of "Henry V", published in 1600, is missing the Chorus, a dramatic device which recent criticism has used to suggest a strikingly modern view of history and politics. These and other significant changes mean that critics can no longer assume that the play presents a distanced, ironic perspective on its own political and military action. If Elizabethan audiences saw in performance something closer to the First Folio than the 1623 Folio text, then their dramatic engagement with history was of a kind very different from that of the play's 20th-century interpreters. This new edition makes available the original text of "Henry V", in all its theatrical simplicity and historical difference.

In the 1590s, Shakespeare was working with and writing for the Lord Chamberlain's Men at The Theatre, Shoreditch while he was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate Street. Living with Shakespeare examines his parish, church, locale, neighbours and their potential influences on his writing--from the radical 'Paracelsian' doctors, musicians and public figures--to the international merchants who lived nearby. Packed with new discoveries from difficult-to-access manuscript records this book reveals the parish's complex social, religious, political and neighbourly intersections and influences. Taking a section of Shakespeare's life, (c. 1593-1598), as he evolved from new 'arriviste' in London to established theatre professional, the book examines the 100 or so families who lived in his parish and demonstrates how their interests, work and connections formed part of the background environment that Shakespeare probably borrowed from as he reworked existing stories. These people form a fascinating story, which sheds new light on the influences that shaped a great writer as he finished Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice and began to re-establish his family name, status and reputation. Marsh's ability to weave primary research and discoveries together with historical narratives, transports readers into Shakespeare's world and allows them a real glimpse into his daily life.

Hamlet's Dreams brings together the Robben Island Prison of Nelson Mandela and the prison that is Denmark for Shakespeare's Hamlet. David Shalkwyk uses the circulation of the so-called 'Robben Island Shakespeare', a copy of the Alexander edition of the Complete Works that was secretly circulated, annotated and signed by a group of Robben Island political prisoner in the 1970s (including Nelson Mandela), to examine the representation and experience of imprisonment in South African prison memoirs and Shakespeare's Hamlet. The book looks at the ways in which oppressive spaces or circumstances restrict the ways in which personal identity can be formed or formulated in relation to others. The 'bad dreams' that keep Hamlet from considering himself the 'king of infinite space' are, it argues, the need for other people that becomes especially evident in situations of real or psychological imprisonment.

Easy to use in the classroom or as a tool for revision, Oxford Literature Companions provide student-friendly analysis of a range of popular A Level set texts. Each book offers a lively, engaging approach to the text, covering characterisation and role, genre, context, language, themes, structure, performance and critical views, whilst also providing a range of varied and in-depth activities to deepen understanding and encourage close work with the text. Each book also includes a comprehensive Skills and Practice section, which provides detailed advice on assessment and a bank of exam-style questions and annotated sample student answers. This guide covers Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare, is suitable for all exam boards and for the most recent AS/A level specifications.

Published in 1594, under the title The Taming of a Shrew, this play has always been regarded as an earlier version by another dramatist, or as a corrupt memorial reconstruction of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Yet the version accepted as Shakespeare's was not published until the First Folio of 1623.

Teaching Shakespeare through performance has a long history, and active methods of teaching and learning are a logical complement to the teaching of performance. Virtual reality ought to be the logical extension of such active learning, providing an unrivalled immersive experience of performance that overcomes historical and geographical boundaries. But what are the key advantages and disadvantages of virtual reality, especially as it pertains to Shakespeare? And more interestingly, what can Shakespeare do for VR (rather than vice versa)? This Element, the first on its topic, explores the ways that virtual reality can be used in the classroom and the ways that it might radically change how students experience and think about Shakespeare in performance.

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'.