This is the first scholarly study devoted to Shakespeare's girl characters and conceptions of girlhood. It charts the development of Shakespeare's treatment of the girl as a dramatic and literary figure, and explores the impact of Shakespeare's girl characters on the history of early modern girls as performers, patrons, and authors.

This book examines conceptions of authority for and in Shakespeare, and the construction of Shakespeare as literary and cultural authority. The first section, Defining and Redefining Authority, begins by re-defining the concept of Shakespeare's sources, suggesting that 'authorities' and 'resources' are more appropriate terms. Building on this conceptual framework, the remainder of this section explores linguistic and discursive authority more broadly. The second section, Shakespearean Authority, considers the construction, performance and questioning of authority in Shakespeare's plays. Essays here range from examinations of monarchical authority to discussions of household authority, literary authority and linguistic ownership. The final part, Shakespeare as Authority, then traces the increasing establishment of Shakespeare as an authority from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century in a series of essays that explore Shakespearean authority for editors, actors, critics, authors, readers and audiences. The volume concludes with two essays that reassess Shakespeare as an authority for visual culture - in the cinema and in contemporary art.

This revaluation of Shakespeare's most seductive tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, allies itself with neither George Bernard Shaw and Philo's Roman judgment of the lovers as "strumpet and fool"-premised on the idle sensuality and feckless self-regard ever evident in the regal pair-nor with the many at the opposite critical pole who have found themselves swept up, to some extent at least, in the "grand illusion" of the lovers themselves as peerless figures transcending the very deaths to which Caesar's heartless predation drives them. Nor does it seek some middle way, settling into a comfortable agnosticism that claims the poet's view of the pair remains too ambiguous to resolve. Instead, by mining a wealth of metaphoric cross-references and ironical, mirroring figurations provided by the tragedy's subsidiary characterizations, this new analysis argues that Shakespeare's assessment of the lovers is in fact unambiguous: Antony and Cleopatra unknowingly settle for functioning merely as two more of the play's eunuchs fanning the flames of their self-destructive passions for one another when they could have realized the new heaven and new earth Antony promised his queen had their "intercourse" with one another been more vigorously complete. Not alone their deaths, but their entire experience is this play is but a search for "easy ways to die" rather than the quest is should have been to live more richly yet and generate new life beyond their respective notorieties as separate individuals to be celebrated.

In 2006 the Royal Shakespeare Company began its mission to transform the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. This has been a unique initiative from a major cultural organisation for several reasons: - Education has been placed at the heart and not at the periphery of the RSC's vision. Producing versions of Shakespeare's plays for young audiences has, for example, become an annual feature of the Company's programming. - The project's longevity - it has already been in existence for six years and has funding to continue for at least another four years; - The nature of the learning network it has established, involving schools from all over the UK and a partnership in the US; - The partnership with a higher education institution (the University of Warwick) which has steered teachers through their own research projects, resulting in a 90%+ completion rate among the teachers involved; - The amount of independent research that has established the extent and nature of the impact of this work in both quantitative and qualitative terms.The book tells the story of this transformative project - to describe and to theorise the innovative classroom practice that the RSC has pioneered and to explain what the research tells us about the impact this practice has had on children's experience of Shakespeare in both primary and secondary schools. It describes all of this in authoritative but accessible language, and is relevant to anyone with an interest in the teaching of Shakespeare and / or in how a major cultural organisation can use its expertise to impact significantly on the education of young people from a wide range of social backgrounds. As well as drawing upon the research already conducted, the book benefits from the writer's knowledge and expertise of the teaching of drama. It also benefits from interviews from internationally influential figures, notably Michael Boyd and Jonathan Bate.

Coriolanus is the last and most intriguing of Shakespeare's Roman tragedies. Critics, directors and actors have long been bewitched by this gripping character study of a warrior that Rome can neither tolerate nor do without. Caius Martius Coriolanus is a terrifying war machine in battle, a devoted son to a wise and ambitious mother at home, and an inflammatory scorner of the rights and rites of the common people. This Critical Reader opens up the extraordinary range of interpretation the play has elicited over the centuries and offers exciting new directions for scholarship. The volume commences with a Timeline of key events relating to Coriolanus in print and performance and an Introduction by the volume editor. Chapters survey the scholarly reaction to the play over four centuries, the history of Coriolanus on stage and the current research and thinking about the play. The second half of the volume comprises four 'New Directions' essays exploring: the rhetoric and performance of the self, the play's relevance to our contemporary world, an Hegelian approach to the tragedy, and the insights of computer-assisted stylometry. A final chapter critically surveys resources for teaching the play.

In "Antony and Cleopatra, " Shakespeare dramatizes the classical love story of the Roman general and the Egyptian queen, their fatal romance, and the power struggle that leads to the triumph of Octavius Caesar. While the play has much to offer, it is also one of Shakespeare's least accessible tragedies. It can baffle readers with its difuseness and multiple perspectives, or intimidate directors eager to do justice to its huge canvass without overwhelming the audience. This reference provides a thorough overview of the play, its background, and its critical and dramatic legacy.

The early chapters examine the original text of "Antony and Cleopatra" and the play's contexts and sources. In particular, the book considers how Shakespeare's dramatic presentation of a powerful female ruler might reflect political attitudes in Renaissance England, and how he drew from North's Plutarch. The volume then analyzes the dramatic structure of the play--its settings, patterns of language, genre, and characters. Later chapters explore the tragedy's major themes and critical reception and discuss its performance history. A bibliographical essay then reviews the most important general works for further reading.

This volume considers the linguistic complexities associated with Shakespeare's presence in South Africa from 1801 to early twentieth-first century televisual updatings of the texts as a means of exploring individual and collective forms of identity. A case study approach demonstrates how Shakespeare's texts are available for ideologically driven linguistic programs. Seeff introduces the African Theatre, Cape Town, in 1801, multilingual site of the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in Southern Africa where rival, amateur theatrical groups performed in turn, in English, Dutch, German, and French. Chapter 3 offers three vectors of a broadening Shakespeare diaspora in English, Afrikaans, and Setswana in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 analyses Andre Brink's Kinkels innie Kabel, a transposition of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors into Kaaps, as a radical critique of apartheid's obsession with linguistic and ethnic purity. Chapter 5 investigates John Kani's performance of Othello as a Xhosa warrior chief with access to the ancient tradition of Xhosa storytellers. Shakespeare in Mzansi, a televisual miniseries uses black actors, vernacular languages, and local settings to Africanize Macbeth and reclaim a cross-cultural, multilingualism. An Afterword assesses the future of Shakespeare in a post-rainbow, decolonizing South Africa. Global Sha Any reader interested in Shakespeare Studies, global Shakespeare, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare and appropriation, Shakespeare and language, Literacy Studies, race, and South African cultural history will be drawn to this book.

It has sometimes been assumed that the difficulty of translating Shakespeare into French has meant that he has had little influence in France. Shakespeare Goes to Paris proves the opposite. Virtually unknown in France in his lifetime, and for well over a hundred years after his death, Shakespeare was discovered in the first half of the eighteenth century, as part of a growing French interest in England. Since then, Shakespeare's impact in France has been enormous. Writers, from Voltaire to Gide, found themsleves baffled, frustrated, mesmerised but overawed by a playwright who broke all the rules of French classical theatre and challenged the primacy of French culture. Attempts to tame and translate him alternated with uncritical idolisation, such as that of Berlioz and Hugo. Changing attitudes to Shakespeare have also been an index of French self-esteem, as John Pemble shows in his sparkingly written book.

This is the first study to consider the relationship between private confessional rituals and memory across a range of early modern writers, including Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell.

The Taming of the Shrew has puzzled, entertained and angered audiences, and it has been reinvented many times throughout its controversial history. Offering a focused overview of key emerging ideas and discourses surrounding Shakespeare's problematic comedy, the volume reveals and debates how contemporary readings and adaptions of the play have sought to reconsider and resolve the play's contentious portrayal of gender, power and identity. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to the needs of students, teachers and researchers. Key themes and issues include: * Gender and Power * History and Early Modern Contexts * Performance and Politics * Adaptation and Afterlife All the essays offer new perspectives and combine to give readers an up-to-date understanding of what's exciting and challenging about The Taming of the Shrew.

Readers of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies have long noted the absence of readily explainable motivations for some of Shakespeare's greatest characters: why does Hamlet delay his revenge for so long? Why does King Lear choose to renounce his power? Why is Othello so vulnerable to Iago's malice? But while many critics have chosen to overlook these omissions or explain them away, Millicent Bell demonstrates that they are essential elements of Shakespeare's philosophy of doubt. Examining the major tragedies, Millicent Bell reveals the persistent strain of philosophical skepticism. Like his contemporary, Montaigne, Shakespeare repeatedly calls attention to the essential unknowability of our world. In a period of social, political, and religious upheaval, uncertainty hovered over matters great and small-the succession of the crown, the death of loved ones from plague, the failure of a harvest. Tumultuous social conditions raised ultimate questions for Shakespeare, Bell argues, and ultimately provoked in him a skepticism which casts shadows of existential doubt over his greatest masterpieces.

This study on New World-utopian politics in The Tempest traces paradigm shifts in literary criticism over the past six decades that have all but re-inscribed the text into a political document. This book challenges the view that the play has a dominant New World dimension and demonstrates through close textual readings how an unstable setting at the same time enables and effaces discursively over-invested New World interpretations. Almost no critical attention has been paid to the play's vacuum of power, and this work interprets pastoral, utopian, and 'American' tensions in light of the play's forever-ambiguous setting. Through a 'presentist' post-1989 lens, an oft-neglected historical and political paradigm shift in Shakespeare criticism comes to light.

This book offers a timely examination of the relationship between Shakespeare and contemporary digital media. By focusing upon a variety of 'Shakespearean' individuals, groups and communities and their 'online' presence, the book explores the role of popular internet culture in the ongoing adaptation of Shakespeare's plays and his general cultural standing. The description of certain performers as 'Shakespearean' is a ubiquitous but often throwaway assessment. However, a study of 'Shakespearean' actors within a broader cultural context reveals much, not only about the mutable face of British culture (popular and 'highbrow') but also about national identity and commerce. These performers share an online space with the other major focus of the book: the fans and digital content creators whose engagement with the Shakespearean marks them out as more than just audiences and consumers; they become producers and critics. Ultimately, Digital Shakespeareans moves beyond the theatrical history focus of related works to consider the role of digital culture and technology in shaping Shakespeare's contemporary adaptive legacy and the means by which we engage with it.

Everyone knows the story of the star-crossed lovers but close attention to the language of the play can deepen and darken the legend. As icons of passion, Romeo and Juliet reveal the recklessness, as well as the idealism, of desire in a violent world. Catherine Belsey shows how you can tease out the play's subtle meanings and goes on to discuss key adaptations, including the classic Baz Lurhmann film.

In Shakespeare studies, 'Romance' is widely understood to refer to the plays composed and performed in the waning days of the playwright's career. Romance on the Early Modern Stage introduces a new history for the genre, one that dates back to the first years of the commercial theatre in London. These early plays drew on popular stories depicting adventurous travel, imperial conquest, and exploration of new realms. Their staging also altered the practices of the theatre, as playwrights embraced a dramatic poetics to accommodate the extravagant narratives of these stories. Romance on the Early Modern Stage aligns such formal alterations in stagecraft with an array of materials drawn from early modern global exploration to argue that dramatic fantasies both reflected and informed England's overseas ambitions. The book revises how romance is understood within the dramatic canon - from romance enabling empire in Henry V and Milton's Comus, to the 'anti-romance' staged in The Tempest.

This book charts the influence of Seneca--both as specific text and inherited tradition--through Shakespeare's tragedies. Discerning patterns in previously attested borrowings and discovering new indebtedness, it presents an integrated and comprehensive assessment. Familiar methods of source study and a sophisticated understanding of intertextuality are employed to re-evaluate the much maligned Seneca in the light of his Greek antecedents, Renaissance translations and commentaries, and contemporary dramatic adaptations, especially those of Chapman, Jonson, Marston, Garnier, and Giraldi Cinthio. Three broad categories organize the discussion--Senecan revenge, tyranny, and furor--and each is illustrated by an earlier and later Shakespearean tragedy. The author keeps in view Shakespeare's eclecticism, his habit of combining disparate sources and conventions, as well as the rich history of literary criticism and theatrical interpretation. The book concludes by discussing Seneca's presence in Renaissance comedy and, more important, in that new and fascinating hybrid genre, tragicomedy. Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy makes an important contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare and of his foremost antecedents, as well as throwing light on the complex interactions of the Classical and Renaissance theatres.

Frances E. Dolan examines the puzzling pronouns and puns, the love poetry, mischief, and disguises of "Twelfth Night," exploring its themes of grief, obsessive love, social climbing and gender identity, and helping you towards your own close-readings.

How can the most silent member of the family carry the message of subversion against venerated institutions of state and society? Why would two playwrights, writing 300 years apart, employ the same dramatic methods for rebelling against the establishment, when these methods are virtually ignored by their contemporaries? This book considers these and similar questions. It examines the historical similarities of the eras in which Shakespeare and Shaw wrote and then explores types of father-daughter interactions, considering each in terms of the existing power structures of society.

These two dramatists draw on themes of incest, daughter sacrifice, role playing, education, and androgyny to create both active and passive daughters. The daughters literally represent a challenge to the patriarchy and metaphorically extend that challenge to such institutions as church and state. The volume argues that the father-daughter relationship was the ideal dramatic vehicle for Shakespeare and Shaw to advance their social and political agendas. By exploring larger issues through the father-daughter relationship, both playwrights were able to avoid the watchful eyes of censors and comment on such topics as the divine right of kings, filial bonds of obedience, and even regicide.

Many plays of Shakespeare's time were, like modern movie and television scripts, products of collaboration between two or more writers. This book shows that in the first of his Late Romances, Pericles, Shakespeare collaborated with the minor playwright George Wilkins. It explores a wide range of new techniques for identifying the co-authors in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

This title offers a fresh approach to the plays that suggests they can be seen as metaphysical 'experiments' conducted in the medium of drama.Metaphysics is usually associated with that part of the philosophical tradition which asks about 'last things', questions such as: How many substances are there in the world? Which is more fundamental, quantity or quality? Are events prior to things, or do they happen to those things? While he wasn't a philosopher, Shakespeare was obviously interested in 'ultimates' of this sort. Instead of probing these issues with argument, however, he did so with plays. "Shakespearean Metaphysics" argues for Shakespeare's inclusion within a metaphysical tradition that opposes empiricism and Cartesian dualism.Through close readings of three major plays - "The Tempest", "King Lear" and "Twelfth Night" - Witmore proposes that Shakespeare's manner of depicting life on stage itself constitutes an 'answer' to metaphysical questions raised by later thinkers such as Spinoza, Bergson, and Whitehead. Each of these readings shifts the interpretative frame around the plays in radical ways; taken together they show the limits of our understanding of theatrical play as an 'illusion' generated by the physical circumstances of production."Shakespeare Now!" is a series of short books that engage imaginatively and often provocatively with the possibilities of Shakespeare's plays. It goes back to the source - the most living language imaginable - and recaptures the excitement, audacity and surprise of Shakespeare. It will return you to the plays with opened eyes.

The different versions of Hamlet constitute one of the most vexing puzzles in Shakespeare studies. In this groundbreaking work, Shakespeare scholar Terri Bourus argues that this puzzle can only be solved by drawing on multiple kinds of evidence and analysis, including book and theatre history, biography, performance studies, and close readings.

The author provides a scene-by-scene commentary on the action, which tracks the development of character and explores Shakespeare's handling of the moral and spiritual issues to which the play gives rise. He also examines attitudes to the play down the ages, from scholars, critics and the play-going public, and demonstrates that a sceptical era like our own finds, perhaps to its surprise, that it has much in common with the age of Dr. Johnson. Davies surveys more recent stage and film productions to show how contemporary directors have used King Lear to work out their social, political and historical preoccupations.