Shakespeare's poetic-dramatic worlds are inescapably limited. There is always, in his poems and plays, a force (a contingent drive, a pre-textual undertow, a rational-critical momentum, an ironic stance, the deflections of error) coercing plot and meaning to their end. By examining the work of limits in the sonnets and in five of his plays, this book seeks not only to highlight the poet's steadfast commitment to critical rationality. It also aims to plead a case of hermeneutic continence. Present-day appraisals of Shakespeare's world-making and meaning-projecting potential are often overruled by a neo-romantic and phenomenological celebration of plenty. This pre-critical tendency unwittingly obtains epistemic legitimation from philosophical quarters inspired by Alain Badiou's derisive rejection of "the pathos of finitude". But finitude is much more than a modish, neo-existentialist, watchword. It is what is left of ontology when reason is done. And cool reason was already at work before Kant. In accounting for the way in which Shakespeare places limits to life (Romeo and Juliet), to experience (The Tempest), to love (the Sonnets), to time (Macbeth), to the world (Hamlet) and to knowledge (Othello), Limited Shakespeare: The Reason of Finitude aims to underscore the deeply mediated dimension of Shakespearean experience, always over-determined by the twin forces of contingency and textual determinism, and his meta-rational and virtually ironic taste for irrational, accidental, and error-driven limits (bonds, bounds, deaths).

Courses on Shakespeare and Comedy are very popular so there is a ready market for this book Study of humour and comedy more generally is growing so there is a secondary market This book draws parallels between Shakespeare's time and today, which makes the book very relevant and understandable to readers Draws on a broad range of Shakespeare's plays so easy to slot onto courses Written in an engaging and accessible style for readers of all levels

Explores the network of social, political and spiritual connections in north west England as a site for regional drama, introducing the reader to the non-metropolitan theatre spaces which formed a vital part of early modern dramatic activity. Uses the possibility that Shakespeare began his theatrical career to provide a range of new contexts for reading his plays. Examines the contexts in which the apprentice dramatist would have worked, providing new insight into regional performance, touring theatre & the patronage of the Earls of Derby. Examines the experiences of Catholic families and the way in which Lancashire's status as a Catholic stronghold led to conflict with central government's attempts to create a united state.. All this feeds into innovative readings of individual plays such as Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. -- .

Shakespeare's problem plays present an unusually fertile field for Jungian tillage. Like a face glimpsed in a crowd and then lost, these works seem to hint at truths just beyond our grasp. Viewed through the lens of Jung's theory of archetypes, pieces fall into place with remarkable clarity, each revolving around a specific critical axis that allows us to see the form and structure that elude us in other readings. The author argues that Jung's theories offer the best key to date for these most intriguing of literary and dramatic puzzles.

The potential duality of human character and its capacity for dissembling was a source of fascination to the Elizabethan dramatists. Where many of them used the Machiavellian picture to draw one fair-faced scheming villain after another, Shakespeare absorbed more deeply the problem of the tensions between the public and private face of man. Originally published in 1983, this book examines the ways in which this psychological insight is developed and modified as a source of dramatic power throughout Shakespeare's career. In the great sequence of history plays he examines the conflicting tensions of kingship and humanity, and the destructive potential of this dilemma is exploited to the full in the 'problem plays'. In the last plays power and virtue seem altogether divorced: Prospero can retire to an old age at peace only at the abdication of all his power. This theme is central to the art of many dramatists, but in the context of Renaissance political philosophy it takes on an added resonance for Shakespeare.

Read HAMLET in graphic-novel form--with NO FEAR! NOW IN COLOR! Based on the No Fear Shakespeare translations, this dynamic graphic novel--now with color added--is impossible to put down. The illustrations are distinctively offbeat, slightly funky, and appealing to teens. Includes: - An illustrated cast of characters - A helpful plot summary - Illustrations that show the reader exactly what's happening in each scene--making the plot and characters clear and easy to follow

The Life of William Shakespeare is a fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of Shakespeare's life and works focusing on oftern neglected literary and historical contexts: what Shakespeare read, who he worked with as an author and an actor, and how these various collaborations may have affected his writing. * Written by an eminent Shakespearean scholar and experienced theatre reviewer * Pays particular attention to Shakespeare's theatrical contemporaries and the ways in which they influenced his writing * Offers an intriguing account of the life and work of the great poet-dramatist structured around the idea of memory * Explores often neglected literary and historical contexts that illuminate Shakespeare's life and works

This book provides a thorough analysis of terpsichorean lexis in Renaissance drama. Besides considering not only the Shakespearean canon but also the Bard's contemporaries (e.g., dramatists as John Marston and Ben Jonson among the most refined Renaissance dance aficionados), the originality of this volume is highlighted in both its methodology and structure. As far as methods of analysis are concerned, corpora such as the VEP Early Modern Drama collection and EEBO, and corpus analysis tools such as #LancsBox are used in order to offer the widest range of examples possible from early modern plays and provide co-textual references for each dance. Examples from Renaissance playwrights are fundamental for the analysis of connotative meanings of the dances listed and their performative, poetic and metaphoric role in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama. This study will be of great interest to Renaissance researchers, lexicographers and dance historians.

Shakespeare, the Renaissance and Empire: Poetry, Philosophy and Politics is the second volume of this study and builds on the first, which concentrated on related matters, including geography and language. In both volumes, a key focus is close analysis of the text and an attention to Shakespeare's use of signs, verbal and visual, to represent the world in poetry and prose, in dramatic and non-dramatic work as well as some of the contexts before, during and after the Renaissance. Shakespeare's representation of character and action in poetry and theatre, his interpretation and subsequent interpretations of him are central to the book as seen through these topics: German Shakespeare, a life and no life, aesthetics and ethics, liberty and tyranny, philosophy and poetry, theory and practice, image and text. The book also explores the typology of then and now, local and global.

From 1660 through approximately 1830, the alteration of Shakespearean texts to comply with contemporary dramaturgy was a normal occurrence, and the need to adapt Shakespeare to popular tastes generated music quite different in style, function, and influence from that envisioned by the Elizabethan playwright. Shakespeare's plots and poetry were updated, and the role of music elevated. The musical repertoire created for this transfigured Shakespeareana represents the staggering variety of music on the English stage and shows the effect of Continental musical influences, especially Italian opera and ballad opera. Proceeding chronologically, this book discusses music used in Shakespeare productions on the London stage during the 170-year period following the Restoration. Included are settings of Shakespeare's song lyrics, other original texts, and added non-Shakespearean texts, as well as incidental music, masques, operas and afterpieces based on the plays. Source materials documenting the arguments include manuscript scores, the extant music printed in play texts, and contemporary commentary from advertisements, criticism, playbills, and memoirs and correspondence. An appendix summarizes information about important productions and source materials in a series of charts cross-referenced to the extensive bibliography. Numerous musical examples illustrate the text, and scores of Shakespearean music by Arne, Boyce, Leveridge, Vernon, Weldon, and others are reprinted. Theater historians as well as music historians working in this period will find this book a valuable resource, as will theater practitioners interested in period productions.

Rejecting arguments that Shakespeare is either an absolutist or a partisan of civic republican values, this book argues that Shakespeare is essentially anti-political, dissecting the nature of the nation-state and charting a surprising form of resistance to it. For Shakespeare, the nation-state is essentially and inescapably a vehicle of sovereign power, seizing the bodily lives of its subjects to impose regulated subjectivities, roles and identities, including a collective national identity. Shakespeare does not imagine directly opposing sovereign power; rather, he imagines using sovereign power against itself to engineer new forms of selfhood and relationality that escape the orbit of the nation-state. It is the new experiences of selfhood and relationality that flourish in the shadows of sovereign power that Gil terms 'the life of the flesh, ' and he argues that one place where the life of the flesh appears especially prominently is in a non-intimate experience of sexuality.

Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries analyzes literary remediations of Shakespeare's works, particularly those written for young readers. This book explores adaptations, revisions, and reimaginings by Lewis Theobald, the Bowdlers, the Lambs, and Mary Cowden Clarke, among others, to provide a theoretical account of the poetics and practices of remediating literary texts. Considering the interplay between the historical fascination with Shakespeare and these practices of adaptation, this book examines the endless attempt to mediate our relationship to Shakespeare. Howard Marchitello investigates the motivations behind various forms of remediation, ultimately expanding theories of literary adaptation and appropriation.

The author contends that Shakespeare's essential greatness is evident when focusing on the impact his best plays make when acted. This work also illustrates his preoccupation with the quest for human perfection and the mystery of sanctification. It concentrates on the texts and their theatrical rendering.

Shakespeare's last plays, the tragicomic Romances, are notoriously strange plays, riddled with fabulous events and incredible coincidences, magic and dream. These features have sometimes been interpreted as the carelessness of an of an aging dramatist weary of his craft, or justified as folklore motifs, suitable to the romance tale. But neither view explains the fascination and power these plays still exert. Originally published in 1987, Ruth Nevo's book offers a reading of the plays which invokes the findings and methods of post-psychoanalytic semiotics. Drawing on a Lacanian model of the "textual unconscious", she embarks on searching analyses of Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, brilliantly illuminating their apparent absurdities and anomalies, their bizarre or preposterous events and obscurely motivated actions, their often puzzling syntax. Her investigation of the plays' informing fantasies produces unified and enriched readings which serve both to rehabilitate those plays which have been less than highly thought of, and to disclose new significance in the acknowledged masterpieces.

If it is not generally known that the foundations of twentieth-century criticism of Shakespeare's imagery were laid over one hundred and fifty years ago, the explanation lies in the limited availability of the single original edition of Walter Whiter's Specimen of a Commentary on Shakspeare published in 1794. In an age in which the study of Shakespeare's characters was of prime interest and importance, Whiter - a classical scholar who took holy orders and ended his life as a country parson - developed a form of textual criticism closely linked to a study of the workings of the human mind: and his book offers a psychological survey of the creative imagination, following the principles laid down in Locke's Essay on Human Understanding and illustrated by examples from Shakespeare's plays. In his realization that Shakespeare provides the finest examples of the poetic imagination Whiter is of his time: but in his particular study of the associative powers of such a mind engaged in the process of creation, he is far in advance of his time and has no immediate disciples in the later nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, however, there was an increasing acknowledgement of Whiter's work and a more frequent appeal for the reissue of his book. Originally published in 1967, the present edition was started in response to that appeal more than ten years before Mr Alan Over's tragic death in 1964 and incorporates the revisions and additions made by Whiter for his own projected second edition.

Originally published in 1987, "Fanned and Winnowed Opinions" celebrates the scholarship of Professor Harold Jenkins, one of this century's foremost editors and critics of Shakespeare. All of the essays address Shakespearean topics, and many of the sixteen focus on the years between 1595 and 1605, the period on which much of Professor Jenkin's work centers: there are, appropriately, three essays on Hamlet. A variety of critical approaches is represented, including the Freudian and the feminist; some essays focus on one play, while others take a thematic approach. Comedies, histories, and tragedies all come under consideration. The contributors include many distinguished scholars, some of whom studied under Professor Jenkins or edited volumes of the Arden Shakespeare under his direction. All of the contributions were specifically written for the Festschrift and had not appeared in print before. In addition to the scholarly essays, the volume features an introduction with an appreciative review of Harold Jenkins' career and a complete bibliography of his works.

Conflict is at the heart of much of Shakespeare's drama. Frequently there is an overt setting of violence, as in Macbeth, but, more significantly there is often 'interior' conflict. Many of Shakespeare's most striking and important characters - Hamlet and Othello are good examples - are at war with themselves. Originally published in 1987, S. C. Boorman makes this 'warfare of our nature' the central theme of his stimulating approach to Shakespeare. He points to the moral context within which Shakespeare wrote, in part comprising earlier notions of human nature, in part the new tentative perceptions of his own age. Boorman shows Shakespeare's great skill in developing the traditional ideas of proper conduct to show the tensions these ideas produce in real life. In consequence, Shakespeare's characters are not the clear-cut figures of earlier drama, rehearsing the set speeches of their moral types - they are so often complex and doubting, deeply disturbed by their discordant natures. The great merit of this fine book is that it displays the ways in which Shakespeare conjured up living beings of flesh and blood, making his plays as full of dramatic power and appeal for modern audiences as for those of his own day. In short, this book presents a human approach to Shakespeare, one which stresses that truth of mankind's inner conflict which links virtually all his plays.

Shakespeare has been dubbed the greatest psychologist of all time. This book seeks to prove that statement by comparing the playwright's fictional characters with real-life examples of violent individuals, from criminals to political actors. For Gilligan and Richards, the propensity to kill others, even (or especially) when it results in the killer's own death, is the most serious threat to the continued survival of humanity. In this volume, the authors show how humiliated men, with their desire for retribution and revenge, apocryphal violence and political religions, justify and commit violence, and how love and restorative justice can prevent violence. Although our destructive power is far greater than anything that existed in his day, Shakespeare has much to teach us about the psychological and cultural roots of all violence. In this book the authors tell what Shakespeare shows, through the stories of his characters: what causes violence and what prevents it.

A collection of essays originally presented on the Blackfriars stage at the American Shakesepeare Center, Shakespeare Expressed brings together scholars and practitioners, often promoting ideas that can be translated into classroom experiences. Drawing on essays presented at the Sixth Blackfriars Conference, held in October 2011, the essays focus on Shakespeare in performance by including work from scholars, theatrical practitioners (actors, directors, dramaturgs, designers), and teachers in a format that facilitates conversations at the intersection of textual scholarship, theatrical performance, and pedagogy. The volume's thematic sections briefly represent some of the major issues occupying scholars and practitioners: how to handle staging choices, how modern actors embody early modern characters, how the physical and technical aspects of early modern theaters previously impacted and how they currently affect performance, and how the play texts can continue to enlighten theatrical and scholarly endeavors. A special essay on pedagogy that features specific classroom exercises also anchors each section in the collection. The result is an eclectic, stimulating, and forward-thinking look at the most current trends in early modern theater studies.

Shakespeare, the Renaissance and Empire presents Shakespeare as both a local and global writer, investigating Shakespeare's trans-cultural writing through the interrelations and interactions of binaries including theory and practice, past and present, aesthetics and ethics, freedom and tyranny, republic and empire, empires and colonies, poetry and history, rhetoric and poetics, England and America, and England and Asia. The book breaks away from traditional western-centric analysis to present a universal Shakespeare, exposing readers to the relevance and significance of Shakespeare within their local contexts and cultures. This text aims to present a global Shakespeare, utilizing a dual perspective or dialectical presentation, mainly centred on questions of (1) how Shakespeare can be viewed as both an English writer and a world writer; (2) how language operates across genres and kinds of discourse; and (3) how Shakespeare helps to articulate a poetics of both texts (literature) and contexts (cultures). The book's originality lies in its articulation of the importance and value of Shakespeare in the emerging landscape of global culture.

The third edition of Hamlet offers a completely new introduction to this rich, mysterious play, examining Shakespeare's transformation of an ancient Nordic legend into a drama whose philosophical, psychological, political, and spiritual complexities have captivated audiences world-wide for over 400 years. Focusing on the ways in which Shakespeare re-imagined the revenge plot and its capacity to investigate the human experiences of love, grief, obligation, and memory, Heather Hirschfeld explores the play's cultural and theatrical contexts, its intricate textual issues, its vibrant critical traditions and controversies, and its history of performance and adaptation by celebrated directors, actors, and authors. Supplemented by an updated reading list, extensive illustrations and helpful appendices, this edition also features revised commentary notes explicitly designed for the student reader, offering the very best in contemporary criticism of this great tragedy.

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 third edition of Twelfth Night retains the text edited and annotated by Elizabeth Story Donno for the first edition of 1985, and features an updated introduction by Penny Gay, which focuses on recent scholarship and performance history. Building on her Introduction to the second edition, Gay stresses the play's theatricality, its elaborate linguistic games and its complex use of Ovidian myths. She analyses the delicate balance Shakespeare strikes in Twelfth Night between romance and realism, and explores representations of gender, sexuality and identity in the text. A selection of new photographs completes the edition.

This volume gathers and annotates all of the Shakespeare criticism, including previously unpublished lectures and notes, by the maverick American intellectual Kenneth Burke. Burke's interpretations of Shakespeare have influenced important lines of contemporary scholarship; playwrights and directors have been stirred by his dramaturgical investigations; and many readers outside academia have enjoyed his ingenious dissections of what makes a play function. Burke's intellectual project continually engaged with Shakespeare's works, and Burke's writings on Shakespeare, in turn, have had an immense impact on generations of readers. Carefully edited and annotated, with helpful cross-references, Burke's fascinating interpretations of Shakespeare remain challenging, provocative, and accessible. Read together, these pieces form an evolving argument about the nature of Shakespeare's artistry. Included are thirteen analyses of individual plays and poems, an introductory lecture explaining his approach to reading Shakespeare, and a comprehensive appendix of scores of Burke's other references to Shakespeare. The editor, Scott L. Newstok, also provides a historical introduction and an account of Burke's legacy. This edition fulfils Burke's own vision of collecting in one volume his Shakespeare criticism, portions of which had appeared in the many books he had published throughout his lengthy career. Here, Burke examines Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Venus and Adonis, Othello, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Falstaff, the Sonnets, and Shakespeare's imagery. KENNETH BURKE (1897-1993) was the author of many books, including the landmark Motivorum trilogy: A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955 (2007). He has been hailed as one of the most original American thinkers of the twentieth century and possibly the greatest rhetorician since Cicero. Burke's enduring familiarity with Shakespeare helped shape his own theory of dramatism, an ambitious elaboration of the "all the world's a stage" conceit. Burke is renowned for his far-reaching 1951 essay on Othello, which wrestles with concerns still relevant to scholars more than half a century later; his imaginative ventriloquism of Mark Antony's address over Caesar's body has likewise found a number of appreciative readers, as have his many other essays on the playwright. SCOTT L. NEWSTOK is Assistant Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College and Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University.

To interrupt, both on stage and off, is to wrest power. From the Ghost's appearance in Hamlet to Celia's frightful speech in Volpone, interruptions are an overlooked linguistic and dramatic form that delineates the balance of power within a scene. This book analyses interruptions as a specific form in dramatic literature, arguing that these everyday occurrences, when transformed into aesthetic phenomena, reveal illuminating connections: between characters, between actor and audience, and between text and reader. Focusing on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Fletcher, Michael M. Wagoner examines interruptions that occur through the use of punctuation and stage directions, as well as through larger forms, such as conventions and dramaturgy. He demonstrates how studying interruptions may indicate aspects of authorial style - emphasizing a playwright's use and control of a text - and how exploring relative power dynamics pushes readers and audiences to reconsider key plays and characters, providing new considerations of the relationships between Othello and Iago, or Macbeth and the Ghost of Banquo.