In this text, the author Philippa Berry rewrites critical perceptions of death in Shakespeare's tragedies from a feminist perspective. Drawing on feminist theory, postmodern thought and queer theory, Berry challenges existing critical notions of what is "fundamental" to Shakespearean tragedy. She argues that there is a figurative rejection of death as terminus, which owes more to pagan thought than Christian. Through a close reading of the main tragedies, Berry discovers a sensuous and meditative Shakespearean discourse of materialism. Her theoretical and textual insights into the properties of matter, time, the soul, and the body now have relevance to contemporary debates about time and matter in science and philosophy.

English Stage Comedy 1490-1990 is a unique and beautifully written study of the comedy of the English stage from the Tudor period to the late twentieth century. Alexander Leggatt demonstrates that an examination of comedy as a 'genre' can tell us much about the relationships between literature and society. English Stage Comedy 1490-1990 surveys five centuries of classic comic drama, focusing on major playwrights such as:
* Shakespeare
* Jonson
* Etherege
* Wycherley
* Congreve
* Vanbrugh
* Goldsmith
* Sheridan
* Wilde
* Shaw
* Coward
* Orton
* Ayckbourn

This book examines six plays by Shakespeare ("Love's Labour's Lost", "Hamlet", "As You Like It", "Twelfth Night", "The Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest") as dramatizations of the Renaissance Court in its developing history - a history searched by Shakespeare to disclose its most characteristic gains and losses. For these plays do not simply celebrate Tudor and Stuart rule: they scrutinize it too, in the centre of its institutional theatre of power, the Court. This book shows how, if the plays came into Court, the Court also came into the plays, with its most salient features - its competitiveness, its inner tensions and its contradictions, its language, its cultural life and its entertainments - exposed to the scrutiny of an art-form that proved itself to be a new mode of historical understanding.

In critical history, Shakespeare's The Tempest has been interpreted as a reticent play, a fascinating and yet mysterious blend of magic and verisimilitude, narrative and drama, spectacle and meditation on death. The Tempest seems to raise fundamental issues without ever exhausting them, it captures and appropriates existing motifs and modes, and allows for later appropriations and re-mediations. Is its signifying potential still alive in the third millennium? Does it still speak to us? Revisiting The Tempest aims to explore that potential and examine the play's more 'intractable material' as a fertile source of significance.The essays that make up this collection range from investigations of the play's position within the European early modern dramatic heritage to its 'domestic' re-writings and/or adaptations in diverse theatrical contexts and media, while also interrogating the play's own resistance to interpretation. Rather than providing new meanings, Revisiting The Tempest explores how this drama makes meaning and reanimates it through time.

A quirky collection of true stories from the weird and wonderful world of Shakespearean theatre, featuring distinguished actors falling off stages, fluffed lines, performances in the dark, and why you must never, ever say the name of that Scottish play, especially if you are Peter O'Toole. A fascinating playbill of stories from the weird and wonderful world of Shakespearean theatre through the centuries, including distinguished actors falling off stages, fluffed lines, performances in the dark, and why you must never, ever say the name of that Scottish play, especially if you are Peter O'Toole. Discover a wealth of Shakespearean shenanigans over the years, including the terrible behaviour of the groundlings at Shakespeare's Globe, how the 'rude mechanicals' in A Midsummer Night's Dream got recast as a bunch of ladies from the WI, and how Dame Maggie Smith got even with Sir Laurence Olivier. Published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this treasury of curious tales is a must-read for all Shakespeare lovers and theatre fans. Word count: 45,000

Exam Board: AQA A, AQA B, Edexcel, CCEA Level: AS/A-level Subject: English literature First teaching: September 2015 First exams: Summer 2016 Enable students to achieve their best grade in AS/A-level English Literature with this year-round course companion; designed to instil in-depth textual understanding as students read, analyse and revise Othello throughout the course. This Study and Revise guide: - Increases students' knowledge of Othello as they progress through the detailed commentary and contextual information written by experienced teachers and examiners - Develops understanding of characterisation, themes, form, structure and language, equipping students with a rich bank of textual examples to enhance their coursework and exam responses - Builds critical and analytical skills through challenging, thought-provoking questions and tasks that encourage students to form their own personal responses to the text - Extends learning and prepares students for higher-level study by introducing critical viewpoints, comparative references to other literary works and suggestions for independent research - Helps students maximise their exam potential using clear explanations of the Assessment Objectives, sample student answers and examiner insights - Improves students' extended writing techniques through targeted advice on planning and structuring a successful essay

"Shakespeare, Theory and Performance" is an exciting collection of essays, bringing a full range of contemporary critical perspectives to bear upon the practical questions of performing Shakespeare. During recent years, a new revolution in critical theory has called into question a number of assumptions about the performance of Shakespeare which had long gone unchecked.
In this volume, contributors from theater, literary and Shakespearean studies collaborate to offer a productive rnterplay, employing a variety of discourses--including feminism, post-colonialism, and semiotics--to challenge and interrogate the practice of Shakespearean performance. Issues include implications of gender, race and class for audience response; the impact of technology on the study of performance as text; and the appropriation of Shakespeare by foreign cultures.

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.

Series Information:
The Critical Heritage Series

The Critical Heritage series gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Critical Heritage is available as a set of 67 volumes, as mini-sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) or as individual volumes.

"The Critical Heritage" gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. "The Critical Heritage" is available as a set of 67 volumes, as mini-sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) or as individual volumes.

The Critical Heritage series gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Critical Heritage is available as a set of 67 volumes, as mini-sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) or as individual volumes.

Entries provide the likely sources for a name; describe historical and mythological backgrounds; examine Shakespeare's presentation of a character or place; and suggest various interpretations of a name. Each entry contains line citations to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Wells and Taylor, Oxford University Press (1986).

"As She Likes It" is the first attempt to tackle the enduring question of how to perform those unruly women at the centre of Shakespeare's comedies. Unique among both Shakespearan and feminist studies, "As She Likes It" asks how gender politics affects the production of the comedies, and how gender is represented, both in the text and on the stage. Penny Gay takes a look at the way "Twelfth Night", "The Taming of the Shrew", "Much Ado About Nothing", "As You Like It" and "Measure for Measure" have been staged over the last half a century, when perceptions of gender roles have undergone massive changes. She also interrogates, rigorously but thoughtfully, the relationship between a male theatrical establishment and a burgeoning feminist approach to performance. Useful for practitioners and for students, "As She Likes It" offers critical reading for anyone interested in women's experience of theatre.

This book is the first to argue that the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets is the well-known young Elizabethan writer Richard Barnfield (1574-1620), long suspected to have been one of Shakespeare's "private friends" (as they were termed by Francis Meres in 1598), with whom (as Meres also tells us) Shakespeare shared some of his sonnets. This is also the first book to argue that William Stanley (1561-1642), sixth earl of Derby, is the young man to whom they addressed their respective sonnets and other love poems in the period c. 1592-1595. In making these identifications, this is the first book to examine in detail the dialogue between Shakespeare's Sonnets and three of Barnfield's books of poetry (all published within a little more than one year)--a dialogue only known to be discussed in a conference paper and one other book.William Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield, and the Sixth Earl of Derby will likely appeal to all readers interested in Shakespeare's life and love poetry, both specialist scholars and non-specialist enthusiasts alike.

To 'rematerialize' in the sense of Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage is not to recover a lost material infrastructure, as Marx spoke of, nor is it to restore to some material existence its priority over the imaginary. Indeed, this collection of work by some of the most highly-regarded critics in Shakespeare studies does not offer a single theoretical stance on any of the various forms of critical materialism (Marxism, cultural materialism, new historicism, transversal poetics, gender studies, or performance criticism), but rather demonstrates that the materiality of Shakespeare is multidimensional and consists of the imagination, the intended, and the desired. Nothing returns in this rematerialization, unless it is a return in the sense of the repressed, which, when it comes back, comes back as something else. An all-star line-up of contributors includes Kate McLuskie, Terence Hawkes, Catherine Belsey and Doug Bruster.

Why did no one read Sonnet 18 for over one hundred years? What traumatic memories did Sonnet 111 conjure up for Charles Dickens? Which Sonnet did Wilfred Owen find particularly offensive on the WW1 battlefront? What kind of love does Sonnet 116 celebrate and why? Filling a surprising gap in Shakespeare studies, this book offers a challenging new reception history of the Sonnets and explores their belated entry into the Shakespeare canon. Jane Kingsley-Smith reveals the fascinating cultural history of individual Sonnets, identifying those which were particularly influential and exploring why they rose to prominence. This is a highly original study which argues that we should redirect our attention away from the story that the Sonnets tell as a sequence, to the fascinating afterlife of individual Shakespeare Sonnets.

Argument was the basis of Renaissance education; both rhetoric and dialectic permeated early modern humanist culture, including drama. This study approaches Shakespeare's history plays by analyzing the use of argument in the plays and examining the importance of argument in Renaissance culture. Knowles shows how analysis of arguments of speech and action take us to the core of the plays, in which Shakespeare interrogates the nature of political morality and truth as grounded in the history of what men do and say.

In The Quality of Mercy, one of the world's most revered theatre directors reflects on a fascinating variety of Shakespearean topics. In this sequence of essays, Peter Brook debates such questions as who was the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays, why Shakespeare is never out of date, and how actors should approach Shakespeare's verse. He also revisits some of the plays which he has directed with notable brilliance, such as King Lear, Titus Andronicus and, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Taken as a whole, this short but immensely wise book offers an illuminating and provocative insight into a great director's relationship with our greatest playwright. 'An invaluable gift from the greatest Shakespeare director of our time... Brook's genius, modesty, and brilliance shine through on every page' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

"Love's Labour's Lost" has had a puzzling history. Until the 1950s it was generally considered one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, and it was one of his most vilified until the 20th century. Perhaps more than any other Shakespearean play, it explores the power and limitations of language, and this blatant concern for language led many early critics to believe that it was the work of a playwright just learning his art. Because of its linguistic density, it is one of Shakespeare's most demanding plays, and this difficulty helps account for its initial unpopularity. But modern critics have begun to study the play in earnest and it is now one of Shakespeare's most popular works. This reference is a thorough introduction to the play's origins and legacy.

The volume provides a full overview of all aspects of the play, from its genesis to modern productions, and scholarship. The book begins with a summary of the play's textual history, including the problems of dating it accurately. It then discusses the cultural, social, and ideological contexts that inform the drama and considers some of Shakespeare's plausible sources. The play's dramatic structure, including its language, is examined at length, along with its various themes. The reference then recounts its critical and scholarly reception, and a final chapter surveys the play's performance history. Chapters cite works for further reading, and the volume concludes with a selected bibliography of major studies.

In this highly entertaining study, De Sousa argues that Shakespeare reinterprets, refashions and reinscribes his alien characters - Jews, Moors, Amazons and gypsies. In this way, the dramatist questions the narrowness of a European perspective which caricatures other societies and views them with suspicion. De Sousa examines how Shakespeare defines other cultures in terms of the interplay of gender, text and habitat. Written in a provocative style, this readable book provides a wealth of fascinating information both on contemporary stage productions and on race and gender relations in early modern Europe.

The tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet has touched the hearts of young and old for nearly four hundred years. In this work, Alan Hager has compiled a rich collection of primary materials and contemporary ranging from information about the earliest performances of Romeo and Juliet to discussions of suicide in the 1990s. Designed to help students of the play, Understanding Romeo and Juliet highlights many different aspects of the play's context. Such aspects include a discussion about religions of love in the East and West, and examination of vendetta and collective violence, and an analysis of the play in the context of classical and medieval thought. Hager relates the work to issues as recent as the so-called Werther Syndrome (copycat suicide based on fictional models) and as remote as the notion of reincarnated love such as that of Rama and Sita in the Sanskrit epic Ramayana. Following a literary analysis of the play, the casebook provides commentary and primary documents on the narrative backgrounds and sources of the play and selections from those sources; a discussion of its performance history on stage, in opera and film; the historical context of the play as an exploration of the nature of love, with selections from poetry of the period; and selections on real-life parallels, such as present-day Bosnia, the recent Leonardo DiCaprio-Claire Danes film of the play, and teen suicide in the 1990s, all of which will help readers to relate to the play. Each section of the work closes with topics for class discussion and papers and suggested works for further reading.

Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England is the first extended study of the touring practices and performances of Elizabethan and Jacobean travelling players. It opens with a general introduction to the lively, competitive world of professional touring theatre. Following chapters focus on playing practices and performances in the spaces used as temporary theatres by touring actors (such a town halls and country houses). The final chapter looks at the decline of this important theatrical tradition in the 1620s.

The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic endeavour.;In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from the limitati

Allusions to Shakespeare haunt our contemporary culture in a myriad of ways, whether through brief references or sustained intertextual engagements. Shakespeare's plays and motifs have been appropriated in fragmentary forms onstage and onscreen since motion pictures were invented in 1893. This collection of essays extends beyond a US-UK axis to bring together an international group of scholars to explore Shakespearean appropriations in unexpected contexts in lesser-known films and television shows in India, Brazil, Russia, France, Australia, South Africa, East-Central Europe and Italy, with reference to some filmed stage works.