'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

A study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet. The debt owed by Shakespeare to Ovid is a major and important topic in scholarship. This book offers a fresh approach to the subject, in aiming to account for the Middle English literary lenses through which Shakespeare and his contemporaries often approached Greco-Roman mythology. Drawing its principal examples from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, and Twelfth Night, it reinvestigates a selection of moments in Shakespeare's works that have been widely identified in previous criticism as "Ovidian", scrutinising their literary alchemy with an eye to uncovering how ostensibly classical references may be haunted by the under-acknowledged, spectral presences of medieval intertexts and traditions. Its central concern is the mutual hauntings of Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Gower in the early modern literary imagination; it demonstrates that "Ovidian" allusions to mythological figures such as Ariadne, Philomela, or Narcissus in Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic works were sometimes simultaneously mediated by the hermeneutic and affective legacies of earlier vernacular texts,including The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Confessio Amantis. LINDSAY ANN REID is a Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career. The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge. The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.

Shakespeare / Text sets new agendas for the study and use of the Shakespearean text. Written by 20 leading experts on textual matters, each chapter challenges a single entrenched binary - such as book/theatre, source/adaptation, text/paratext, canon/apocrypha, sense/nonsense, extant/ephemeral, material/digital and original/copy - that has come to both define and limit the way we read, analyze, teach, perform and edit Shakespeare today. Drawing on methods from book history, bibliography, editorial theory, library science, the digital humanities, theatre studies and literary criticism, the collection as a whole proposes that our understanding of Shakespeare - and early modern drama more broadly - changes radically when 'either/or' approaches to the Shakespearean text are reconfigured. The chapters in Shakespeare / Text make strong cases for challenging received wisdom and offer new, portable methods of treating 'the text', in its myriad instantiations, that will be useful to scholars, editors, theatre practitioners, teachers and librarians.

What makes Shakespeare's late plays so special? Through detailed analyses of key passages, Kate Aughterson shows how these plays portray a world of political intrigue, familial chaos and crisis, which teeters continually into tragedy: a world we can recognise today.
Part I of this engaging study:
- provides stimulating close readings of extracts from "The Tempest," "The Winter's Tale," "Cymbeline" and "Pericles
"- examines major topics such as openings, endings, familial roles, stage properties, spectacle and song
- offers suggestions for further work and summarizes the methods of analysis.
Part II supplies essential background material, including:
- detailed accounts of Shakespeare's literary and historical contexts
- samples from important critical works and performances.
With a helpful Further Reading section, this illuminating volume is ideal for anyone who wishes to appreciate and explore Shakespeare's late plays for themselves.

This is an introduction to Shakespeare's "I Henry IV" - introducing its critical and performance history, current critical landscape and new directions in research on the play. "I Henry IV" has always been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays and this critical guide offers a comprehensive guide to the wide range of criticism on the play and its central figures, including Falstaff. It introduces the play's critical and performance history, including notable stage productions alongside TV, film and radio versions. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further individual research. "Continuum Renaissance Drama" offers practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performative contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Each guide introduces the text's critical and performance history but also provides students with an invaluable insight into the landscape of current scholarly research through a keynote essay on the state of the art and newly commissioned essays of fresh research from different critical perspectives.

What work did physically disabled characters do for the early modern theatre? Through a consideration of a range of plays, including Doctor Faustus and Richard III, Genevieve Love argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related 'likeness problems' that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The figure of disability stands for the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled characters with names such as Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of thefictional and the material, embodied world of the theatre. When the figure of the disabled body exits the stage, it also mediates a second problem of likeness, between plays in their performed and textual forms. While supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays have been characterized as 'lame', the dynamic movement of prosthetic disabled characters in the theatre expands the figural role which disability performs in the relationship between plays on the stage and on the page. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability reveals how attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works, while illuminating in turn how theatre offers a reframing of disability as metaphor.

Timon of Athens is a bitterly intriguing study of a fabulously rich man who wastes his wealth on his friends, and, when he is finally impoverished, learns to despise humanity with a hatred that drives him to his grave. The play's response to matters topical in Jacobean London sharpens its thrust as satire. Yet the setting in ancient Athens allows it to read as a timeless fable, deeply relevant to a modern society that sees itself as pursuing material prosperity to the point of self-destruction. The first half of the play offers a satirical vision of a world of artifice and insincerity. The second half is a startlingly experimental drama in which a succession of Timon's real and false friends unsuccessfully challenge his commitment to his life as a misanthropic recluse in the woods. The play's plot structure is schematically clear, and the poetry of Timon's rage is arresting in its savage intensity. Yet readers have often detected loose ends, and the tone of writing is uneven. In his Introduction, John Jowett explains how these characteristics arise because the play was written as a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. This edition pays full justice to Middleton's presence, explaining how his contribution gave the play its distinctive edge. We as readers need to read this play as a dialogue between writers of different temperaments, and this edition is the first to make such a reading possible. The Introduction provides the fullest account of the play's performance history available. The commentary is the most detailed ever to have been published. Appendices include source materials and a listing of major productions world-wide.

In this beautifully illustrated book, one of the foremost Shakespeareans of our time explores the ways in which Shakespeare has been imagined from his time to ours. In a penetrating series of interpretations, Stephen Orgel explores the ironies and paradoxes that have characterized the reconstruction of Shakespeare's texts, his image, the staging and illustration of his plays over the past four centuries, as he is perennially reinvented for new cultural ends. Drawing on performance history, textual history, and the visual arts (including a fascinating chapter on portraiture), Imagining Shakespeare displays throughout the cultural versatility, elegance, lucidity, and wit which have become the hallmarks of Orgel's style.

Includes everything students need for their first encounter with Shakespeare - well-chosen scenes from his most famous plays, plus lively accessible activities for discussion, drama, language study and comparison. It's the ideal starting-point for exploring Shakespeare, his theatre and his language. Extracts from: Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice.

"Shakespeare and Character "brings together leading scholars in theory, literary criticism, and performance studies in order to redress a serious gap in Shakespeare studies and to put character back at the centre of our understanding of Shakespeare's achievement as an artist and thinker.

A study of distinct forms of mass violence, the narratives each kind demands, and the collective identities constructed from and upon these, this book focuses around readings of popular and influential novels such as Toni Morrisons "Beloved," Amy Tans "The Joy Luck Club" and Isabel Allendes "The House of Spirits."

Arden Student Guides: Language and Writing offer a new type of study aid which combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the critical writing skills you need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's complex dramatic language, and expanding your own critical vocabulary, as you respond to his plays. Key features include: an introduction considering when and how the play was written, addressing the language with which Shakespeare created his work, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal detailed examination and analysis of the individual text, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies discussion of performance history and the critical reception of the work a 'Writing matters' section in every chapter, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations. Written by world-class academics with both scholarly insight and outstanding teaching skills, each guide will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm. At a climactic point in the play, Macbeth realises that the witches have deceived him through their ambiguous language: 'they palter with us in a double sense'. This book explores Shakespeare's own paltering in the play - the densely rich language of ambition, of blood, and of guilt that structures Macbeth.

David Hillman's new book focuses on a vital area of contemporary Renaissance scholarship - that of Early Modern notions of embodiment and selfhood. The book imagines the Shakespearean corpus from the inside out: it explores the preoccupation with the body's interior spaces in several of Shakespeare's plays, focussing on how these plays address questions of knowledge and acknowledgement: on the ways characters imagine being within the body of the other, or having one's own body inhabited or possessed by another.

This book offers the term "ecophobia" as a way of understanding and organizing representations of contempt for the natural world. Estok argues that this vocabulary is both necessary to the developing area of ecocritical studies and for understandings of the representations of "Nature" in Shakespeare. Engaging close readings with theoretical sophistication make this book a path-breaking contribution to both Shakespearean scholarship and the burgeoning field of ecocriticism.

Shakespeare in China provides English language readers with a comprehensive sense of China's past and on-going encounter with Shakespeare. It offers a detailed history of twentieth-century Sino-Shakespeare from the beginnings to 1949, followed by more recent accounts of the playwright in the People's Republic, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The study pays particular attention to translation, criticism and theatrical productions and highlights Shakespeare's fate during the turbulent political times of modern China. Chapters on Shakespeare and Confucius and The Paradox of Shakespeare in the New China consider the playwright in the context of 'old' and 'new' Chinese ideologies. Bringing together hard to find materials in both English and Chinese, it builds upon and extends past research on its subject.

A revealing examination of an under-explored area of Shakespeare studies, this work looks at the evidence for the author's deep and evolving response to the loss of his only son, Hamnet. Although many commentators have been intrigued by the possible effects of the death of Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, on the writer, Shakespeare and Son: A Journey in Writing and Grieving is the first full-length study examining the evidence that Shakespeare's later work was deeply involved with this loss. The book is also the first full-length study to explore Shakespeare's works in light of the psychology of grief, combining psychological insights with literary analysis. Specifically, the book explores 20 plays from all parts of Shakespeare's career, concentrating on works known to definitely have been written after Hamnet's death, especially Much ado About Nothing, Henry the Fourth Part 2, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, King Lear, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. Examining various manifestations of grief in the plays, such as anger, depression, guilt, and hope, author Keverne Smith argues that the evidence of Shakespeare's grief is cumulative and evident in repeated structures and patterns in plays written over a period of 14 to 15 years. Discussion of 20 of Shakespeare's works, concentrating on 16 works completed after his son Hamnet's death in 1596 Chronological organization so readers can follow the development of Shakespeare's response to the death of Hamnet as reflected in the plays and poetry written following this tragedy A cross-disciplinary bibliography, drawing especially on literary, theatrical, historical, thanatological, and psychological commentaries

This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context. Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.

Contents:
Martin Brunkhorst, Bergische Universitat (Germany); Anthony B Dawson, University of British Columbia (Canada); Mary Judith Dunbar, University of Santa Clara (USA); Juilet Dusinberre, Girton College, Cambridge; Barbara Hodgdon, Drake University (USA); Dennis Kennedy, University of Pittsburgh (USA); Richard Paul Knowles, University of Guelph (Canada); Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire (USA); Philip C McGuire, Michigan State University (USA); Cary Mazer, University of Pennsylvania (USA); Denis Salter, McGill University (Canada); William B Worthen, Northwestern University (USA)

Cross-gender performance was an integral part of Shakespearean theatre: from boys portraying his female characters, to those characters disguising themselves as men within the story. This book examines contemporary trends in staging cross-gender performances of Shakespeare in the UK and USA. Terri Power surveys the field of gender in performance through an intersectional feminist and queer theoretical lens. In depth discussions of key productions reveal processes adapted by companies for their performances. The book also looks at how contemporary performance responds to new cultural politics of gender and creates a critical language for understanding that within Shakespeare. This book features: - First-hand interviews with professional artists - Case studies of individual performances - A practical workshop section with innovative exercises

Although psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare is a prominent and prolific field of scholarship, the analytic methods and tools, theories, and critics who apply the theories have not been adequately assessed. This book fills that gap. It surveys the psychoanalytic theorists who have had the most impact on studies of Shakespeare, clearly explaining the fundamental developments and concepts of their theories, providing concise definitions of key terminology, describing the inception and evolution of different schools of psychoanalysis, and discussing the relationship of psychoanalytic theory (especially in Shakespeare) to other critical theories. It chronologically surveys the major critics who have applied psychoanalysis to their readings of Shakespeare, clarifying the theories they are enlisting; charting the inception, evolution, and interaction of their approaches; and highlighting new meanings that have resulted from such readings. It assesses the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to Shakespeare studies and the significance and value of the resulting readings.

Hamlet's father's Ghost asks his son to 'Remember me!', but how did people remember around 1600? And how do we remember now? Shakespeare and Memory brings together classical and early modern sources, theatre history, performance, material culture, and cognitive psychology and neuroscience in order to explore ideas about memory in Shakespeare's plays and poems. It argues that, when Shakespeare was writing, ideas about memory were undergoing a kind of crisis, as both the technologies of memory (print, the theatre itself) and the belief structures underpinning ideas about memory underwent rapid change. And it suggests that this crisis might be mirrored in our own time, when, despite all the increasing gadgetry at our disposal, memory can still be recovered, falsified, corrupted, or wiped: only we ourselves can remember, but the workings of memory remain mysterious. Shakespeare and Memory draws on works from all stages of Shakespeare's career, with a particular focus on Hamlet, the Sonnets, Twelfth Night, and The Winter's Tale. It considers some little things: what's Hamlet writing on? And why does Orsino think he smells violets? And it asks some big questions: how should the dead be remembered? What's the relationship between memory and identity? And is it art, above all, that enables love and beauty, memory and identity, to endure in the face of loss, time, and death?