These popular editions allow 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. Each note, each gloss, each commentary reflects the stage life of the play with constant reference to the challenge of the text in performance. 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. Shakespeare's shortest play tells the story of Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus, who, fearing the possibility of a dictator-led empire, betrays Caesar to protect Rome. Little does he know that Cassius has been holding the strings, manipulating Brutus into exploiting Caesar's weakness and removing him from power with the help of fellow conspirers. Contemplating motives for murder, national allegiance, and divine right, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is a unique look at the true events surrounding Caesar's assassination in 44 B.C.

The standard analytical approach to teaching Shakespeare does not tend to help students understand the theatricality of the Bard's plays and can leave them with an overly dry, disconnected view of Shakespeare. Designed to address this problem, Holistic Shakespeare combines analysis with creative learning methods. Holistic Shakespeare acts as a guide for teachers as well as enabling students to feel as if they are in the stands of the Globe Theatre actually watching the play. This book is designed to explain the methodologies and values of the holistic educational model, which is directed toward whole-brain, integrated and experiential learning that motivates students to think deeply about the interlinks between what they learn in the classroom and the significant moral and ethical questions that impact their everyday lives. Further, in the holistic Shakespeare classroom, application of these foundational concepts opens up a fertile pathway that leads students toward a more intimate understanding of how Shakespeare thought - about himself, his relationships and his environment. In holistic education, WHOLENESS (or holism) describes an integrated curricular approach that places value on the complete learner and cultivates every student's unique potential to become active, thinking and caring contributors to the larger world. Holistic Shakespeare embraces the text's definitive status as a theatrical script, making performance-based activities an indispensable instructional tool. Like the exciting creative buzz that pervades the rehearsal room, the holistic learning environment is active, process-oriented, cooperative and exploratory, which restores true ownership of the educational journey to the place where it belongs - in the hands of the student. Performance-based teaching has reinvigorated the Shakespeare classroom in recent decades.

Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Centre showcases a wide array of recent, innovative and original research into Shakespeare and learning in Australasia, in secondary, tertiary and adult education. Premised on the dissolution of the centre/colony binary that for so long structured the reception and teaching of Shakespeare in the colonies, the book explores the use of local knowledge and experience to invigorate and renew learning. In elevating the value of the 'local', the book provides models of educational theory and practice that are transferable and adaptable. The editors have drawn on contributors with diverse areas of expertise including dramatic practitioners, historicist scholars, school teachers and academics who train teachers, and literary scholars with an interest in new theoretical and practical approaches to pedagogy.

Shakespeare's women rarely reach the end of the play alive. Whether by murder or by suicide, onstage or off, female actors in Shakespeare's works often find themselves 'playing dead.' But what does it mean to 'play dead', particularly for women actors, whose bodies become scrutinized and anatomized by audiences and fellow actors who 'grossly gape on'? In what ways does playing Shakespeare's women when they are dead emblematize the difficulties of playing them while they are still alive? Ultimately, what is at stake for the female actor who embodies Shakespeare's women today, dead or alive? Situated at the intersection of the creative and the critical, Performing Shakespeare's Women: Playing Dead engages performance history, current scholarship and the practical problems facing the female actor of Shakespeare's plays when it comes to 'playing dead' on the contemporary stage and in a post-feminist world. This book explores the consequences of corpsing Shakespeare's women, considering important ethical questions that matter to practitioners, students and critics of Shakespeare today.

This book tells the forgotten story of the Shakespeare Hut, a vast, mock-Tudor building for New Zealand Anzac soldiers visiting London on leave from the front lines. Constructed in Bloomsbury in 1916, the Hut was to be the only built memorial to mark Shakespeare's Tercentenary in the midst of war. With a purpose-built performance space, its tiny stage hosted the biggest theatrical stars of the age. The Hut is a vivid and unique case study in cultural memory and performance of Shakespeare. One extraordinary building brings together Shakespeare's place in First World War theatre, in emerging new post-colonial identities, the story of Shakespearean performance in the twentieth century and in the struggle for women's suffrage. Grant Ferguson transports you to the Hut and its lively, idiosyncratic world. From a feminist-led stage to a hub of Indian intellectual and political debate, from a Shakespeare memorial to an Anzac social club, this is the story of a building truly at a crossroads.

Explores the challenges of maintaining bonds, living up to ideals, and fulfilling desire in Shakespeare's plays In Thinking About Shakespeare, Kay Stockholder reveals the rich inner lives of some of Shakespeare's most enigmatic characters and the ways in which their emotions and actions shape and are shaped by the social and political world around them. In addressing all genres in the Shakespeare canon, the authors explore the possibility of people being constant to each other in many different kinds of relationships: those of lovers, kings and subjects, friends, and business partners. While some bonds are irrevocably broken, many are reaffirmed. In all cases, the authors offer insight into what drives Shakespeare's characters to do what they do, what draws them together or pulls them apart, and the extent to which bonds can ever be eternal. Ultimately, the most durable bond may be between the playwright and the audience, whereby the playwright pleases and the audience approves. The book takes an in-depth look at a dozen of The Bard's best-loved works, including: A Midsummer Night's Dream; Romeo and Juliet; The Merchant of Venice; Richard II; Henry IV, Part I; Hamlet; Troilus and Cressida; Othello; Macbeth; King Lear; Antony and Cleopatra; and The Tempest. It also provides an epilogue titled: Prospero and Shakespeare. Written in a style accessible for all levels Discusses 12 plays, making it a comprehensive study of Shakespeare's work Covers every genre of The Bard's work, giving readers a full sense of Shakespeare's art/thought over the course of his oeuvre Provides a solid overall sense of each play and the major characters/plot lines in them Providing new and sometimes unconventional and provocative ways to think about characters that have had a long critical heritage, Thinking About Shakespeare is an enlightening read that is perfect for scholars, and ideal for any level of student studying one of history's greatest storytellers.

First Published in 2002. This is a collection of essays and commentary on the later Shakespearian tragedies of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Anthony and Cleopatra and Richard II.

First Published in 2002. This is a collection of essays and commentary on some of Shakespeare's Sonnets looking at the areas of symbolism, time and eternity, integration and their expansion and moves onto the metaphysical poem of the Phoenix and the Turtle and considers if it has the same love as celebrated in the Sonnets.

First published in 2002. This is the Volume III of the five G. Wilson Knight collected works series and focuses on Shakespeare's tragic heroes for his early to later tragedies or Timon of Athens, Anthony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. This book has grown from Knight's dramatic recital 'Shakespeare's Dramatic Challenge', and therefore includes a prefatory note on his stage experience. The complete record, with illustrations, has already been documented in Shakespearian Production (enlarged 1964), but a rather more personal account is offered here.

Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia is a nearly unique transnational study of the theater / performance traditions of early modern Spain and England. Divided into three parts, the book focuses first on translating for the stage, examining diverse approaches to the topic. It asks, for example, whether plays should be translated to sound as if they were originally written in the target language or if their foreignness should be maintained and even highlighted. Section II deals with interpretation and considers such issues as uses of polyphony, the relationship between painting and theater, and representations of women. Section III highlights performance issues such as music in modern performances of classical theater and the construction of stage character. Written by a highly respected group of British and American scholars and theater practitioners, this book challenges the traditional divide between the academy and stage practitioners and between one theatrical culture and another.

The concept of the just war poses one of the most important ethical questions to date. Can war ever be justified and, if so, how? When is a cause of war proportional to its costs and who must be held responsible? The monograph Just and Unjust Wars in Shakespeare demonstrates that the necessary moral evaluation of these questions is not restricted to the philosophical moral and political discourse. This analysis of Shakespeare's plays, which focuses on the histories, tragedies and Roman plays in chronological order, brings to light that the drama includes an elaborate and complex debate of the ethical issues of warfare. The plays that feature in this analysis range from Henry VI to Coriolanus and they are analysed according to the three Aquinian principles of legitimate authority, just cause and right intention. Also extending the principles of analysis to more modern notions of responsibility, proportionality and the jus in bello-presupposition, this monograph shows that just war theory constitutes a dominant theoretical approach to war in the Shakespearean canon.

First published in 1981.
Each of Shakespeare's plays is in a continuous state of development in performance. This book examines major changes whilst focusing on six plays in detail: Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, Henry V, Hamlet and Twelfth Night.
Changing Styles in Shakespeare looks at representative and key productions to trace the evolution of each play on today's stage, illustrating how production changes relate to a changed perception of the play, and thus to shifts in social attitudes. It singles out the salient features of many productions, paying special attention to reviews and prompt books.

Can Shakespeare help us with the question of how to live? Re Humanising Shakespeare argues that although Shakespeare strikingly dramatizes various kinds of uncertainty and scepticism, including scepticism about what it is to be human, his work can still serve as as rich source of existential wisdom and guidance. Revised throughout, this edition includes: a new introduction which focuses more attention on what is specific to literature's treatment of the human (as epitomised by Shakespeare); a section drawing on new work on literary and dramatic genres as different ways of attending to human life; a revised chapter on the history plays; and a reading of King Lear. Blending theory and critical resources with close analysis of the plays, this book makes provocative reading for all those interested in Shakespeare, ethics, human being and questions of literary value. It is revised throughout and includes a new section on genre, as well as discussion of King Lear. It offers new ways of understanding literature's distinctive treatment of the human. It shows through detailed readings of the plays how Shakespeare both unsettles and reclaims ideas about being human. It provides a clear account of modernity which illuminates the relationship between critical theory, scepticism and literary humanism. It includes close readings of a number of plays including Hamlet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, Coriolanus and Macbeth.

This edition first published in 1979. Discussing Shakespeare's sonnets in relation to sonnets by Italian, French and English poets, Kenneth Muir shows how they were influenced by Shakespeare's reading of Sidney, Erasmus and Ovid and discusses their art in terms of construction, sound patterns and imagery. He considers the relationship of the sonnets to Shakespeare's dramatic writing, while stressing the dramatic element in the sonnets themselves. Finally he surveys the changing attitudes to the sonnets during the last three centuries.

First published in 1972. Shakespeare's writing abounds with legal terms and allusions and in many of the plays the concept and working of the law is a significant theme. Shakespeare and the Lawyers gives a comprehensive survey of what Shakespeare wrote about the law and lawyers, and what has been written, particularly by lawyers, about Shakespeare's life and works in relation to the law. The book first reviews the recorded facts about Shakespeare's life and works, and his connection with the Inns of Court. It then discusses legal terms, allusions and plots in the plays; Shakespeare's treatment of the problems of law, justice and government; his description of lawyers and officers of the law; his references to actual legal personalities; and his trial scenes. Two further chapters consider the criticisms that have been made of Shakespeare's law, and the contribution to Shakespeare studies by lawyers.

First published in 1951. The edition reprints the second, updated, edition, of 1977. When first published this book quickly established itself as the standard survey of Shakespeare's imagery considered as an integral part of the development of Shakespeare's dramatic art. By illustrating, through the use of examples the progressive stages of Shakespeare's use of imagery, and in relating it to the structure, style and subject matter of the plays, the book throws new light on the dramatist's creative genius. The second edition includes a new preface and an up-to-date bibliography.

First published in 1986. 'Impressively open to the complexity of cultural discourses, to the ways in which one discursive form may function as a screen for another above all to the political entailment of genre.'Stephen Greenblatt. What is the relation between literary and political power? How do the symbolic dimensions of social practice and the social dimensions of artistic practice relate to one another? Power on Display considers Shakespeare's progression from romantic comedies and history plays to tragedy and romance in the light of the general process of cultural change in the period.

First published in 1980. This collection of essays by the first General Editor of the New Arden Shakespeare brings together the best of Ellis-Fermor's Shespearean criticism, in addition to outstanding essays on Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida. Collected and edited by Kenneth Muir, the book is prefaced by an appreciation of Ellis-Fermor's work.

First published in 1982.
Macbeth exercises a strange influence over readers and theatre audiences: the words of the text offer no easy clue to meaning or significance and in dramatic structure the play is very different from other Shakespearean tragedies. Many kinds of study are needed in order to understand the tragedy of Macbeth and this book provides a wide range of studies that respect the individuality of the text and examine it from different viewpoints.
Contents include: Themes and Structure; Characterization and Narrative, Visual Effects, Performance in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; Historical and Political Background; Role of Witchcraft; Game Theory.
Contributors include: John Russell Brown, Derek Russell Davis, Gareth Lloyd Evans, R A Foakes, Michael Goldman, Robin Grove, Peter Hall, Michael Hawkins, Brian Morris, D J Palmer, Marvin Rosenberg and Peter Stallybrass.

This title offers a unique opportunity to view the creation of Shakespeare's after-life and reputation through the works of his major theatrical interpreters. This facsimile edition is backed up by full scholarly apparatus and will appeal to those undertaking research in Shakespearian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Studies and the History of the Theatre and Performance.

This edition first published in 1966. Previous edition published 1965 by the University of California Press. Perhaps more than any other play of Shakespeare's King Lear has been subjected to almost totally contradictory interpretations. In the first historical section of the book the author describes the varying concepts of the play and the distortions of text and even plot that have been widely used. Garrick's playing of Lear as a pathetic and down-trodden old man. Laughton's and Olivier's versions and Herbert Blaus's theory of the 'subtext' are described and analysed. The central section of the book examines the medieval, folk and romance sources of the play. The final chapter illustrates how the action of the play and its pervading violence and evil are not explained in terms of human motive and rely for their meaning more on their effects than their antecedents. An important theme is the play's examination of society and the ties of service and family love.

Offering a variety of perspectives on the history and role of Arab Shakespeare translation, production, adaptation and criticism, this volume explores both international and locally focused Arab/ic appropriations of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. In addition to Egyptian and Palestinian theatre, the contributors to this collection examine everything from an Omani performance in Qatar and an Upper Egyptian television series to the origin of the sonnets to an English-language novel about the Lebanese civil war. Addressing materials produced in several languages from literary Arabic (fusha) and Egyptian colloquial Arabic ('ammiyya) to Swedish and French, these scholars and translators vary in discipline and origin, and together exhibit the diversity and vibrancy of this field.

For this updated critical edition of King Lear, Lois Potter has written a completely new introduction, taking account of recent productions and reinterpretations of the play, with particular emphasis on its afterlife in global performance and adaptation. The edition retains the Textual Analysis of the previous editor, Jay L. Halio, shortened and with a new preface by Brian Gibbons. Professor Halio, accepting that we have two versions of equal authority, the one derived from Shakespeare's rough drafts, the other from a manuscript used in the playhouses during the seventeenth century, chooses the Folio as the text for this edition. He explains the differences between the two versions and alerts the reader to the rival claims of the quarto by means of a sampling of parallel passages in the Introduction and by an appendix which contains annotated passages unique to the quarto.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Memory and commemoration play a vital role not only in the work of Shakespeare, but also in the process that has made him a world author. As the contributors of this collection demonstrate, the phenomenon of commemoration has no single approach, as it occurs on many levels, has a long history, and is highly unpredictable in its manifestations. With an international focus and a comparative scope that explores the afterlives also of other artists, this volume shows the diverse modes of commemorative practices involving Shakespeare. Delving into these "cultures of commemoration," it presents keen insights into the dynamics of authorship, literary fame, and afterlives in its broader socio-historical contexts.