This stimulating and accessible book is intended for instructors at the junior high school, high school, and undergraduate levels who present Shakespeare's most familiar tragedies to students who are largely unfamiliar with them. Acclaimed teacher of drama Victor L. Cahn begins with a general introduction, then examines six of Shakespeare's tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. With attention always directed towards inspiring student interest and response, Professor Cahn provides an overview or "spine" for each work, then proceeds scene by scene, focusing on salient characters, details of language, and major themes. The volume not only is entertaining and clear, but also raises provocative points of interpretation as well as numerous questions for discussion. Underlying the project is the conviction that although the plays are most effective in performance, they can nonetheless prove compelling in the classroom, where students can appreciate that although these works are set in a distant time and place, their issues and implications remain universal.

Hamlet stands as a high water mark of canonical art, yet it has equally attracted rebels and experimenters, those avant-garde writers, dramatists, performers, and filmmakers who, in their adaptations and appropriations, seek new ways of expressing innovative and challenging thoughts in the hope that they can change perceptions of their own world. One reason for this, as the book argues, is that the source text that is their inspiration was written in the same spirit. Hamlet as a work of art exhibits many aspects of the "vanguard" movements in every society and artistic milieux, an avant-garde vision of struggle against conformity, which retains an edge of provocative novelty. Accordingly, it has always inspired unorthodox adaptations and can be known by a neglected portion of the company it keeps, the avant-garde in every age. After placing Hamlet alongside "cutting edge" works in Shakespeare's time, such as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, chapters deal with the ways in which experimental writers, theatre practitioners, and film-makers have used the play down to the present day to develop their own avant-garde visions. This is a part of the uncanny ability of Shakespeare's Hamlet to be "ever-now, ever-new."

This stimulating and accessible book is intended for instructors at the junior high school, high school, and undergraduate levels who present some of Shakespeare's most familiar works to students who are largely unfamiliar with them. Acclaimed teacher of drama Victor L. Cahn begins with a general introduction, then examines seven of Shakespeare's plays: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, TWELFTH NIGHT, RICHARD II, HENRY IV, PART 1, and THE TEMPEST. With attention always directed towards inspiring student interest and response, Professor Cahn provides an overview or "spine" for each work, then proceeds scene by scene, focusing on salient characters, details of language, and major themes. The volume not only is entertaining and clear, but also raises provocative points of interpretation as well as numerous questions for discussion. Underlying the project is the conviction that although the plays are most effective in performance, they can nonetheless prove compelling in the classroom, where students can appreciate that although these works are set in a distant time and place, their issues and implications remain universal.

The powerful exchanges between stage, stake, and scaffold - the theatre, the bear garden and the spectacle of public execution - crucially informed Shakespeare's explorations into the construction and workings of 'the human'. The theatre's family resemblance to animal baiting and the spectacle of punishment, its sharing of the same basic type of performance space - a theatre-in-the-round, a scaffold, stake or platform surrounded by spectators - bred an ever-ready potential for a transfer of images and meanings. The staging of one of these kinds of performance is always framed by an awareness of the other two, whose presence is never quite erased and often, indeed, emphatically foregrounded. Situating Shakespearean drama within its material environment, Andreas Hofele explores how this spill-over affects the way Shakespeare models his human characters and his understanding of 'human character' in general. His dramatis personae are infused with a degree of animality that a later, more specifically Cartesian, anthropology would categorically efface. Readings based on such an anthropology tend to reduce Shakespeare's teeming multitude of animal references to a stable marker of moral, social, and ontological difference, 'beast' being everything 'man' is not or ought not to be. In contrast, Hofele argues that Shakespearean notions of humanity rely just as much on inclusion as on exclusion of the animal. Humans and animals face each other across the species divide, but the divide proves highly permeable.

This new Complete Works marks the completion of the Arden Shakespeare Third Series and includes all of Shakespeare's plays, poems and sonnets, edited by leading international scholars. New to this edition are the 'apocryphal' plays, part-written by Shakespeare: Double Falsehood, Sir Thomas More and King Edward III. The anthology is unique in giving all three extant texts of Hamlet from Shakespeare's time: the first and second Quarto texts of 1603 and 1604-5, and the first Folio text of 1623. With a simple alphabetical arrangement the Complete Works are easy to navigate. The lengthy introductions and footnotes of the individual Third Series volumes have been removed to make way for a general introduction, short individual introductions to each text, a glossary and a bibliography instead, to ensure all works are accessible in one single volume. This handsome Complete Works is ideal for readers keen to explore Shakespeare's work and for anyone building their literary library.

Long before the economist Amartya Sen proposed that more than 100 million women were missing-lost to disease or neglect, kidnapping or forced marriage, denied the economic and political security of wages or membership in a larger social order-Shakespeare was interested in such women's plight, how they were lost, and where they might have gone. Characters like Shakespeare's Cordelia and Perdita, Rosalind and Celia constitute a collection of figures related to the mythical Persephone who famously returns to her mother and the earth each spring, only to withdraw from the world each winter when she is recalled to the underworld. That women's place is far from home has received little attention from literary scholars, however, and the story of their fraught relation to domestic space or success outside its bounds is one that hasn't been told. Women and Mobility investigates the ways Shakespeare's plays link female characters' agency with their mobility and thus represent women's ties to the household as less important than their connections to the larger world outside. Female migration is crucial to ideas about what early modern communities must retain and expel in order to carve a shared history, identity and moral framework, and in portraying women as "sometime daughters" who frequently renounce fathers and homelands, or queens elsewhere whose links to faraway places are vital to the rebuilding of homes and kingdoms, Shakespeare also depicts global space as shared space and the moral world as an international one.

This stimulating and accessible book is intended for instructors at the junior high school, high school, and undergraduate levels who present Shakespeare's most familiar tragedies to students who are largely unfamiliar with them. Acclaimed teacher of drama Victor L. Cahn begins with a general introduction, then examines six of Shakespeare's tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. With attention always directed towards inspiring student interest and response, Professor Cahn provides an overview or "spine" for each work, then proceeds scene by scene, focusing on salient characters, details of language, and major themes. The volume not only is entertaining and clear, but also raises provocative points of interpretation as well as numerous questions for discussion. Underlying the project is the conviction that although the plays are most effective in performance, they can nonetheless prove compelling in the classroom, where students can appreciate that although these works are set in a distant time and place, their issues and implications remain universal.

'With the publication of Woudhuysen's Arden 3 edition, the magisterial study of the play that will energise a new generation of readers and directors has now arrived.' Eric Rasmussen, University of Nevada at Reno, Shakespeare Survey

Performing the work of William Shakespeare can be daunting to new actors. Author Herb Parker posits that his work is played easier if actors think of the plays as happening out of outrageous situations, and remember just how non-realistic and presentational Shakespeare's plays were meant to be performed. The plays are driven by language and the spoken word, and the themes and plots are absolutely out of the ordinary and fantastic-the very definition of outrageous. With exercises, improvisations, and coaching points, Acting Shakespeare is Outrageous! helps actors use the words Shakespeare wrote as a tool to perform him, and to create exciting and moving performances.

Shakespeare and Commedia dell'Arte examines the ongoing influence of commedia dell'arte on Shakespeare's plays. Exploring the influence of commedia dell'arte improvisation, sight gags, and wordplay on the development of Shakespeare's plays, Artemis Preeshl blends historical research with extensive practical experience to demonstrate how these techniques might be applied when producing some of Shakespeare's best-known works today. Each chapter focuses on a specific play, from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Winter's Tale, drawing out elements of commedia dell'arte style in the playscripts and in contemporary performance. Including contemporary directors' notes and interviews with actors and audience members alongside Elizabethan reviews, criticism, and commentary, Shakespeare and Commedia dell'Arte presents an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Renaissance theatre.

Shakespeare and Commedia dell'Arte examines the ongoing influence of commedia dell'arte on Shakespeare's plays. Exploring the influence of commedia dell'arte improvisation, sight gags, and wordplay on the development of Shakespeare's plays, Artemis Preeshl blends historical research with extensive practical experience to demonstrate how these techniques might be applied when producing some of Shakespeare's best-known works today. Each chapter focuses on a specific play, from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Winter's Tale, drawing out elements of commedia dell'arte style in the playscripts and in contemporary performance. Including contemporary directors' notes and interviews with actors and audience members alongside Elizabethan reviews, criticism, and commentary, Shakespeare and Commedia dell'Arte presents an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Renaissance theatre.

At Work in the Early Modern English Theater: Valuing Labor explores the economics of the theater by examining how drama seeks to make sense of changing conceptions of labor. With the growth of commerce and market relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England came the corresponding degradation and exploitation of workers, many of whom made their frustrations known through petitions and pamphlets. Poverty affected all sectors of society in early modern England and many laborers, even London citizens from more prosperous trades, could expect to experience periods of impoverishment. This group of precarious laborers included actors and playwrights, many of whom had direct connections to London's more established trades and occupations. Scholars have argued that dispossessed laborers turned to other forms of labor in lieu of their traditional livelihoods, including brigandage, piracy, begging, and cozening. To this list of alternative communities and applications of labor in the early modern period, Matthew Kendrick's scholarship adds the London theaters. Each chapter is guided by the central premise that anxiety over the objectification and dispossession of labor in its various forms is enacted on stage, and that drama helps to formulate, by merit of the theater's socioeconomic identity, an emerging laboring subjectivity engendered by the violent development of capitalism. As the nexus of a declining feudal social structure and an emerging capitalist regime of commodity production, a location in which dispossessed labor intersected with traditions of skilled labor and the unwieldy consumerist energies of the marketplace, the space of the theater was uniquely situated to channel and give dramatic form to the growing antagonisms and tensions that shaped labor. The stage offers a space in which to negotiate the value and meaning of labor in an increasingly exploitative society.

Dealing mainly with the works of William Shakespeare, the essays in Close Readings without Readings reflect Stephen Booth's lifelong interest in uncovering the ways great literature works upon readers. As the book's title suggests, the author does not aim to create new or novel interpretations or to uncover the political agendas of literary works, but to notice language patterns-repetitions, analogies, correspondences, echoes, overtones-and other ways in which the choice and the arrangement of words affect readers. For Booth, close reading is a practice of attentiveness. He notices how, why, and in what ways Shakespeare's works affect his readers. Whether readers agree with the premises of a literary work or not, they subject themselves, knowingly or not, to its effects. For Booth, what we value in literature is the experience. He has devoted his own work to recognizing the nature, process, and functions of reading literature, and to teaching others to do the same. Recent years have seen Booth's efforts recognized by volumes dedicated both to close reading and to his achievements as editor, scholar, critic, and teacher.

The work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has often been the testing-ground for innovations in literary studies, but this has not been true of ecocriticism. This is partly because, until recently, most ecologically minded writers have located the origins of ecological crisis in the Enlightenment, with the legacies of the Cartesian cogito singled out as a particular cause of our current woes. Traditionally, Renaissance writers were tacitly (or, occasionally, overtly) presumed to be oblivious of environmental degradation and unaware that the episteme-the conceptual edifice of their historical moment-was beginning to crack. This perception is beginning to change, and Dr. Guber's work is poised to illuminate the burgeoning number of ecocritical studies devoted to this period, in particular, by showing how the classical concept of the cosmopolis, which posited the harmonious integration of the Order of Nature (cosmos) with the Order of Society (polis), was at once revived and also systematically dismantled in the Renaissance. Renaissance Ecopolitics from Shakespeare to Bacon: Rethinking Cosmopolis demonstrates that the Renaissance is the hinge, the crucial turning point in the human-nature relationship and examines the persisting ecological consequences of the nature-state's demise.

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 second edition of Troilus and Cressida, a play that has long been considered difficult but is now popular both on the stage and in criticism, features an expanded and updated introduction and reading list. The first edition has been praised for its careful rethinking of the text, excellent annotation, lively attention to performance and extensive coverage of the play's major concerns. This updated edition retains these characteristics. In addition, Gretchen Minton and Anthony B. Dawson have provided a new account of the critical and theatrical treatment of Troilus and Cressida over the last fifteen years, showing how modern audiences have become attuned to the play's sardonic undercutting of both the medieval romance of the title characters and the Homeric tale of the Trojan War. Recent performance history is placed against a broader background of social change, including shifting attitudes towards war, political decision-making, gender politics, and fear of disease and contagion.

In this new monograph, Claire Hansen demonstrates how Shakespeare can be understood as a complex system, and how complexity theory can provide compelling and original readings of Shakespeare's plays. The book utilises complexity theory to illuminate early modern theatrical practice, Shakespeare pedagogy, and the phenomenon of the Shakespeare 'myth'. The monograph re-evaluates Shakespeare, his plays, early modern theatre, and modern classrooms as complex systems, illustrating how the lens of complexity offers an enlightening new perspective on diverse areas of Shakespeare scholarship. The book's interdisciplinary approach enriches our understanding of Shakespeare and lays the foundation for complexity theory in Shakespeare studies and the humanities more broadly.

This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare's drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare's work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare's works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare's works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange.

Appropriating Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Pyramus and Thisbe argues that the vibrant, transformative history of Shakespeare's play-within-a-play from A Midsummer Night's Dream across four centuries allows us to see the way in which Shakespeare is used to both create and critique emergent cultural trends. Because of its careful distinction between "good" and "bad" art, Pyramus and Thisbe's playful meditation on the foolishness of over-reaching theatrical ambition is repeatedly appropriated by artists seeking to parody contemporary aesthetics, resulting in an ongoing assessment of Shakespeare's value to the time. Beginning with the play's own creation as an appropriation of Ovid, designed to keep the rowdy clown in check, Appropriating Shakespeare is a wide-ranging study that charts Pyramus and Thisbe's own metamorphosis through opera, novel, television, and, of course, theatre. This unique history illustrates Pyramus and Thisbe's ability to attract like-minded, experimental, genre-bending artists who use the text as a means of exploring the value of their own individual craft. Ultimately, what this history reveals is that, in excerpt, Pyramus and Thisbe affirms the place of artist as both consumer and producer of Shakespeare.

Double Shakespeares examines contemporary performances of Shakespeare plays that employ the "emotional realist" traditions of acting that were codified by Stanislavski over a century ago. These performances recognize the inescapable doubleness of realism: that the actor may aspire to be the character but can never fully do so. This doubleness troubled the late-nineteenth-century actors and theorists who first formulated realist modes of acting; and it equally troubles theorists and theatre practitioners today. The book first looks at contemporary performances that foreground the doubleness of the actor's body, particularly through cross-dressing. It then examines narratives of Shakespearean rehearsal-both fictional representations of rehearsal in film and video, and eye-witness narratives of actual rehearsals-and how they show us the process by which the actor does or does not "become" the character. And, finally, it looks at modern performances that "frame" Shakespeare's play as a play-within-a-play, showing the audience both the character in the Shakespeare play-within and the actor in the frame-play acting that character.

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.

This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body's heterogeneity and plasticity can reveal. From literary motif or psychosomatic symptom to revolutionary gesture or existential malady, the double crux of hunger and disgust is a powerful force which can define the experience of embodiment. Kafka's fable of the "Hunger Artist" offers a matrix for the fast, while its surprising last-page revelation introduces disgust as a correlative of abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva's theory of abjection, the figure of the fraught body lurking at the heart of the negative grotesque gathers precision throughout this study, where it is employed in a widening series of contexts: suicide through overeating, starvation as self-performance or political resistance, the teratological versus the totalitarian, the anorexic harboring of death. In the process, writers and artists as diverse as Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti, George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, J.M. Coetzee, Cindy Sherman, Pieter Breughel, Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Paul McCarthy, and others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed by the starving body, this book intensifies the relationship between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the modalities of the "dark grotesque" which inform the aesthetics and politics of hunger. It will be of value to anyone interested in the culture, politics, and subjectivity of embodiment, and scholars working within the fields of disgust studies, food studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies.

In this fascinating book, Leah S. Marcus argues that the colonial context in which Shakespeare was edited and disseminated during the heyday of the British Empire has left a mark on Shakespeare's texts to the present day. How Shakespeare Became Colonial offers a unique and engaging argument, including: A brief history of the colonial importance of editing Shakespeare; The colonially inflected racism that hides behind the editing of Othello; The editing of female characters - colonization as sexual conquest; The significance of editions that were specifically created for schools in India during British colonial rule. Marcus traces important ways in which the colonial enterprise of setting forth the best possible Shakespeare for world consumption has continued to be visible in the recent treatment of his playtexts today, despite our belief that we are global or postcolonial in approach.

In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare's relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare's specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism's likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second-and no less central-is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume's organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work's reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense-of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts' growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare's writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today's Shakespearean classrooms.

Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume's tripartite structure considers instead the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare's oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting's cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

This text traces the changing theatrical and cultural identity of the History plays in the context of postwar social and political conflict, crisis and change. Since the company's inception in the early 1960s, the RSC's commitment to relevance has fostered close relationships between Shakespearean criticism and performance, and between the theatre and its audiences. Through a detailed discussion of key productions, from "The War of the Roses" in 1963 to "The Plantegenets" in 1988, Robert Shaughnessy emphasizes the political dimension of contemporary theatrical representations of Shakespeare, and of the "Shakespearean" modes of history that these plays have been employed to promote; individualist, cyclical, male-dominated, and driven by essentialised, transcendent human nature.