What does it mean to make life? This book focuses on one of the key questions for culture and science in both Shakespeare's time and our own. Shakespeare wrote "A Midsummer Night's Dream" during a period when the "new science" had begun to unsettle the foundations of knowledge about the natural world. Through close analysis of the play and reflection on modern genetic engineering, Turner examines developments in early modern culture as it sought to come to terms with the new forces of magic, astrology, alchemy and mechanics, fields of knowledge that preoccupied the most adventurous intellects of Shakespeare's period and that promised limitless power over nature.Shakespeare's writing sheds light on current developments in science, ethics, law, and religion in contemporary culture. This book reveals the richness and peculiarity of early scientific thought in Shakespeare's time and shows how the questions he poses remain fundamental as the nature of "life" has become one of the most pressing political, ethical, and philosophical problems for society today."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.

This collection of essays reassesses a range of Shakespeare's plays in relation to carnivalesque theory. The plays discussed include: Henry IV; Romeo and Juliet; A Midsummer Night's Dream; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Hamlet; Measure For Measure; The Winter's Tale; and Henry VIII. Contributors re-historicize the carnivalesque in different ways, offering both a developed application, or critique of, Bakhtin's thought."

Did Shakespeare really join John Fletcher to write Cardenio, a lost play based on Don Quixote? With an emphasis on the importance of theatrical experiment, a script and photos from Gary Taylor's recent production, and essays by respected early modern scholars, this book will make a definitive statement about the collaborative nature of Cardenio.

Shakespeare had extraordinary intelligence, unheard-of powers of observation and interpretation, a soaring imagination, a way with words that defies description, and a defining interest in the theater. He brought kings, queens, heroes, and peasantry to the stage so they could be seen in a more realistic fashion. Even so, in modern times, assistance is often needed to interpret Shakespeare's work.

In "A Leg Up on the Canon," author Jim McGahern provides an extensive biography of Shakespeare and offers an introductory guide to his histories, comedies, tragedies, romances, and poems. McGahern presents summaries of the texts, explanations of difficult passages, extensive historical context, and glossaries of terms no longer in use. In each volume, he outlines the plot of plays in that category and then delivers a one-act play with inclusive commentary. McGahern includes pertinent remarks and important speeches and soliloquies interlaced with brief explanations and descriptions of the actions on stage as well as plot developments.

"A Leg Up on the Canon," a four-volume series, provides insights into the word music of the talented man from Stratford.

Piece together the world of Shakespeare in this art jigsaw puzzle depicting the London of his day. Spot a huge cast of contemporary extras as a Midsummer Night’s dream is rehearsed at the globe and fellow actors wander the streets, along with local characters who may well have provided the Bard with inspiration. From lovers ascending ladders and bears being baited to tavern brawls and summer fetes, there is something to delight in every detail.

"This book investigates the political dimensions of Czech Shakespeare appropriation and production in the wake of the fall of communism, uncovering an anxious struggle between dimensions of Czech nationhood that comes to a head in a competition for a 'true' Shakespeare, and addressing key issues such as gender, globalization and national culture"--

Carter explores early modern culture's reception of Ovid through the manipulation of Ovidian myth by Shakespeare, Middleton, Heywood, Marlowe and Marston. With a focus on sexual violence, homosexuality, incest and idolatry, Carter analyses how depictions of mythology represent radical ideas concerning gender and sexuality.

Building on current scholarly interest in the religious dimensions of the play, this study shows how Shakespeare uses Hamlet to comment on the Calvinistic Protestantism predominant around 1600. By considering the play's inner workings against the religious ideas of its time, John Curran explores how Shakespeare portrays in this work a completely deterministic universe in the Calvinist mode, and, Curran argues, exposes the disturbing aspects of Calvinism. By rendering a Catholic Prince Hamlet caught in a Protestant world which consistently denies him his aspirations for a noble life, Shakespeare is able in this play, his most theologically engaged, to delineate the differences between the two belief systems, but also to demonstrate the consequences of replacing the old religion so completely with the new.

This book fills a lacuna in the intellectual history of the seventeenth century by investigating the role that skepticism plays in the declining prestige of memory. It argues that Shakespeare and Donne revolutionize the art of memory, thanks to their skepticism, and thereby transform literary strategies like mimesis, exemplarity, and pastoral.

An extensive history of The Royal Shakespeare Company's studio theatre, Studio Shakespeare: The Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place also includes a biography of its founder and first artistic director, Mary Ann 'Buzz' Goodbody (1947-75). Alycia Smith-Howard reveals how, as a socialist, feminist, and the RSC's first female director, Goodbody sought to invigorate classical theatre and its approach to producing the works of Shakespeare. The Other Place, which opened its doors in 1973, was her greatest achievement, and was, in the words of Ron Daniels of the American Repertory Theatre, 'a training ground for an entire generation of Shakespeare actors and directors'. The volume examines Shakespeare productions at The Other Place from 1973 to its closure in 1989. The author's sources include Goodbody's 'Mission Statement' for the studio theatre as well as other previously unavailable materials such as Goodbody's private papers, journal entries, director's notes and correspondence. In addition, it contains interviews and commentary from such theatrical luminaries as Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, Cicely Berry, Trevor Nunn, Peter Hall, Patrick Stewart, and many others. Smith-Howard's narrative discusses productions of twelve plays at The Other Place, among them King Lear (1974), Hamlet (1975), The Merchant of Venice (1978), Antony and Cleopatra (1982), King John (1988) and Othello (1989). The cast lists of productions at The Other Place are included in an appendix. Smith-Howard's study captures the spirit and ethos of an important and radical exercise in theatre which influenced the mainstream work of The Royal Shakespeare Company. It is a lucid, compelling and valuable contribution not only to Shakespeare studies but also to theatre history. This book, as directors once said, 'has legs'.

Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture argues for the crucial place of the 'monster' in the early modern imagination. The author traces the metaphorical significance of 'monstrous' forms across a range of early modern exhibition spaces - fairground displays, 'cabinets of curiosity' and court entertainments - to contend that the 'monster' finds its most intriguing manifestation in the investments and practices of contemporary theater. The study's new readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson make a powerful case for the drama's contribution to debates about the 'extraordinary body'.

From Harold Bloom, one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, comes an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Cleopatra--one of the Bard's most riveting and memorable female characters--in "a masterfully perceptive reading of this seductive play's endless wonders" (Kirkus Reviews). Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history--and thanks to Shakespeare, one of the most intriguing personalities in literature. She is lover of Marc Antony, defender of Egypt, and, perhaps most enduringly, a champion of life. Cleopatra is supremely vexing, tragic, and complex. She has fascinated readers and audiences for centuries and has been played by the greatest actresses of their time, from Elizabeth Taylor to Vivien Leigh to Janet Suzman to Judi Dench. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Cleopatra with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are in high school and college and another when we are adults, Bloom explains his shifting understanding of Cleopatra over the course of his own lifetime. The book becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our own humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare's characters make. With Cleopatra, "Bloom brings considerable expertise and his own unique voice to this book" (Publishers Weekly), delivering exhilarating clarity and inviting us to look at this character as a flawed human who might be living in our world. The result is an invaluable resource from our greatest literary critic.

Can postmodern accounts of the gaze--deriving from the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Lacan, Fanon, and Riviere—tell us anything about those structures of vision prior to, and repressed by, modernity? Shakespeare's Visual Regime examines the tragedies, histories, and Roman plays for an emergent early modern spectatorial subject, thereby locating Shakespearean theater within those discourses most crucial to the contemporary exposition and disruption of regimes of vision: perspective painting, cartography, optics, geometry, Puritan anti-theatrical polemic, and the occult.

Volumes in this series trace the course of Shakespeare criticism, play-by-play, from the earliest items of recorded criticism to the beginnings of the modern period. The focus of the documentary material is from the late 18th century to the first half of the 20th century. The series makes a major contribution to our understanding of the plays and traditions of Shakespearean criticism as they have developed from century to century. The introduction to each volume constitutes an important chapter of literary history, tracing the entire critical career of each play from the beginnings to the present day. Includes English, European and American excerpts from Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Ruskin, Walt Whitman, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Bernard Shaw, John Masefield, Lytton Strachey, John Middleton Murray, and Wyndham Lewis.

This revised edition of the successful Casebook first published in 1969, has been brought up-to-date with the inclusion of more recent criticism, whilst retaining early comments and critiques. Contributors include A.C.Bradley, A.Wilson Knight, Enid Welsford, George Orwell, Robert B.Heilman, Barbara Everett, John Holloway, W.R.Elton, Stanley Cavell and Stephen Greenblatt.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading 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 intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Performing Transversally expands on Bryan Reynolds' controversial transversal theory in exciting ways while offering groundbreaking analyses of Shakespeare's plays--Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Henry V, The Tempest, and Coriolanus--and textual, filmic, and theatrical adaptations of them. With his collaborators, Reynolds challenges traditional readings of Shakespeare, reevaluating the critical methodologies that characterize them, in regard to issues of cultural difference, authorship, representation, agency, and iconography. Reynolds demonstrates the value of his “investigative-expansive mode,” outlining a “transversal poetics” that points toward a critical future that is more aware of its subjective interconnectedness with the topics and audiences it seeks to engage than is reflected in most Shakespeare criticism and literary-cultural scholarship.

This volume offers a new introduction which provides a wide-ranging survey of criticism of "Macbeth" and four new essays. The new essays from Muriel Bradbrook, Malcolm Evans, Graham Holderness and Germaine Greer bring this edition up-to-date with current critical approaches. The essays are contributed by - A.C. Bradley, S. Freud, G. Wilson Knight, C. Spurgeon, J. Masefield, C. Brooks, L.C. Knight's, M. Bradbrook, G. Holderness, G. Greer and M. Evans.

First published in 1987. This study removes some of the critical puzzles that Shakespeare's comedies of love have posed in the past. The author shows that what distinguishes the comedies is not their similarity but their variety - the way in which each play is a new combination of essentially similar ingredients, so that, for example, the boy/girl changes in The Merchant of Venice are seen to have a quite different significance from those in As You Like It.

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.

The opening chapter traces the history of the term 'problem plays' as applied to Shakespeare and defines it more clearly and precisely than has been done in the past. Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra are then discussed in separate chapters, not only as problem plays but from various points of view: such matters as themes, structural pattern, character-problems, the play's relation to its sources as well as to other plays in the canon, are all touched upon.

First published in 1971. This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history. Contents include: Spenser and the Allegorists; The Faerie Queene, I and V; The Cave of Mammon; The Banquet of Sense; John Donne; The Patience of Shakespeare; Survival fo the Classic; Shakespeare's Learning; The Mature Comedies; The Final Plays.