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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Plays & playwrights > 16th to 18th centuries > Shakespeare studies & criticism
Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of the previous year's textual and critical studies and of major British performances. The books are illustrated with a variety of Shakespearean images and production photographs. The current editor of Survey is Peter Holland. The first eighteen volumes were edited by Allardyce Nicoll, numbers 19-33 by Kenneth Muir and numbers 34-52 by Stanley Wells. The virtues of accessible scholarship and a keen interest in performance, from Shakespeare's time to our own, have characterised the journal from the start. Now backnumbers are gradually being reissued in paperback.
feminist approaches to Shakespeare by foregrounding the important role of women in showing the right way to live and achieve happiness. timely criticism, as it considers Shakespeare in the current context of the #MeToo movement providing new insights to studies of the emotions by approaching them from the perspective of research conducted by positive psychologists.
Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance asks a central theoretical question in the study of drama: What is the relationship between the dramatic text and the meanings of performance? W.B. Worthen argues that the text cannot govern the force of its performance. Instead, the text becomes significant only as embodied in the changing conventions of its performance. Worthen explores this understanding of dramatic performativity by interrogating several contemporary sites of Shakespeare production. The book includes detailed discussions of recent films and stage productions, and sets Shakespeare performance alongside other works of contemporary drama and theatre.
This volume considers the linguistic complexities associated with Shakespeare's presence in South Africa from 1801 to early twentieth-first century televisual updatings of the texts as a means of exploring individual and collective forms of identity. A case study approach demonstrates how Shakespeare's texts are available for ideologically driven linguistic programs. Seeff introduces the African Theatre, Cape Town, in 1801, multilingual site of the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in Southern Africa where rival, amateur theatrical groups performed in turn, in English, Dutch, German, and French. Chapter 3 offers three vectors of a broadening Shakespeare diaspora in English, Afrikaans, and Setswana in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 analyses Andre Brink's Kinkels innie Kabel, a transposition of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors into Kaaps, as a radical critique of apartheid's obsession with linguistic and ethnic purity. Chapter 5 investigates John Kani's performance of Othello as a Xhosa warrior chief with access to the ancient tradition of Xhosa storytellers. Shakespeare in Mzansi, a televisual miniseries uses black actors, vernacular languages, and local settings to Africanize Macbeth and reclaim a cross-cultural, multilingualism. An Afterword assesses the future of Shakespeare in a post-rainbow, decolonizing South Africa. Global Sha Any reader interested in Shakespeare Studies, global Shakespeare, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare and appropriation, Shakespeare and language, Literacy Studies, race, and South African cultural history will be drawn to this book.
In a novel reading of Shakespeare's plays, this book addresses an observation first made many decades ago, that Shakespeare appears to neglect the intellectual upheavals that astronomy brought about in his lifetime. The author examines temporal, situational, and verbal anomalies in Hamlet and other plays using hermeneutic-dialectic methodology, and finds a consistent pattern of interpretation that is compatible with the history of astronomy and with the development of modern cosmology. He also demonstrates how Shakespeare takes into account beliefs about the nature of the heavens from the time of Pythagoras up to and including discoveries and theories in the first decade of the seventeenth century. The book makes the case that, as in many other fields, Shakespeare's celestial knowledge is far beyond what was commonly known at the time. Students and teachers interested in Shakespeare's alleged indifference towards, or ignorance of, the celestial sciences will find this book illuminating, as will historians of science and scholars whose work focuses on epistemology and its relationship to the canon, and on how Shakespeare acquired the data that his plays deliver.
Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of the previous year’s textual and critical studies and of major British performances. The books are illustrated with a variety of Shakespearean images and production photographs. The current editor of Survey is Peter Holland. The first eighteen volumes were edited by Allardyce Nicoll, numbers 19-33 by Kenneth Muir and numbers 34-52 by Stanley Wells. The virtues of accessible scholarship and a keen interest in performance, from Shakespeare’s time to our own, have characterised the journal from the start. For the first time, numbers 1-50 are being reissued in paperback, available separately and as a set.
Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of the previous year’s textual and critical studies and of major British performances. The books are illustrated with a variety of Shakespearean images and production photographs. The current editor of Survey is Peter Holland. The first eighteen volumes were edited by Allardyce Nicoll, numbers 19-33 by Kenneth Muir and numbers 34-52 by Stanley Wells. The virtues of accessible scholarship and a keen interest in performance, from Shakespeare’s time to our own, have characterised the journal from the start. For the first time, numbers 1-50 are being reissued in paperback, available separately and as a set.
Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage collects significant work from the 2013 Blackfriars Conference. The conference, sponsored by the American Shakespeare Center, brings together scholars, actors, directors, dramaturges, and students to share important new work on the staging practices used by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The volume's contributors range from renowned scholars and editors to acclaimed directors, highly-trained actors, and budding researchers. The topics cover a similarly wide range: a close reading of an often-cut scene from Henry V meets an account of staging pregnancy; a meticulous review of early modern contract law collides with an analysis of an actor in a bear costume; an account of printed punctuation from the 1600s encounters a study of audience interaction and empowerment in King Lear; the identification of candid doubling in A Comedy of Errors meets the troubling of gender categories in The Roaring Girl. The essays focus on the practical applications of theory, scholarship, and editing to performance of early modern plays.
This book adds a unique eastern perspective to the ever growing corpus of Shakespeare criticism. The ancient Sanskrit theory of Rasa - the aesthete's emotional response to performing arts - is explicated in detail and applied to Shakespeare's tragic masterpieces. Bharata, who wrote about Rasa in the Natyasastra, developed detailed guidelines for the communication of emotion from author to actor and then to the audience culminating in a sublime aesthetic experience. Though chronologically Bharata is as ancient as Aristotle, thematically, his ideas are as relevant today as Aristotle's is and often echo those of the Greek master. This cross-cultural study on the communication of emotions in art establishes that emotions are universal and their communication follows similar patterns in all climes. The Rasa theory is today applied to modern media like film and has found a place among audience centric communication theories. This volume extends the East-West dialogue in aesthetic theory by identifying parallels and points of deviation and delights both aesthete and critic alike.
This wide-ranging study relates patronage to Shakespeare and the theatrical culture of his time. Twelve distinguished theater historians address such questions as--What important functions did patronage have for the theater during this period? How, in turn, did the theater impact on and represent patronage? In what ways do patronage, political power, and playing intersect? The authors also show how patronage practices changed and developed from the early Tudor period to the years in which Shakespeare was the English theater's leading artist.
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.
For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers' responses to Shakespeare's sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets' first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. First Readers of Shakespeare's Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare's sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers' interests in Shakespeare's classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Romeo and Juliet has always been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays on stage and film. This edition provides the full text of the play as well as a thorough account of its production history, equally useful for the scholar, actor and director. The introduction examines major changes over four centuries of theatrical production. The commentary provides detailed examples of how different performers, from Henry Irving and Ellen Terry to Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, have brought life and death to Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers.
Rome was tantamount to its ruins, a dismembered body, to the eyes of those - Italians and foreigners - who visited the city in the years prior to or encompassing the lengthy span of the Renaissance. Drawing on the double movement of archaeological exploration and creative reconstruction entailed in the humanist endeavour to 'resurrect' the past, 'ruins' are seen as taking precedence over 'myth', in Shakespeare's Rome. They are assigned the role of a heuristic model, and discovered in all their epistemic relevance in Shakespeare's dramatic vision of history and his negotiation of modernity. This is the first book of its kind to address Shakespeare's relationship with Rome's authoritative myth, archaeologically, by taking as a point of departure a chronological reversal, namely the vision of the 'eternal' city as a ruinous scenario and hence the ways in which such a layered, 'silent', and aporetic scenario allows for an archaeo-anatomical approach to Shakespeare's Roman works.
Like a King: Casting Shakespeare's Histories for Citizens and Subjects is a dual examination of Shakespeare's history plays in their early modern production contexts and the ways in which the histories can speak directly to twenty-first-century American political and social concerns. Author and production director Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy examines how strategic doubled and re-gendered casting can animate the underlying questions of Richard II, Henry V, and King John in vital and immediate ways for American audiences. Examining evidence from both the archive and the rehearsal room, Gutierrez-Dennehy explores the texts as repositories for twenty-first-century dialogues about power, gender, identity, nationhood, and leadership. With the American political system as its backdrop, Like a King argues that productions of Shakespeare's histories can interrogate and explore the relationships between American citizens and their leaders.
This volume presents a close reading of instances of Shakespearean quotations, allusions, imagery and rhetoric found in Karl Marx's collected works and letters, which provides evidence that Shakespeare's writings exerted a formative influence on Marx and the development of his work. Through a methodology of intertextual and interlingual close-reading, this study provides evidence of the extent to which Shakespeare influenced Marx and to which Marxism has Shakespearean roots. As a child, Marx was home-schooled in Ludwig von Westphalen's little academy, as it were, which was Shakespeare- and literary-focused. The group included von Westphalen's daughter, who later became Marx's wife, Jenny. The influence of Shakespeare in Marx's writings shows up as early as his school essays and love letters. He modelled his early journalism partly on ideas and rhetoric found in Shakespeare's plays. Each turn in the development of Marx's thought-from Romantic to Left Hegelian and then to Communist-is achieved in part through his use of literature, especially Shakespeare. Marx's mature texts on history, politics and economics-including the famous first volume of Das Kapital-are laden with Shakespearean allusions and quotations. Marx's engagement with Shakespeare resulted in the development of a framework of characters and imagery he used to stand for and anchor the different concepts in his political critique. Marx's prose style uses a conceit in which politics are depicted as performative. Later, the Marx family-Marx, Jenny and their children-was central in the late-19th-century revival of Shakespeare on the London stage, and in the growth of academic Shakespeare scholarship. Through providing evidence for a formative role of Shakespeare in the development of Marxism, the present study suggests a formative role for literature in the history of ideas.
What if you found yourself working for an intelligence agency and suddenly your understanding of other human beings had become a matter of life or death? Yair Neuman draws us into a unique thought experiment, using portraits from some of Shakespeare's most stirring works to illustrate how our psychological understanding of human nature can be significantly enriched through literature. Provocative and engaging, Shakespeare for the Intelligence Agent: Toward Understanding Real Personalities invites you to a challenging, enjoyable, and in many cases humorous reading of human personality through Shakespeare's plays.
Shakespeare's Returning Warriors - and Ours takes its primary inspiration from the contemporary U.S. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) crisis in soldiers transitioning from battlefields back into society. It begins by examining how ancient societies sought to ease the return of soldiers in order to minimize PTSD, though the term did not become widely used until the early 1980s. It then considers a dozen or so Shakespearean plays that depict such transitions at the start, focusing on the tragic protagonists and antagonists in paradigmatic "returning warrior" plays, including Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, and exploring the psychological and emotional ill-fits that prevent warrriors from returning to the status quo ante after battlefield triumphs, or even surviving the psychic demons and moral disequilibrium they unleash on their domestic settings and themselves. It also analyzes the history plays, several comedies, and Hamlet as plays that partly conform to and also significantly deviate from the basic paradigm. The final chapter discusses recent attempts to effect successful transitions, often using Shakespeare's plays as therapy, and depictions of attempts to wage warfare without inducing PTSD. Through the investigation of the tragedies and model returning warrior experiences, Shakespeare's Returning Warriors - and Ours highlights a central and understudied feature of Shakespeare's plays and what they can teach us about PTSD today when it is a widespread phenomenon in American society.
In Shakespeare studies, 'Romance' is widely understood to refer to
the plays composed and performed in the waning days of the
playwright's career. Romance on the Early Modern Stage introduces a
new history for the genre, one that dates back to the first years
of the commercial theatre in London. These early plays drew on
popular stories depicting adventurous travel, imperial conquest,
and exploration of new realms. Their staging also altered the
practices of the theatre, as playwrights embraced a dramatic
poetics to accommodate the extravagant narratives of these stories.
Romance on the Early Modern Stage aligns such formal alterations in
stagecraft with an array of materials drawn from early modern
global exploration to argue that dramatic fantasies both reflected
and informed England's overseas ambitions. The book revises how
romance is understood within the dramatic canon - from romance
enabling empire in Henry V and Milton's Comus, to the
'anti-romance' staged in The Tempest.
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.
This book is a authoritative account of Shakespeare's plays as they were transformed from scripts to be performed into books to be read, and eventually from popular entertainment into the centerpieces of the English literary canon. Kastan examines the motives and activities of Shakespeare's first publishers; the curious eighteenth-century schizophrenia that saw Shakespeare radically modified on stage at the very moment that scholars were working to establish and restore the "genuine" texts, and the exhilarating possibilities of electronic media for presenting Shakespeare now to new generations of readers. This is an important contribution to Shakespearean textual scholarship, to the history of the early English book trade, and to the theory of drama itself.
Shakespeare in Singapore provides the first detailed and sustained study of the role of Shakespeare in Singaporean theatre, education, and culture. This book tracks the role and development of Shakespeare in education from the founding of modern Singapore to the present day, drawing on sources such as government and school records, the entire span of Singapore's newspaper archives, playbills, interviews with educators and theatre professionals, and existing academic sources. By uniting the critical interest in Singaporean theatre with the substantial body of scholarship that concerns global Shakespeare, the author overs a broad, yet in-depth, exploration of the ways in which Singaporean approaches to Shakespeare have been shaped by, and respond to, cultural work going on elsewhere in Asia. A vital read for all students and scholars of Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Singapore offers a unique examination of the cultural impact of Shakespeare, beyond its usual footing in the Western world.
Floating daggers, enchanted handkerchiefs, supernatural storms, and moving statues have tantalized Shakespeare's readers and audiences for centuries. The essays in Shakespeare's Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance renew attention to non-human influence and agency in the plays, exploring how Shakespeare anticipates new materialist thought, thing theory, and object studies while presenting accounts of intention, action, and expression that we have not yet noticed or named. By focusing on the things that populate the plays-from commodities to props, corpses to relics-they find that canonical Shakespeare, inventor of the human, gives way to a lesser-known figure, a chronicler of the ceaseless collaboration among persons, language, the stage, the object world, audiences, the weather, the earth, and the heavens.
This book considers early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness, uncovering and historicizing the complex negotiations among physical embodiment, emotional response, and communally-sanctioned behavior in Shakespeare's literary and material world. The volume visits a series of questions about the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor, emotional competence or satisfaction, and joy or self-fulfillment. Individual essays investigate the purported disabilities of the "crook-back" King Richard III or the "corpulent" Falstaff, the conflicts between different health-care belief-systems in The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, the power of figurative language to delineate or even instigate puberty in the Sonnets or Romeo and Juliet, and the ways in which the powerful or moneyed mediate the access of the poor and injured to cure or even to care. Integrating insights from Disability Studies, Health Studies, and Happiness Studies, this book develops both a detailed literary-historical analysis and a provocative cultural argument about the emphasis we place on popular notions of fitness and contentment today.
Over the last twenty five years, scholarship on Early Modern women writers has produced editions and criticisms, both on various groups and individual authors. The work on Mary Wroth has been particularly impressive at integrating her poetry, prose and drama into the canon. This in turn has led to comparative studies that link Wroth to a number of male and female writers, including of course, William Shakespeare. At the same time no single volume has attempted a comprehensive comparative analysis. This book sets out to explore the ways in which Wroth negotiated the discourses that are embedded in the Shakespearean canon in order to develop an understanding of her oeuvre based, not on influence and imitation, but on difference, originality and innovation. |
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