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.

Sixteenth-century English speakers understood identity in radically different terms than ours. "The Interpersonal Idiom" explores the ways early modern usage figures selves as a function of other selves, particularly in the tropes of humoralism, visual perception, and sexual constancy. Challenging the current critical preoccupation with subjectivity, Selleck argues that Shakespeare, Donne, and other early modern writers often emphatically resist emerging conventions of subjective authority and cast selfhood instead as the experience of others. Analyzing a diverse range of texts -- from treatises on medicine, faculty psychology, and the controversy over women to drama, poetry, and devotional literature -- Selleck's study proposes a new theoretical understanding of identity in early modern culture.

This collection of modern essays by leading figures in the field of Shakespeare scholarship reveals the rich interplay between contemporary theoretical approaches - psychoanalytic, new historicist, feminist and cultural materialist - and the study of the play in performance, both in Shakespeare's time and our own. Examining the representation of power, ideology, class, race and gender in a wide range of playtexts and theatrical contexts, the essays explore Shakespeare's performance possibilities in theory and in practice.

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.

Intermedial Shakespeares argues that intermediality has refashioned performances of Shakespeare's plays over the last two decades in Europe. It describes ways in which text and author, time and space, actor and audience have been redefined in Shakespearean productions that incorporate digital media, and it traces transformations in practice.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's magical vision. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of The Tempest in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors - Peter Brook, Sam Mendes and Rupert Goold - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

What skills did Shakespeare's actors bring to their craft? How do these skills differ from those of contemporary actors? Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre: Thinking with the Body examines the 'toolkit' of the early modern player and suggests new readings of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their many skills. Theatre is an ephemeral medium. Little remains to us of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: some printed texts, scattered documents and records, and a few scraps of description, praise, and detraction. Because most of what survives are printed playbooks, students of English theatre find it easy to forget that much of what happened on the early modern stage took place within the gaps of written language: the implicit or explicit calls for fights, dances, military formations, feats of physical skill, song, and clowning. Theatre historians and textual editors have often ignored or denigrated such moments, seeing them merely as extraneous amusements or signs that the text has been 'corrupted' by actors. This book argues that recapturing a positive account of the skills and expertise of the early modern players will result in a more capacious understanding of the nature of theatricality in the period.

This text focuses on preparing students for A-Level. It has notes, end-of-act activities, tips from an A-Level Chief Examiner and space for students' own annotations.

Why is Shakespeare so often associated with information technologies and with the idea of archiving itself? Alan Galey explores this question through the entwined histories of Shakespearean texts and archival technologies over the past four centuries. In chapters dealing with the archive, the book, photography, sound, information, and data, Galey analyses how Shakespeare became prototypical material for publishing experiments, and new media projects, as well as for theories of archiving and computing. Analysing examples of the Shakespearean archive from the seventeenth century to today, he takes an original approach to Shakespeare and new media that will be of interest to scholars of the digital humanities, Shakespeare studies, archives, and media history. Rejecting the idea that current forms of computing are the result of technical forces beyond the scope of humanist inquiry, this book instead offers a critical prehistory of digitisation read through the afterlives of Shakespeare's texts.

This book examines Shakespeare's depiction of foreign queens as he uses them to reveal and embody tensions within early modern English politics. Linking early modern and contemporary political theory and concerns through the concepts of fragmented identity, hospitality, citizenship, and banishment, Sandra Logan takes up a set of questions not widely addressed by scholars of early modern queenship. How does Shakespeare's representation of these queens challenge the opposition between friend and enemy that ostensibly defines the context of the political? And how do these queens expose the abusive potential of the sovereign? Focusing on Katherine of Aragon in Henry VIII, Hermione in The Winter's Tale, Tamora in Titus Andronicus, and Margaret in the first history tetralogy, Logan considers them as means for exploring conditions of vulnerability, alienation, and exclusion common to subjects of every social position, exposing the sovereign himself as the true enemy of the state.

In this exciting new introduction to Shakespeare, Catherine Belsey takes traditional tales as a starting point to argue against the cultural materialists who claim Shakespeare's iconic status is no more than an accident of history. Each chapter shows how one of Shakespeare's best-known plays retells with a difference stories familiar both then and now. Belsey goes on to put forward new readings, teasing out the enigmas that constitute these texts and the interpretations they have inspired.

This book marries a theoretical analysis of the issues underlying the role of the dramaturg with a thorough sense of the material conditions of theatrical production, from script editing and rehearsal room interactions to the preparation of programme notes and audience lectures. Central to the project is a notion of authority defined not by text or author, but by the theatre itself. The result is a guide for the prospective dramaturg which also provides for the more general reader a unique case study of the nexus between the methods and assumptions of literary criticism and those of practical theatre.

This book analyses three Shakespearean plays that particularly deal with abusive forms of banishment: King Richard II, Coriolanus, and King Lear. In these plays, the abuses of power are triggered by fearless speeches that question the legitimacy of power and are misinterpreted as breaches of allegiance; in these plays, both the bold speech of the fearless speaker and the performative sentence of the banisher trigger the relentless dynamics of what Deleuze and Guattari termed 'deterritorialisation'. This book approaches the central question of the abusive denial of territory from various angles: linguistic, legal and ethical, physical and psychological. Various strategies of resistance are explored: illegal return, which takes the form of a frontal counterattack employing a 'war machine'; ruse and the experience of internal(ised) exile; and mental escape, which nonetheless may lead to madness, exhaustion or heartbreak. -- .

This book shows how Shakespeare's excellence as storyteller, wit and poet reflects the creative process of conceptual blending. Cognitive theory provides a wealth of new ideas that illuminate Shakespeare, even as he illuminates them, and the theory of blending, or conceptual integration, strikingly corroborates and amplifies both classic and current insights of literary criticism. This study explores how Shakespeare crafted his plots by fusing diverse story elements and compressing incidents to strengthen dramatic illusion; considers Shakespeare's wit as involving sudden incongruities and a reckoning among differing points of view; interrogates how blending generates the "strange meaning" that distinguishes poetic expression; and situates the project in relation to other cognitive literary criticism. This book is of particular significance to scholars and students of Shakespeare and cognitive theory, as well as readers curious about how the mind works.

Performing Shakespearean Appropriations explores the production and consumption of Shakespeare in acts of adaptation and appropriation across time periods and through a range of performance topics. The ten essays, moving from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, address uses of Shakespeare in the novel, television, cinema, and digital media. Drawing on Christy Desmet's work, several contributors figure appropriation as a posthumanist enterprise that engages with electronic Shakespeare by dismantling, reassembling, and recreating Shakespearean texts in and for digital platforms. The collection thus looks at media and performance technologies diachronically in its focus on Shakespeare's afterlives. Contributors also construe the notion of "performance" broadly to include performances of selves, of communities, of agencies, and of authenticity-either Shakespeare's, or the user's, or both. The essays examine both specific performances and larger trends across media, and they consider a full range of modes: from formal and professional to casual and amateur; from the fixed and traditional to the ephemeral, the itinerant, and the irreverent.

"Shakespeare Festivals Around the World, " edited by recognised Shakespeare scholar Marcus D. Gregio, explores the everlasting nature of William Shakespeare via essays about theatre practice and comprehensive listings of more than one hundred Shakespeare-producing organisations around the world. A unique and invaluable research guide for theatregoers, theatre practitioners, and theatre scholars, its noteworthy essays and significant listings are an essential addition to any Shakespeare-lovers

"Henry V" is a complex and challenging Shakespearean play that rewards detailed study. While few critics count it among Shakespeare's greatest works, the play is almost always successful in the theater. Compared to some of Shakespeare's more critically esteemed works, "Henry V" is more accessible to students, who find it easier to grasp as a text inviting lively discussion. In the early 1990's its popularity surged with the release of Kenneth Branagh's film version (1989), a hit with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. This reference book is a comprehensive introductory guide to virtually all aspects of the play.

The volume begins with a full overview of the textual history of the play and its historical and cultural contexts, with special emphasis on how it contributed to the debate on kingship and authority in the late sixteenth century. The book then concentrates extensively on the play's dramatic structure, its plots, its patterns of language, and its development of characters. Central to this discussion is the ambiguous presentation of Henry V, a public figure who may be interpreted as both a heroic king and a Machiavellian leader. The next chapter examines the play's significant themes: order and chaos, war, and kingship. The volume then evaluates different critical approaches to the play, so that the reader may understand how critics have responded to it over time. The final chapter carefully analyzes several theatrical, film, and video productions of "Henry V." A closing bibliographical essay outlines the most important critical works on this enduring and provocative drama.

Written near the end of Shakespeare's most phenomenally creative period, Antony and Cleopatra is perhaps the most ambitious of all Shakespeare's designs, in its unmatched geographical and historial sweep, its bold mingling of genres, and its extraordinary variety of style, mood, and effect. Yet the degree and nature of its success remain surprisingly contentious, and performances of the play have seldom matched the extravagant expectations of its admirers. The wideranging introduction to this new edition considers the paradoxes of the play's reception from a number of angles. A full discussion of Shakespeare's sources (the most important of which is excerpted in a generous appendix) considers ways in which these may have influenced the play's problematic design. A comprehensive stage history illustrates how the theatrical fortunes of Antony and Cleopatra continue to be affected by the inappropriate spectacular traditions of nineteenth-century staging, and by an enduring gender-inflected orientalism that has particularly distorted responses to the character of Cleopatra. A substantial critical section examines how the technique of the play - its deliberate frustrations of expectation, its carefully constructed tensions between rhetoric and action, and its daring exploitation of bathos and anti-climax - may have contributed to the sense of disappointment which colours so many accounts of performance. The editor argues that such effects are structural to the paradoxical vision of this tragedy and to its disturbed preoccupation with the unstable boundaries of gender and identity. The text has been freshly edited in accordance with the principles of the series, and the extensive commentary is attentive to the theatrical dimensions of the play as well as to the rich complexity of its poetic language.

Titus shoots his arrows bearing petitions for justice to the gods; Claudius asks 'what form of prayer can serve my turn?'; Lear wishes he could crack the vault of heaven with his prayers. Again and again, Shakespeare dramatises the scenario of the unheard prayer, in which the one who prays does so full well in the knowledge that no one is listening, interested, or even there at all. The scenario is keyed to the anxieties that surrounded the act of praying itself, so full as it was with controversy, the centrepiece of sectarian dispute over what was good and bad religion. This study reads the unheard prayer scenario as itself an appeal for a vision of tolerance, unobtainable perhaps, but nevertheless desired and imagined.

Early modern historians now agree that revolutions in military technology, information technology, navigation, clockmaking, surveying, and many other technical fields exerted considerable influences on Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. "Shakespeare and Technology" examines the multifaceted impact of early modern technological revolutions on Shakespeare's dramaturgy. By reading the plays in their immediate technological contexts, Cohen offers new insights into some of Shakespeare's key metaphors, his methods of character development and plot development, his ideas about genre, his concept of theatrical space, and his views on the theater's role in society. The study finds that Shakespeare acknowledged long-standing stigmas associated with each of the technologies that defined his culture, and it highlights the ways in which characters described themselves and others as machines. "Shakespeare and Technology" should be of interest to literature scholars, early modern cultural historians, and historians of science and technology.

Shakespearean characters from Hamlet to Much Ado about Nothing contrast prose and verse in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons that can be very revealing of certain aspects of their personalities. First published in 1951, this book assesses the use of prose in Shakespeare's plays and, in doing so, asks larger questions about the playwright's technique and aims. Crane's investigation will be of value to anyone with an interest in Shakespeare's methods and work.

Originally published in 1961 on the occasion of John Dover Wilson's 80th birthday, this book contains a list of his published writings, beginning with his articles for the Manchester Guardian in the early 20th century and moving through to his 1961 edition of Coriolanus. This text will be of value to anyone with an interest in Dover Wilson's life and academic career.

Literary scholars, theorists, and historians deploy New Economic techniques to illuminate English Renaissance literature in fresh ways. Contributors variously explore poetry's precarious perch between gift and commodity; the longing for family in The Comedy of Errors as symbolically expressing the alienating pressures of mercantilism; Measure for Measure's representation of singlewomen and the feminization of poverty; the collision between two views of money in a possible collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton; the cultural spread of an accounting mentality and quantitative thinking; and money as it crosses the frontier between price and pricelessness, from early bodily-injury insurance schemes to The Merchant of Venice.

This major new study asks the question, "how much do we know about Shakespeare's collaborations with other dramatists?", and sets out to provide a detailed evaluation of the claims made for Shakespeare's co-authorship of Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Through an examination of the processes of collaboration and the methods used in authorship studies since the early nineteenth century, Brian Vickers identifies a coherent tradition in attribution work on Shakespeare.