Renaissance Humanism developed a fantasy of friendship in which men can be absolutely equal to one another, but Shakespeare and other dramatists quickly saw through this rhetoric and developed their own ideas about friendship more firmly based on a respect for human difference. They created a series of brilliant and varied fictions for human connection, as often antagonistic as sympathetic, using these as a means for individuals to assert themselves in the face of social domination. Whilst the fantasy of equal and permanent friendship shaped their thinking, dramatists used friendship most effectively as a way of shaping individuality and its limitations. Dealing with a wide range of Shakespeare's plays and poems, and with many works of his contemporaries, this study gives readers a deeper insight into a crucial aspect of Shakespeare's culture and his use of it in art.

By examining how female characters speak and act during coming of age, engagement, marriage, and intimacy, Consent in Shakespeare will enhance understanding about how and why women spoke, remained silent, or acted as they did in relation to their intimate partners in Early Modern and contemporary private and public situations in and around the Mediterranean. Consent in intimate relationships is front and center in today's conversations. This book re-examines the verbal and physical interactions of female-identified characters in Early Modern and contemporary cultures in Shakespeare's Mediterranean comedies and the sources from which he derived his plays. This re-examination of the words that women say or do not say, and actions that women do or do not take, in Shakespeare's Mediterranean plays and his probable sources sheds light on how Shakespeare's audiences might have perceived Mediterranean cultural mores and norms. Assessment of source materials for Shakespeare's comedies set in the Balkans, France, Italy, the Near East, North Africa, and Spain suggests how women of diverse backgrounds communicated in everyday life and peak life experiences in the Early Modern era. Given Shakespeare's impact worldwide, this initiative to shift the conversation about the power of consent of female protagonists and supporting characters in Shakespeare's Mediterranean plays will further transform conversations about consent in class, board and conference rooms, and the international stage.

The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory introduces this vibrant field of study to students and scholars, whilst defining and extending critical debates in the area. The book begins with a series of "Critical Introductions" offering an overview of memory in particular areas of Shakespeare such as theatre, print culture, visual arts, post-colonial adaptation and new media. These essays both introduce the topic but also explore specific areas such as the way in which Shakespeare's representation in the visual arts created a national and then a global poet. The entries then develop into more specific studies of the genre of Shakespeare, with sections on Tragedy, History, Comedy and Poetry, which include insightful readings of specific key plays. The book ends with a state of the art review of the area, charting major contributions to the debate, and illuminating areas for further study. The international range of contributors explore the nature of memory in religious, political, emotional and economic terms which are not only relevant to Shakespearean times, but to the way we think and read now.

The chapters in this book constitute a timely response to an important moment for early modern cultural studies: the academy has been called to attend to questions of social justice. It requires a revision of the critical lexicon to be able to probe the relationship between Shakespeare studies and the intractable forms of social injustice that infuse cultural, political and economic life. This volume helps us to imagine what radical and transformative pedagogy, theatre-making and scholarship might look like. The contributors both invoke and invert the paradigm of Global Shakespeare, building on the vital contributions of this scholarly field over the past few decades but also suggesting ways in which it cannot quite accommodate the various 'global Shakespeares' presented in these pages. A focus on social justice, and on the many forms of social injustice that demand our attention, leads to a consideration of the North/South constructions that have tended to shape Global Shakespeare conceptually, in the same way the material histories of 'North' and 'South' have shaped global injustice as we recognise it today. Such a focus invites us to consider the creative ways in which Shakespeare's imagination has been taken up by theatre-makers and scholars alike, and marshalled in pursuit of a more just world.

Playing Shakespeare's Rebels and Tyrants is the fourth volume in the Peter Lang series, Playing Shakespeare's Characters. As in the previous volumes, a broad range of contributors (actors, directors, scholars, educators, etc.) analyze the concepts of rebellion, tyranny, leadership, empathy with not only references to Elizabethan and Jacobean studies, but also to Donald Trump, the social justice movement, and the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Shakespeare's rebels occupy space in both the personal and political, and often quickly turn from rebel to tyrant once in power. How can Shakespeare's text inform current conversations about race, equity, representation, rebellion and tyranny? Who gets to define the power dynamics in Shakespeare's plays? This volume looks at the Henrys, Hotspurs, Richards, Lears, Brutuses and Caesars, as well as the Juliets, Rosalinds and Cordelias who make up the panoply of Shakespeares rebels and tyrants.

This book is a study of twenty stage productions, adaptations and screen versions of Shakespeare's final Roman play. It makes available for the first time sustained discussions of major productions of the play in four languages and five countries, and explores how Shakespeare's most political drama has been shaped to circumstances radically different from its original early modern staging. The book offers in-depth analyses of Coriolanus productions covering the post-war era to the twenty-first century, combining close readings of documents and historical contextualisation to productions by the BBC, the Berliner Ensemble, The Katona Jozsef Theatre in communist Hungary, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Britain's National Theatre, The New York Shakespeare Festival, Robert Lepage, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and Ralph Fiennes' major motion picture. -- .

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

1. First book aimed at a student or general market reading Shakespeare through the lens of anthropology - close study of several commonly-studied plays so will fit well on courses 2. Shakespeare is a popular topic in many subjects and this can function as a textbook on anthropology and social studies courses that look at literature 3. This book will appeal beyond the usual Shakespeare and literary studies market to anthropology and social sciences

1. First book aimed at a student or general market reading Shakespeare through the lens of anthropology - close study of several commonly-studied plays so will fit well on courses 2. Shakespeare is a popular topic in many subjects and this can function as a textbook on anthropology and social studies courses that look at literature 3. This book will appeal beyond the usual Shakespeare and literary studies market to anthropology and social sciences

Exam Board: AQA A, AQA B, Edexcel, CCEA Level: AS/A-level Subject: English literature First teaching: September 2015 First exams: Summer 2016 Enable students to achieve their best grade in AS/A-level English Literature with this year-round course companion; designed to instil in-depth textual understanding as students read, analyse and revise Othello throughout the course. This Study and Revise guide: - Increases students' knowledge of Othello as they progress through the detailed commentary and contextual information written by experienced teachers and examiners - Develops understanding of characterisation, themes, form, structure and language, equipping students with a rich bank of textual examples to enhance their coursework and exam responses - Builds critical and analytical skills through challenging, thought-provoking questions and tasks that encourage students to form their own personal responses to the text - Extends learning and prepares students for higher-level study by introducing critical viewpoints, comparative references to other literary works and suggestions for independent research - Helps students maximise their exam potential using clear explanations of the Assessment Objectives, sample student answers and examiner insights - Improves students' extended writing techniques through targeted advice on planning and structuring a successful essay

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.

A modern-day Taming of the Shrew that concludes at a high school prom. An agoraphobic Olivia from Twelfth Night sending video dispatches from her bedroom. A time-traveling teenager finding romance in the house of Capulet. Shakespeare and Girls' Studies posits that Shakespeare in popular culture is increasingly becoming the domain of the adolescent girl, and engages the interdisciplinary field of Girls' Studies to analyze adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare's plays in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Through chapters on film, television, young adult fiction, and web series aimed at girl readers and audiences, this volume explores the impact of girl cultures and concerns on Shakespeare's afterlife in popular culture and the classroom. Shakespeare and Girls' Studies argues that girls hold a central place in Shakespearean adaptation, and that studying Shakespeare through the lens of contemporary girlhoods can generate new approaches to Renaissance literature as well as popular culture aimed at girls and young people of marginalized genders. Drawing on contemporary cultural discourses ranging from Abstinence-Only Sex Education and Shakespeare in the US Common Core to rape culture and coming out, this book addresses the overlap between Shakespeare's timeless girl heroines and modern popular cultures that embrace figures like Juliet and Ophelia to understand and validate the experiences of girls. Shakespeare and Girls' Studies theorizes Shakespeare's past and present cultural authority as part of an intersectional approach to adaptation in popular culture.

Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos: Matter, Stage, Form breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates a sublime mood or ethos which predisposes audiences intellectually and emotionally for the full experience of sublime pathos, explored in the companion volume, Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare's invention of sublime matter, his exploitation of the special characteristics of the Elizabethan stage, and his dramaturgical and formal simulacra of absolute space and time. In the process, it considers Shakespeare's conception of the universe and man's place in it and uncovers the epistemological and existential implications of key aspects of his art. As the argument unfolds, a case is made for a transhistorically baroque Shakespeare whose "bastard art" enables the dramatic restoration of an original innocence where ignorance really is bliss. Taken together, Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos and Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

Chances are good that you've used one of the following expressions in your everyday conversations: "Eaten me out of house and home," "Give the devil his due," "Done to death," or "The green-eyed monster." But did you know William Shakespeare authored each of these phrases, along with many other English phrases in common use? For the Love of Shakespeare celebrates these and other common sayings that appear in our daily conversations and correctly attributes them to their true author, William Shakespeare. K. B. Chandra Raj showcases these expressions, now over 400 years old, in their original plays and poems to explain how they have changed in meaning and context. In addition, Chandra Raj studies the influence of Shakespeare's words and their remarkable staying power. His thoughtful commentary reveals how the originality and pure genius of Shakespeare's works have led them not only to enter the public lexicon, but also to continue to be performed on screen and stage. Full of the beautiful language of Shakespeare, For the Love of Shakespeare celebrates the English playwright's incredible talent, and definitively shows how his works transcend time. Lovers of Shakespeare rejoice: All's well that ends well!

Shakespeare's Boys: A Cultural History is the first extensive exploration of boyhood in Shakespeare's plays. It examines a range of characters from Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies in their original early modern contexts and surveys their performance histories on stage and screen from the Restoration until the present day. Focusing on the status of aristocratic boys, the transition from boyhood to manhood and methods of education, it argues that the varied and complex portrayal of boys in Shakespeare reflects the ambiguous and transitional status of boyhood in early modern England, and that the portrayal of these on-stage boys has been a crucial, and sometimes defining, factor in the performance history of Shakespeare's plays. This study embraces this idea of characters in flux, reading Shakespearean boyhood as a continuum in which each historical reincarnation depends upon and reacts against what came before, while influencing what is to come.

Shakespeare's plays explore a staggering range of political topics, from the nature of tyranny, to the practical effects of Christianity on politics and the family, to the meaning and practice of statesmanship. From great statesmen like Burke and Lincoln to the American frontiersman sitting by his rustic fire, those wrestling with the problems of the human soul and its confrontation with a puzzling world of political peril and promise have long considered these plays a source of political wisdom. The chapters in this volume support and illuminate this connection between Shakespearean drama and politics by examining a matter of central concern in both domains: the human soul. By depicting a bewildering variety of characters as they seek happiness and self-knowledge in the context of differing political regimes, family ties, religious duties, friendships, feuds, and poetic inspirations, Shakespeare illuminates the complex interdynamics between self-rule and political governance, educating readers by compelling us to share in the struggles of and relate to the tensions felt by each character in a way that no political treatise or lecture can. The authors of this volume, drawing upon expertise in fields such as political philosophy, American government, and law, explore the Bard's dramatization of perennial questions about human nature, moral virtue, and statesmanship, demonstrating that reading his plays as works of philosophical literature enhances our understanding of political life and provides a source of advice and inspiration for the citizens and statesmen of today and tomorrow.

Shakespeare's Pictures is the first full-length study of visual objects in Shakespearean drama. In several plays (Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, among others) pictures are brought on stage - in the form of portraits or other images - as part of the dramatic action. Shakespeare's characters show, exchange and describe them. The pictures arouse in their beholders strong feelings, of desire, nostalgia or contempt, and sometimes even taking the place of the people they depict. The pictures presented in Shakespeare's work are part of the language of the drama, and they have a significant impact on theatrical performance, from Shakespeare's time to our own. Keir Elam pays close attention to the iconographic and literary contexts of Shakespeare's pictures while also exploring their role in performance history. Highly illustrated with 46 images, this volume examines the conflicted cooperation between the visual and the verbal.

This innovative work challenges normative binaries in contemporary translation studies and applies frameworks from queer historiography to the discipline in order to explore shifting perceptions of same-sex love and desire in translations and retranslations of William Shakespeare's Sonnets. The book brings together perspectives from poststructuralism, queer theory, and translation history to set the stage for an in-depth exploration of a series of retranslations of the Sonnets from the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The complex and poetic language of the Sonnets, frequently built around era-specific idioms and allusions, has produced a number of different interpretations of the work over the centuries, but questions remain as to how the translation process may omit, retain, or enhance elements of same-sex love in retranslated works across time and geographical borders. In focusing on target cultures which experienced dramatic sociopolitical changes over the course of the twentieth century and comparing retranslations originating from these contexts, Spisiakova finds the ideal backdrop in which to draw parallels between changing developments in power and social structures and shifting translation strategies related to the representation of gender identities and sexual orientations beyond what is perceived to be normative. In so doing, the book advocates for a queer perspective on the study of translation history and encourages questioning traditional boundaries prevalent in the discipline, making this key reading for students and researchers in translation studies, queer theory, and gender studies, as well as those interested in historical developments in Central and Eastern Europe.

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).

When adapting Shakespeare's comedies, cinema and television have to address the differences and incompatibilities between early modern gender constructs and contemporary cultural, social, and political contexts. Screening Gender in Shakespeare's Comedies: Film and Television Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century analyzes methods employed by cinema and television in approaching those aspects of Shakespeare's comedies, indicating a range of ways in which adaptations made in the twenty-first century approach the problems of cultural and social normativity, gender politics, stereotypes of femininity and masculinity, the dynamic of power relations between men and women, and social roles of men and women. This book discusses both mainstream cinematic productions, such as Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice or Julie Taymor's The Tempest, and more low-key adaptations, such as Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It and Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, as well as the three comedies of BBC ShakespeaRe-Told miniseries: Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. This book examines how the analyzed films deal with elements of Shakespeare's comedies that appear subversive, challenging, or offensive to today's culture, and how they interpret or update gender issues to reconcile Shakespeare with contemporary cultural norms. By exploring tensions and negotiations between early modern and present-day gender politics, the book defines the prevailing attitudes of recent adaptations in relation to those issues, and identifies the most popular strategies of accommodating early modern constructs for contemporary audiences.

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on the period of Shakespeare's career that will assist and stimulate scholars of his poems and plays. Rather than merely attempting to summarize the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, individual chapters seek to exemplify a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies currently used in historical research on the early modern period that can inform close analysis of literature. Different sections examine political history at both the national and local levels; relationships between intellectual culture and the early modern political imagination; relevant aspects of religious and social history; and facets of the histories of architecture, the visual arts and music. Topics treated include the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere' and its relationship to drama during Shakespeare's lifetime; the role of historical narratives in shaping the period's views on the workings of politics; attitudes about the role of emotion in social life; cultures of honour and shame and the rituals and literary forms through which they found expression; crime and murder; and visual expressions of ideas of moral disorder and natural monstrosity, in printed images as well as garden architecture.

Taking a 'performance studies' perspective on Shakespearean theatre, W. B. Worthen argues that the theatrical event represents less an inquiry into the presumed meanings of the text than an effort to frame performance as a vehicle of cultural critique. Using contemporary performances as test cases, Worthen explores the interfaces between the origins of Shakespeare's writing as literature and as theatre, the modes of engagement with Shakespeare's plays for readers and spectators, and the function of changing performance technologies on our knowledge of Shakespeare. This book not only provides the material for performance analysis, but places important contemporary Shakespeare productions in dialogue with three influential areas of critical discourse: texts and authorship, the function of character in cognitive theatre studies, and the representation of theatre and performing in the digital humanities. This book will be vital reading for scholars and advanced students of Shakespeare and of Performance Studies.

First published in 1971.
This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history.
Contents include: Spenser and the Allegorists; The Faerie Queene, I and V; The Cave of Mammon; The Banquet of Sense; John Donne; The Patience of Shakespeare; Survival fo the Classic; Shakespeare's Learning; The Mature Comedies; The Final Plays.

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.

Illyria in Shakespeare's England is the first extended study of the eastern Adriatic region, often referred to in the Renaissance by its Graeco-Roman name "Illyria," in early modern English writing and political thought. At first glance the absence of earlier studies may not be surprising: that area may seem significant only to critics pursuing certain specialized questions about Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which is set in Illyria. But in fact, it is not only often misrepresented in the discussions of that play but also typically ignored in the critical conversation on English prose romances, poems, and other plays that feature Illyria or its peoples, some rarely read, others well-known, including Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, 2 Henry VI, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline. Lea Puljcan Juric explores the reasons for such views by engaging with larger questions of interest to many critics who focus on subjects other than geographic regions, such as "othering," religion, race, and the development of national identity, among other issues. She also broadens the conversation on these familiar problems in the field to include the impact of post-Renaissance notions of the Balkans on the erasure of Illyria from Shakespeare studies. Puljcan Juric studies the encounters of the English with the ancient and early modern Illyrians through their Greek and Roman heritage; geographies, histories, and travelogues, written in a variety of European polities including Illyria itself; religious conflict after the Reformation and the threat of Islam; and international politics and commerce. These considerations show how Illyria's geopolitical position among the Ottoman Empire, Habsburg Empire and Venice, its "national" struggles as well as its cultural heterogeneity figured in English interests in the eastern Mediterranean, and informed English ideas about ethnicity, nationhood, and religion. In Shakespeare studies, however, critics have consistently cast Twelfth Night's Illyria as a utopia, an enigma, or a substitute for England, Italy, or Greece. Arguing that twentieth-century politics and negative conceptions of the eastern Adriatic as part of "the Balkans" have underwritten this erasure of Illyria from our perspective on the field, Puljcan Juric shows how entrenched cultural hierarchies tied to elitism and colonial politics still inform our analyses of literature. She invites scholars to recognize that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Illyria is the site of important socio-political and cultural struggles during the period, some shared with neighboring areas, others geographically specific, that invite dynamic historical and literary scrutiny.