A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism provides a rich collection of critical and secondary material selected to assist in the study of Shakespeare's plays. It includes a selection of sources and analogues Shakespeare drew upon in writing nine of his major works, a variety of widely divergent critical interpretations of the plays over the last sixty years - from the practical criticism of the 1930s to the theoretical approaches of the 1990s - and informative essays on Shakespeare's theatre and on the challenges of editing the Shakespeare text. This book represents an invaluable resource for students and teachers of Shakespeare, as well as for theatre practitioners.

One way and another, nearly all of Shakespeare's countrymen and women (including the playwright himself) spent at least parts of their lives as servants of someone else. But until now that fact has gone largely unregarded. This book remedies the oversight, by showing how the ideals and practices of early modern service affect dozens of characters in almost all the plays, in ways that enrich our understanding of familiar figures like Iago and Falstaff and enhance the significance of lesser-known people and events across the canon. And it introduces an important concept, volitional primacy, into contemporary critical discourse.

Whenever Shakespeare wrote a 'shrew' into one of his plays he created a character who challenged ideas about acceptable behaviour for a woman. This is as true today as when the plays were first performed. A shrew is a woman who refuses to be quiet when she is told to be, who says things that people do not want to hear. She is constructed to alleviate male anxieties through ridicule, but like so many objects of comedy or derision, she is full of power because of her very ability to generate these anxieties. 'Shrew' is supposed to be an insult, but has often been used to describe women enacting behaviour that can be brave, clever, noble or just. This book marries an examination of Shakespeare's shrews in his plays with their history in recent performance, to investigate our own attitudes to hearing women with defiant voices.

Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory reconsiders, after 20 years of intense critical and creative activity, the theory and practice of adapting Shakespeare to different genres and media. Organized around clusters of key metaphors, the book explicates the principal theories informing the field of Shakespearean adaptation and surveys the growing field of case studies by Shakespeare scholars. Each chapter also looks anew at a specific Shakespeare play from the perspective of a prevailing set of theories and metaphors. Having identified the key critics responsible for developing these metaphors and for framing the discussion in this way, Iyengar moves on to analyze afresh the implications of these critical frames for adaptation studies as a whole and for particular Shakespeare plays. Focusing each chapter around a different play, the book contrasts comic, tragic, and tragicomic modes in Shakespeare's oeuvre and within the major genres of adaptation (e.g., film, stage-production, novel and digital media). Each chapter seasons its theoretical discussions with a lively sprinkling of allusions to Shakespeare - ranging from TikTok to tissue-boxes, from folios and fine arts to fan work. To conclude each chapter, the author provides a case-study of three or four significant and interesting adaptations from different genres or media. A glossary of terms compiled by Philip Gilreath and the author completes the book.

This title discusses the sequence of four plays that begins with "Richard II" and concludes with "Henry V" referred to as the second tetralogy. This second tetralogy, with its complex characters, is evidence of Shakespeare's developing skills as a playwright and the influence events of the period had on his writing. The author explains what these influences were and how they may have affected Shakespeare's portrayal of the various characters.

Delia Bacon (1811-59), an American writer and dramatist, is remembered today almost exclusively for this controversial 1857 book, in which she argues that the plays of 'Shakspere' were in fact written by a coterie of highly educated aristocrats, including Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, for the purpose of disseminating a philosophy, encoded in the works, which was not intended to be understood by the popular audiences to whom they were ostensibly directed. The book considers the intellectual context in which the plays were written, arguing that radical changes in science and society craved by Bacon were impossible under the despotism of Queen Elizabeth, but could be infiltrated into the consciousness of the elite through drama. Delia Bacon enjoyed the friendship of Hawthorne (who wrote a preface to this book), and Emerson (who thought her a 'genius', but mad). The work sparked a debate on the authorship of the plays which still continues.

Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World explores a range of images and texts that shed light on the complexity of the European reception and interpretation of the New World. Jonathan Hart examines Columbus's first representation of the natives and the New World, the representation of him in subsequent ages, the portrayal of America in sexual terms, the cultural intricacies brought into play by a variety of translators and mediators, the tensions between the aesthetic and colonial in Shakespeare's The Tempest, and a discussion of cultural and voice appropriation that examines the colonial in the postcolonial. This book brings the comparative study of the cultural past of the Americas and the Atlantic world into focus as it relates to the present.

Shakespeare's plays are fascinated by the problems of speed and flight. They are repeatedly interested in humans, spirits, and objects that move very fast; become airborne; and in some cases even travel into space. In Speed and Flight in Shakespeare, the first study of any kind on the subject, Steggle looks at how Shakespeare's language explores ideas of speed and flight, and what theatrical resources his plays use to represent these states. Shakespeare has, this book argues, an aesthetic of speed and flight. Featuring chapters on The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Macbeth and The Tempest, this study opens up a new field around the 'historical phenomenology' of early modern speed.

While many things about Shakespeare's life are unknown, certainly, like everyone else, he had a family. This book gathers into a single source as much information as possible concerning Shakespeare's immediate family, from his grandfathers on the maternal and paternal sides to his granddaughter, the last member of his direct family line. But readers may ask, to what extent did the relationships in the plays reflect the actual familial structures of Shakespeare's day? To what extent did Shakespeare experience personally the familial dynamics about which he wrote so eloquently? And to what extent were Shakespeare's own family experiences typical or atypical of other Elizabethan or Jacobean families? These questions can be addressed because more is known of Shakespeare's family than of the families of any of his fellow writers and actors. For several generations members of Shakespeare's family were important local figures in and around Stratford-upon-Avon, and, fortunately, from the Middle Ages until the present day, Stratford-upon-Avon has been one of the best-documented towns in England. While many things about Shakespeare's life are unknown, certainly, like everyone else, he had a family. This book gathers into a single source as much information as possible concerning Shakespeare's immediate family, from his grandfathers on the maternal and paternal sides to his granddaughter, the last member of his direct family line. But readers may ask, to what extent did the relationships in the plays reflect the actual familial structures of Shakespeare's day? To what extent did Shakespeare experience personally the familial dynamics about which he wrote so eloquently? And to what extent were Shakespeare's own family experiences typical or atypical of other Elizabethan or Jacobean families? These questions can be addressed because more is known of Shakespeare's family than of the families of any of his fellow writers and actors. For several generations, members of Shakespeare's family were important local figures in and around Stratford-upon-Avon, and, fortunately, from the Middle Ages until the present day Stratford-upon-Avon has been one of the best-documented towns in England. In vivid detail, Pogue provides an overview of the various members of Shakespeare's family and, where possible, draws conclusions concerning Shakespeare's relationships with his various family members. Further, the author notes to what extent Shakespeare's family experiences were typical or atypical of the time, and includes at the end of each chapter a discussion of scenes from Shakespeare's plays presenting the relevant familial relationship, juxtaposing the relational scenes he wrote with what we know of his own experience. Such a comparison impresses us once again not just with his skill at holding the mirror up to the nature of his time, but with the imaginative insight into humanity that lay at the heart of his dramatic genius.

This is the first comprehensive study of early modern texts, readings, and readers of Shakespeare's poems in print and manuscript. Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern England makes a compelling contribution both to Shakespeare studies and the history of the book. Examining gendered readerships and the use of erotic works, reading practices and manuscript culture, textual forms and transmission, literary taste and the canonization of Shakespeare, this book argues that historicist criticism can no longer ignore histories of reading.

This New Casebook offers a wide-ranging selection of contemporary critical readings of Shakespeare's three 'problem plays': All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Trolius and Cressida. Together, they reflect the diversity of late twentieth-century theory and the controversy that continues to be generated by the plays, and discuss a variety of key issues. These include the meaning of the term 'problem play', the historical context and political and cultural significance of the plays, as well as issues of staging and theatre history. The volume also provides a helpful introduction which guides the reader through the critical approaches, terms and debates, as well as explanatory notes for each essay and a useful section on further reading.

Encompassing nearly a century of drama, this is the first book to provide students and scholars with a truly comprehensive guide to the early modern soliloquy. Considering the antecedents of the form in Roman, late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century drama, it analyses its diversity, its theatrical functions and its socio-political significances. Containing detailed case-studies of the plays of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Ford, Middleton and Davenant, this collection will equip students in their own close-readings of texts, providing them with an indepth knowledge of the verbal and dramaturgical aspects of the form. Informed by rich theatrical and historical understanding, the essays reveal the larger connections between Shakespeare's use of the soliloquy and its deployment by his fellow dramatists.

Shakespeare's rise to prominence was by no means inevitable. While he was popular in his lifetime, the number of new editions and revivals of his plays declined over the following decades. Emma Depledge uses the methodologies of book and theatre history to provide a re-assessment of the reputation and dissemination of Shakespeare during the Interregnum and Restoration. She demonstrates the crucial role of the Exclusion Crisis (1678-1682), a political crisis over the royal succession, as a foundational moment in Shakespeare's canonisation. The period saw a sudden surge of theatrical alterations and a significantly increased rate of new editions and stage revivals. In the wake of the Exclusion Crisis, Shakespeare's plays were made available on a scale not witnessed since the early seventeenth century, thus reversing what might otherwise have been a permanent disappearance of his drama from canonical familiarity and firmly establishing Shakespeare's work in the national cultural imagination.

"Shakespeare and His Contemporaries" begins with Shakespeare's England and expands to a world before, after, and beyond. With an eye to language, genre, drama, and literary and historical narrative, this book examines the comedy of Shakespeare in the context of comedies from Italy, Spain, and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

"Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain" examines the work of two of the most important English Renaissance authors in terms of the cultural, social and political contexts of early modern Britain. Andrew Hadfield demonstrates that the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the plays of William Shakespeare demand to be read in terms of an expanding Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in which a dominant English identity had to come to terms with the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were now also subjects of the crown.

In the first comprehensive study of how Shakespeare designed his plays to suit his playing company, Brett Gamboa demonstrates how Shakespeare turned his limitations to creative advantage, and how doubling roles suited his unique sense of the dramatic. By attending closely to their dramaturgical structures, Gamboa analyses casting requirements for the plays Shakespeare wrote for the company between 1594 and 1610, and describes how using the embedded casting patterns can enhance their thematic and theatrical potential. Drawing on historical records, dramatic theory, and contemporary performance this innovative work questions received ideas about early modern staging and provides scholars and contemporary theatre practitioners with a valuable guide to understanding how casting can help facilitate audience engagement. Supported by an appendix of speculative doubling charts for plays, illustrations, and online resources, this is a major contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare's dramatic craft.

What can I do? To what degree do we control our own desires, actions, and fate - or not? These questions haunt us, and have done so, in various forms, for thousands of years. Timothy Rosendale explores the problem of human will and action relative to the Divine - which Luther himself identified as the central issue of the Reformation - and its manifestations in English literary texts from 1580-1670. After an introduction which outlines the broader issues from Sophocles and the Stoics to twentieth-century philosophy, the opening chapter traces the theological history of the agency problem from the New Testament to the seventeenth century. The following chapters address particular aspects of volition and salvation (will, action, struggle, and blame) in the writings of Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Ford, Herbert, Donne, and Milton, who tackle these problems with an urgency and depth that resonate with parallel concerns today.

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.

The Bible was everywhere in Shakespeare's England. Through sermons, catechisms, treatises, artwork, literature and, of course, biblical reading itself, the stories and language of the Bible pervaded popular and elite culture. In recent years, scholars have demonstrated how thoroughly biblical allusions saturate Shakespearean plays. But Shakespeare's audiences were not simply well versed in the Bible's content - they were also steeped in the practices and methods of biblical interpretation. Reformation and counter-reformation debate focused not just on the biblical text, but - crucially - on how to read the text. The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage is the first volume to integrate the study of Shakespeare's plays with the vital history of Reformation practices of biblical interpretation. Bringing together the foremost international scholars in the field of 'Shakespeare and the Bible', these essays explore Shakespeare's engagement with scriptural interpretation in the tragedies, histories, comedies, and romances.

This ground breaking and accessible study explores the connections between the English Reformation's impact on the belief in eternal salvation and how it affected ways of believing in the plays of Shakespeare. Claire McEachern examines the new and better faith that Protestantism imagined for itself, a faith in which scepticism did not erode belief, but worked to substantiate it in ways that were both affectively positive and empirically positivist. Concluding with in-depth readings of Richard II, King Lear and The Tempest, the book represents a markedly fresh intervention in the topic of Shakespeare and religion. With great originality, McEachern argues that the English reception of the Calvinist imperative to 'know with' God allowed the very nature of literary involvement to change, transforming feeling for a character into feeling with one.

"Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser" is a study of the connection between visuality and ethical action in early modern English literature. Focusing on works by Shakespeare and Spenser, this book details varying attitudes toward the development of ethical human subjectivity at a moment when basic assumptions about perception and knowledge were breaking down. Knapp places early modern debates over the value of visual experience in determinations of truth and ethical action into dialog with subsequent (and on-going) philosophical efforts to articulate an ethics that accounts for visual experience.

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.