This Guide provides a critical survey of the rich range of responses to "Macbeth," as well as the key debates and developments from the seventeenth century to the present day. Leading the reader through material chronologically, the Guide summarizes, explains and assesses key interpretations, sets them in their intellectual and historical contexts, and supplies extracts from criticism which exemplify crucial critical positions.

Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted English author of all time. Quotations appear everywhere, from the epigraphs of novels to the mottoes on coffee cups. But Shakespeare was also a frequent quoter himself - of classical and contemporary literature, of the Bible, of snatches of popular songs and proverbs. This volume brings together an international team of scholars to trace the rich history of quotation from Shakespeare's own lifetime to the present day. Exploring a wide range of media, including Romantic poetry, theatre criticism, novels by Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Ian McEwan, political oratory, propaganda, advertising, drama, film and digital technology, the chapters draw fresh connections between Shakespeare's own practices of creative reworking and the quotation of his work in new and traditional forms. Richly illustrated and featuring an Afterword by Margreta de Grazia, the collection tells a new story of the making and remaking of Shakespeare's plays and poems.

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.

Situated within the Oxford Handbooks to Literature series, the group of Oxford Handbooks to Shakespeare are designed to record past and present investigations and renewed and revised judgments by both familiar and younger Shakespearean specialists. Each of these volumes is edited by one or more internationally distinguished Shakespeareans; together, they comprehensively survey the entire field.
An essential resource for the study of Shakespeare, The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare is edited by esteemed scholar Arthur Kinney and contains forty specially written essays. It provides fresh and imaginative readings of his plays and poems, reflects on the current state of Shakespeare Studies, and suggests the likely future directions it will take. The Handbook is divided into five sections: 'Texts' explores how Shakespeare wrote, who he collaborated with, the ways in which his works were transmitted, and the reactions of his early readers; 'Conditions' examines the economic, social, artistic, and linguistic forces at play on Shakespeare; 'Works' discusses the various stages of his career; 'Performances' is concerned with issues such as the reception of his plays, the theatre business, and film adaptations; and 'Current Speculations' includes essays on topics ranging from the role of philosophical thought and the influence of classical sources to the relevance of empire, technology, religion, and law. By covering the range of Shakespeare's work in his time and ours, this myriad-minded book deepens and enriches our understanding of the great poet and unparalleled playwright's accomplishments.

Applied Shakespeare is attracting growing interest from practitioners and academics alike, all keen to understand the ways in which performing his works can offer opportunities for reflection, transformation, dialogue regarding social justice, and challenging of perceived limitations. This book adds a new dimension to the field by taking an interdisciplinary approach to topics which have traditionally been studied individually, examining the communication opportunities Shakespeare's work can offer for a range of marginalized people. It draws on a diverse range of projects from across the globe, many of which the author has facilitated or been directly involved with, including those with incarcerated people, people with mental health issues, learning disabilities and who have experienced homelessness. As this book evidences, Shakespeare can be used to alter the spatial constraints of people who feel imprisoned, whether literally or metaphorically, enabling them to speak and to be heard in ways which may previously have been elusive or unattainable. The book examines the use of trauma-informed principles to explore the ways in which consistency, longevity, trust and collaboration enable the development of resilience, positive autonomy and communication skills. It explores this phenomenon of creating space for people to find their own way of expressing themselves in a way that mainstream society can understand, whilst also challenging society to 'see better' and to hear better. This is not a process of social homogenisation but of encouraging positive interactions and removing the stigma of marginalization.

This book develops a new approach for the study of films adapted from canonical 'originals' such as Shakespeare's plays. Departing from the current consensus that adaptation is a heightened example of how all texts inform and are informed by other texts, this book instead argues that film adaptations of canonical works extend cinema's inherent mystification and concealment of its own artifice. Film adaptation consistently manipulates and obfuscates its traces of 'original' authorial enunciation, and oscillates between overtly authored articulation and seemingly un-authored unfolding. To analyse this process, the book moves from a dialogic to a psychoanalytic poststructuralist account of film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. The differences between these rival approaches to adaptation are explored in depth in the first part of the book, while the second part constructs a taxonomy of the various ways in which authorial signs are simultaneously foregrounded and concealed in adaptation's anamorphic drama of authorship.

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.

As readers head into the second fifty years of the modern critical study of blackness and black characters in Renaissance drama, it has become a critical commonplace to note black female characters' almost complete absence from Shakespeare's plays. Despite this physical absence, however, they still play central symbolic roles in articulating definitions of love, beauty, chastity, femininity, and civic and social standing, invoked as the opposite and foil of women who are "fair". Beginning from this recognition of black women's simultaneous physical absence and imaginative presence, this book argues that modern Shakespearean adaptation is a primary means for materializing black women's often elusive presence in the plays, serving as a vital staging place for historical and political inquiry into racial formation in Shakespeare's world, and our own. Ranging geographically across North America and the Caribbean, and including film and fiction as well as drama as it discusses remade versions of Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World will attract scholars of early modern race studies, gender and performance, and women in Renaissance drama.

Winner of the MRDS 2013 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies Many unspoken assumptions permeated the experience of performance in Shakespeare's theatre. Drawing on scientific treatises, murder pamphlets, travel narratives, dream manuals, religious sermons, festive sports, and other fascinating primary sources, Lin reconstructs playgoers' typical ways of thinking and feeling and demonstrates how these culturally-trained habits of mind shaped not only dramatic narratives but also the presentational dynamics of onstage action. Combining literary criticism, theatre history, and performance theory, this ground-breaking study explodes received ideas about mimesis, spectacle, and semiotics as it uncovers the ways in which early modern performance functioned as a material medium, revising and producing social attitudes and practices.

The National Theatre's years at the Old Vic were the most Shakespearean period in its history, one which included Laurence Olivier's Othello and Shylock, a radical all-male As You Like It, the Berliner Ensemble's Coriolanus and Tom Stoppard's classic offshoot, Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. Drawing extensively upon the company archives, this book tells the interlinked stories of the National's relationship with Shakespeare through a series of production case studies. Between them these illuminate Olivier's significance as actor and director, the National's pioneering accommodation of European theatre practitioners, and its ways of engaging Shakespeare with the contemporary.

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of Troilus and Cressida, a play that has long been considered difficult but is now popular both on the stage and in criticism, features an expanded and updated introduction and reading list. The first edition has been praised for its careful rethinking of the text, excellent annotation, lively attention to performance and extensive coverage of the play's major concerns. This updated edition retains these characteristics. In addition, Gretchen Minton and Anthony B. Dawson have provided a new account of the critical and theatrical treatment of Troilus and Cressida over the last fifteen years, showing how modern audiences have become attuned to the play's sardonic undercutting of both the medieval romance of the title characters and the Homeric tale of the Trojan War. Recent performance history is placed against a broader background of social change, including shifting attitudes towards war, political decision-making, gender politics, and fear of disease and contagion.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From providential apocalypticism to climate change, this ground-breaking ecocritical study traces the performance history of the storm scene in King Lear to explore our shifting, fraught and deeply ideological relationship with stormy weather across time. This Contentious Storm offers a new ecocritical reading of Shakespeare's classic play, illustrating how the storm has been read as a sign of the providential, cosmological, meteorological, psychological, neurological, emotional, political, sublime, maternal, feminine, heroic and chaotic at different points in history. The big ecocritical history charted here reveals the unstable significance of the weather and mobilises details of the play's dramatic narrative to figure the weather as a force within self, society and planet.

What part did Shakespeare play in the construction of a 'white people' and how has his work been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity? Since the court of Queen Elizabeth I, through the early modern English theatre to the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, white people have used Shakespeare to define their cultural and racial identity and authority. White People in Shakespeare unravels this complex cultural history to examine just how crucial Shakespeare's work was to the early modern development of whiteness as an embodied identity, as well as the institutional dissemination of a white Shakespeare in contemporary theatres, politics, classrooms and other key sites of culture. Featuring contributors from a wide range of disciplines, the collection moves across Shakespeare's plays and poetry and between the early modern and our own time to interrogate these relationships. Split into two parts, 'Shakespeare's White People' and 'White People's Shakespeare', it explores a variety of topics, ranging from the education of the white self in Hamlet, or affective piety and racial violence in Measure for Measure, to Shakespearean education and the civil rights era, and interpretations of whiteness in more contemporary work such as American Moor and Desdemona.

In 1589 the Privy Council encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take steps to control the theatres, which had offended authority by putting on plays which addressed 'certen matters of Divinytie and of State unfitt to be suffred'.
How had questions of divinity and state become entangled? The Reformation had invested the English Crown with supremacy over the Church, and religious belief had thus been transformed into a political statement. In the plentiful chronicle literature of the sixteenth-century, questions of monarchical legitimacy and religious orthodoxy became intertwined as a consequence of that demand for a usable national past created by the high political developments of the 1530s.
Divinity and State explores the consequences of these events in the English historiography and historical drama of the sixteenth century. It is divided into four parts. In the first, the impact of reformed religion on narratives of the national past is measured and described. Part II examines how the entanglement of the national past and reformed religion was reflected in historical drama from Bale to the early years of James I, and focuses on two paradigmatic characters: the sanctified monarch and the martyred subject. Part III considers Shakespeare's history plays in the light of the preceding discussion, and finds that Shakespeare's career as a historical dramatist shows him eventually re-shaping the history play with great audacity. Part IV corroborates this reading of Shakespeare's later history plays by reference to the dramatic ripostes they provoked.

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.

Shakespeare's tutor: The influence of Thomas Kyd adds to the critical and scholarly discussion that seeks to establish the early modern playwright Thomas Kyd's dramatic canon, and indicates where and how Kyd contributed to the development of Shakespeare's drama through influence, collaboration, revision and adaptation. A further, complementary aim of the book is to demonstrate various ways in which it is possible to combine statistical analysis with reading plays as literary and performative works. The book summarises, extends, and corrects all of the scholarship on Kyd's authorship of anonymous plays, and reveals the remarkable extent to which Shakespeare was influenced by his dramatic predecessor. The book represents a significant intervention in the field of early modern authorship studies and aims to revolutionise our understanding of Shakespeare's dramatic development. -- .

A reissue of the E. K. Chambers's seminal four-volume account of the private, public, and court stages, together with other forms of drama and spectacle surviving from earlier times, from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth until the death of Shakespeare. Haled in its day as a comprehensive compendium of 'practically all the discoverable evidence upon the various parts of the subject, collected, weighed, sorted, classified and built up with immense care into a logical and beautiful structure' (New Statesman), the work is still much consulted by by today's scholars and historians.
From the author's Preface:
'My First Book is devoted to a description, perhaps disproportionate, of the Elizabethan Court, and of the ramifications in pageant and progress, tilt and mask, of that instinct for spectacular mimesis, which the Renaissance inherited from the Middle Ages, and of which the drama is itself the most important manifestation. The Second Book gives an account of the settlement of the players in London, of their conflict, backed by the Court, with the tendencies of Puritanism, and of the place which they ultimately found in the monarchical polity. To the Third and Fourth belong the more pedestrian task of following in detail the fortunes of the individual playing companies and the individual theatres, with such fullness as the available records permit. The Fifth deals with the surviving plays, not in their literary aspect, which lies outside my plan, but as documents helping to throw light upon the history of the institution which produced them.'

This book looks at the staging and performance of normality in early modern drama. Analysing conventions and rules, habitual practices, common things and objects, and mundane sights and experiences, this volume foregrounds a staged normality that has been heretofore unseen, ignored, or taken for granted. It draws together leading and emerging scholars of early modern theatre and culture to debate the meaning of normality in an early modern context and to discuss how it might transfer to the stage. In doing so, these original critical essays unsettle and challenge scholarly assumptions about how normality is represented in the performance space. The volume, which responds to studies of the everyday and the material turn in cultural history, as well as to broader philosophical engagements with the idea of normality and its opposites, brings to light the essential role that normality plays in the composition and performance of early modern drama.

While The Tempest has always been one of Shakespeare's most entertaining and enchanting plays, it continues to stir up passionate debate throughout the world because of its ideas and attitudes toward race, class, political power, and colonialism. This casebook systematically examines these issues, as well as several others, from dramatic and historical perspectives and through parallel contemporary applications. Readers are first introduced to the play with a dramatic analysis that situates the work within Shakespeare's canon and within the romantic tradition. This fresh interpretation also casts much light on the use of imagery and language in setting, character, and thematic development. This casebook draws on the themes and issues introduced, and examines each one in turn with insightful original essays and primary documents. The shipwreck that sets the play in motion is examined in terms of the discovery of the new world, and the prevailing attitudes toward colonialism. A brief chronology of "New World" events helps situate the historical excerpts. Another intriguing topic explored in the casebook is the diverging Elizabethan views on science and religion, with a particular focus on the role of magic. Primary documents that help readers appreciate the significance of matters of sorcery and the supernatural include excerpts from Reginald Scott's 1584 The Discovery of Witchcraft, James I's Demonology (1597) as well as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Other topic chapters examine political power and treachery, as well as society in terms of marriage and the court. A full chapter is also devoted to performance and interpretation of the play. The final "Contemporary Applications" sectioninvestigates current global concerns that parallel those in the play, and help readers appreciate Shakespeare's play in relation to the world around us. Readers are shown dramatically contrasting perspectives on colonialism in Zimbawe. The casebook concludes with a fascinating discussion of the parallel elements of fantasy in The Tempest and in literary works by popular contemporary writers J.R.R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling. Understanding The Tempest follows the successful casebook format developed specifically for the Literature in Context series. Following a dramatic analysis, each topic chapter presents an important historical issue in the play, with insightful narrative essays supported by primary documents. In several chapters, brief chronologies of significant related events help readers understand the historical context of the play and its thematic concerns. As a tool for student research and classroom work, educators will appreciate the numerous topics for written and oral discussion suggested at the conclusion of each unit. Suggested readings further complement the content and research applications of the casebook.

What happens when we engage with fictional characters? How do our imaginative engagements bear on our actions in the wider world? Moving between the literary and the philosophical, Sophie Ratcliffe considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling. On Sympathy uses dramatic monologues based on The Tempest as its focus, and broaches questions about fictional belief, morality, and the dynamics between readers, writers, and fictional characters. The book challenges conventionally accepted ideas of literary identification and sympathy, and asks why the idea of sympathy has been seen as so important to liberal humanist theories of literary value. Individual chapters on Robert Browning, W. H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett, who all drew on Shakespeare's late play, offer new readings of some major works, while the book's epilogue tackles questions of contemporary sympathy. Ranging from the nineteenth century to the present day, this important new study sets out to clarify and challenge current assumptions about reading and sympathetic belief, shedding new light on the idea and ideal of sympathy, the workings of affect and allusion, and the ethics of reading.

How did Shakespeare write his plays and how were they revised during their passage to the stage? James Purkis answers these questions through a fresh examination of often overlooked evidence provided by manuscripts used in early modern playhouses. Considering collaboration and theatre practice, this book explores manuscript plays by Anthony Munday, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Heywood to establish new accounts of theatrical revision that challenge formerly dominant ideas in Shakespearean textual studies. The volume also reappraises Shakespeare's supposed part in the Sir Thomas More manuscript by analysing the palaeographic, orthographic, and stylistic arguments for Shakespeare's authorship of three of the document's pages. Offering a new account of manuscript writing that avoids conventional narrative forms, Purkis argues for a Shakespeare fully participant in a manuscript's collaborative process, demanding a reconsideration of his dramatic canon. The book will greatly interest researchers and advanced students of Shakespeare studies, textual history, authorship studies and theatre historians.

The first edition of Hamlet - often called 'Q1', shorthand for 'first quarto' - was published in 1603, in what we might regard as the early modern equivalent of a cheap paperback. Yet this early version of Shakespeare's classic tragedy is becoming increasingly canonical, not because there is universal agreement about what it is or what it means, but because more and more Shakespearians agree that it is worth arguing about. The essays in this collected volume explore the ways in which we might approach Q1's Hamlet, from performance to book history, from Shakespeare's relationships with his contemporaries to the shape of his whole career.

The first edition of Hamlet - often called 'Q1', shorthand for 'first quarto' - was published in 1603, in what we might regard as the early modern equivalent of a cheap paperback. Yet this early version of Shakespeare's classic tragedy is becoming increasingly canonical, not because there is universal agreement about what it is or what it means, but because more and more Shakespearians agree that it is worth arguing about. The essays in this collected volume explore the ways in which we might approach Q1's Hamlet, from performance to book history, from Shakespeare's relationships with his contemporaries to the shape of his whole career.