The systematic practice of non-traditional or "colorblind" casting began with Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1950s. Although colorblind casting has been practiced for half a century now, it still inspires vehement controversy and debate.
This collection of fourteen original essays explores both the production history of colorblind casting in cultural terms and the theoretical implications of this practice for reading Shakespeare in a contemporary context.

Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London explores the effects of audience riots on the dramaturgy of early modern playwrights, arguing that playwrights from Marlowe to Brome often used their plays to control the physical reactions of their audience. This study analyses how, out of anxiety that unruly audiences would destroy the nascent industry of professional drama in England, playwrights sought to limit the effect that their plays could have on the audience. They tried to construct playgoing through their drama in the hopes of creating a less-reactive, more pensive, and controlled playgoer. The result was the radical experimentation in dramaturgy that, in part, defines Renaissance drama. Written for scholars of Early Modern and Renaissance Drama and Theatre, Theatre History, and Early Modern and Renaissance History, this book calls for a new focus on the local economic concerns of the theatre companies as a way to understand the motivation behind the drama of early modern London.

"The Merchant of Venice" is perhaps most associated not with its titular hero, Antonio, but with the complex figure of the money lender, Shylock. The play was described as a comedy in the First Folio but its modern audiences find it more problematic to categorize. The vilification of Shylock "the Jew" can be very uncomfortable for a modern, post-holocaust audience and debates continue as to whether Shakespeare's portrayal of this complex man is sympathetic or anti-Semitic. John Drakakis' comprehensive introduction traces the stage history of the figure of the Jew and looks boldly at twenty-first century issues surrounding it. He also explores other themes of the play such as father/daughter relations, the power of money and the forceful character of Portia, to offer readers an energetic, original and revelatory reading of this challenging play.

This is an entertaining account of Shakespeare's afterlives in fiction. Paul Franssen offers the first sustained analysis of stories and films that involve the character of Shakespeare. Taking a broad international and historical perspective, he shows how fictions about Shakespeare help us understand what he meant to a certain age, nation, or author, and how they have become a vital aspect of the Shakespeare industry. Appearing sometimes as a ghost or time-traveller, fictional Shakespeares have been made to speak to many issues, such as the French Revolution, the Irish conflict, colonialism, the Anglo-American relationship, sexual orientation, race and class. Written in an accessible style, this book will appeal to advanced students as well as academic researchers in Shakespeare studies, film and cultural studies, literary reception and creative writing.

This study traces the response to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" from Shakespeare's day to the present, including critics from Britain, Europe and America.

This book investigates the origins, impact, and outcome of the Elizabethan obsession with fraudulent conveyancing, the part of debtor-creditor law that determines when a court can void a transfer of assets. Focusing on the years between the passage of a key statute in 1571 and the court case that clarified the statute in 1601, Charles Ross convincingly argues that what might seem a minor matter in the law was in fact part of a wide-spread cultural practice. The legal and literary responses to fraudulent conveyancing expose ethical, practical, and jurisprudential contradictions in sixteenth-century English, as well as modern, society. At least in English Common Law, debt was more pervasive than sex. Ross brings to this discussion a dazzling knowledge of early modern legal practice that takes the conversation out of the universities and Inns of Court and brings it into the early modern courtroom, the site where it had most relevance to Renaissance poets and playwrights. Ross here examines how during the thirty years in which the law developed, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare wrote works that reflect the moral ambiguity of fraudulent conveyancing, which was practiced by unscrupulous debtors but also by those unfairly oppressed by power. The book starts by showing that the language and plot of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor continually refers to this cultural practice that English society came to grips with during the period 1571-1601. The second chapter looks at the social, political, and economic climate in which Parliament in 1571 passed 13 Eliz. 5, and argues that the law, which may have been used to oppress Catholics, was probably passed to promote business. The Sidney chapter shows that Henry Sidney, as governor of Ireland (a site of religious oppression), and his son Philip were, surprisingly, on the side of the fraudulent conveyors, both in practice and imaginatively (Sidney's Arcadia is the first of several works to associate fraudulent conveyancing with the abduction of women). The fourth chapter shows that Edmund Spenser, who as an official in Ireland rails against fraudulent conveyors, nonetheless includes a balanced assessment of several forms of the practice in The Faerie Queene. Chapter five shows how Sir Edward Coke's use of narrative in Twyne's Case (1601) helped settle the issue of intentionality left open by the parliamentary statute. The final chapter reveals how the penalty clause of the Elizabethan law accounts for the punishment Portia imposes on Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice. The real strength of the book lies in Ross's provocative readings of individual cases, which will be of great use to literary critics wrestling with the applications of legal theory to the interpretation of individual texts. This study connects a major development in the law to the literature of the period, one that makes a contribution not only to the law but also to literary studies and political and social history.

'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

This is an exploration of Shakespeare films as interpretations of Shakespeare's plays as well as interpreting the place of Shakespeare on screen within the classroom and within the English curriculum. Shakespeare on screen is evaluated both in relation to the play texts and in relation to the realms of popular film culture. The book focuses on how Shakespeare is manipulated in film and television through the representation of violence, gender, sexuality, race and nationalism. Cartmell discusses a wide range of films, including Orson Welles' Othello (1952), Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991), Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1996) and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998).

This book presents a scholarly edition of five of the first adaptations of Shakespeare from the eighteenth century, the period when Shakespeare became "Shakespeare." Written by men influential in early Augustan cultural spheres, these adaptations demonstrate how contemporary literary principles and contemporary politics were applied to Shakespeare's texts. In these adaptations of Henry V, Richard II, Coriolanus, 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, we see the various ways that eighteenth-century authors "righted" Shakespeare's "wrongs": through the addition and alteration of female characters and romantic sub-plots, the introduction of new scenes, the use of the unities of time and place, and the inclusion of overt moral and political arguments. The critical introduction contextualizes the five adaptations through its discussion of early eighteenth-century theatre and politics. First providing an overview of the state of the theatre at the beginning of the Augustan age, the introduction then examines the multiple political conspiracies that rocked the first years of George I's reign and that provide the backdrop to these adaptations. Furthermore, the introduction draws particular attention to the importance of the actress in the early eighteenth century, highlighting how Shakespeare's adaptors drew on actresses' cultural capital to alter Shakespeare's texts. Finally, the edition provides a critical introduction to each of the plays. Extensive explanatory notes are provided, which situate further these plays in their contemporary context. In its introduction and explanatory notes, Shakespeare Adaptations supplies an important critical apparatus to five plays which are often noted in the annals of Shakespearean theatrical history with derision. However, this edition reveals how these plays documented their own time and helped shape Shakespeare into the most recognizable literary icon in the Western canon.

Shakespeare's Thought: Unobserved Details and Unsuspected Depths in Eleven Plays demonstrates that Shakespeare's plays were conceived and executed as studies of great moral and political issues. After examining the divergent views of critics across the years, this book goes on to analyze eleven of Shakespeare's most famous plays, observing details and supplying interpretations that indicate the depth of his mind and the full extent of his artistic spirit. This book offers an in-depth exploration of the ways in which each play demonstrates Shakespeare's political thought and his poetic genius.

First published in 1991, this book is the first annotated bibliography of feminist Shakespeare criticism from 1975 to 1988 - a period that saw a remarkable amount of ground-breaking work. While the primary focus is on feminist studies of Shakespeare, it also includes wide-ranging works on language, desire, role-playing, theatre conventions, marriage, and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture - shedding light on Shakespeare's views on and representation of women, sex and gender. Accompanying the 439 entries are extensive, informative annotations that strive to maintain the original author's perspective, supplying a careful and thorough account of the main points of an article.

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on Shakespeare and issues of social justice and arts activism by an international team of leading scholars, directors, arts activists, and educators. Across four sections it explores the relevance and responsibility of art to the real world ? to the significant teaching and learning, performance and practice, theory and economies that not only expand the discussion of literature and theatre, but also open the gates of engagement between the life of the mind and lived experience. The collection draws from noted scholars, writers and practitioners from around the globe to assert the power of art to question, disrupt and re-invigorate both the ties that bind and the barriers that divide us. A series of interviews with theatre practitioners and scholars opens the volume, establishing an initial portfolio of areas for research, exploration, and change. In Section 2 'The Practice of Shakespeare and Social Justice' contributors examine Shakespeare's place and possibilities in intervening on issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Section 3 'The Performance of Shakespeare and Social Justice' traces Shakespeare and social justice in multiple global contexts; engaging productions grounded in the politics of Mexico, India, South Africa, China and aspects of Asian politics broadly, this section illuminates the burgeoning field of global production while keeping as a priority the political structures that make advocacy and resistance possible. The last section on 'Economies of Shakespeare' describes socio-economic and community issues that come to light in Shakespeare, and their potential to catalyse ongoing discussion and change in respect to wealth, distribution, equity, and humanity. An annotated bibliography provides further guidance to those researching the subject.

The history of Shakespearean performance is very well served at its two extremes, with volumes providing a valuable historical overview of the subject and others concentrating on the performance history of a particular play. However, no individual volume provides an in-depth consideration of the stage histories of a number of plays, chosen for their particular significance within specific cultural contexts. Shakespeare in Stages addresses this gap. The original case studies explore significant anglophone performances of the plays, as well as ideas about 'Shakespeare', through the changing prisms of three different cultural factors that have proved influential in the way Shakespeare is staged: notions of authenticity, attitudes towards sex and gender, and questions of identity. Ranging from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries and examining productions of plays in Britain, USA, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, the studies focus attention on the complex interaction between particular plays, issues, events, and periods.

This volume, examining the ways in which Shakespeare's plays are designed for hearers as well as spectators, has been prompted by recent explorations of the auditory dimension of early modern drama by such scholars as Andrew Gurr, Bruce Smith, and James Hirsh. To look at the dynamics of hearing in Shakespeare's plays involves a paradigm shift that changes how we understand virtually everything about them, from the architecture of the buildings, to playing spaces, to blocking, and to larger interpretative issues, including our understanding of character based on players' responses to what they hear, mishear, or refuse to hear. Who Hears in Shakespeare? Auditory Worlds on Stage and Screen is comprised of three sections on Shakespeare's texts and performance history: "The Poetics of Hearing and the Early Modern Stage"; "Metahearing: Hearing, Knowing, and Audiences, Onstage and Off"; and "Transhearing: Hearing, Whispering, Overhearing, and Eavesdropping in Film and Other Media." Chapters by noted scholars explore the complex reactions and interactions of onstage and offstage audiences and show how Shakespearean stagecraft, actualized on stage and adapted on screen, revolves around various situations and conventions of hearing-soliloquies,, asides, avesdropping, overhearing, and stage whispers. In short, Who Hears in Shakespeare? enunciates Shakespeare's nuanced, powerful stagecraft of hearing. The volume ends with Stephen Booth's afterword, his inspiring meditation on hearing that considers Shakespearean "audiences" and their responses to what they hear-or don't hear-in Shakespeare's plays.

James S. Baumlin's Theologies of Language in English Renaissance Literature offers a revisionist history of discourse, taking Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton as its touchstones. Their works mark stages in die Entzauberung or "disenchantment," as Max Weber has termed it: that is, in the "elimination of magic from the world." Shakespeare's Hamlet questions the word-magic associated with medieval Catholicism; Donne's love lyrics ironize the sacramental gestures of their poetic-priestly speakers; more radical still, Milton's major poems and polemical prose empty language of sacral power, repudiating human persuasion entirely over matters of "saving faith." Baumlin describes four archetypes of historical rhetoric: sophism, skepticism, incarnationism, and transcendence. Undergirding the age's competing theologies, each makes unique assumptions regarding the powers of language (both communicative and performative); the nature of being (including transcendent being or deity); the structure of the psyche (whether sin-weakened or self-sufficient); and the capacities of human knowing (whether certain knowledge is communicable-or even possible). Working within divergent theologies of language, the poets here studied take theological controversies as explicit themes. The crisis of Hamlet begins not in a king's murder simply, but in his dying without benefit of the sacraments. As if compensating for their loss, young Hamlet "minister[s]" to Gertrude while acting as "scourge" to Claudius. Alternating between soul-cursing and soul-curing, Hamlet plays sorcerer and priest indiscriminately. Appropriating the speech-acts of Catholic sacramentalism, Donne's lyrics describe a private "religion of Love," over which the poet-lover presides as officiant. Or rather, some lyrics present him as Love's Priest, there being as many personae as there are theologies of language. Beyond Love's Priest, Baumlin describes three such personae: Love's Apostate, Love's Atheist, and Love's Reformer. Focusing on "Lycidas" and De Doctrina Christiana, Baumlin outlines Milton's plerophoristic "rhetoric of certitude." Such texts as these explore the problematic status of preaching. (Can human eloquence contribute to salvation?) They explore competing definitions (Aristotelian vs. Pauline) of pistis-meaning alternatively (religious) "faith" and (rhetorical) "persuasion." And they invoke conflicting typologies (classical vs. Hebraic) of authorial ethos. Baumlin's study ends with a glance at the Restoration and Royal Society's final "disenchantment" or secularization of discourse.

Shakespeare's Style presents a detailed consideration of aspects of Shakespeare's writing style in his plays. Each chapter offers a detailed discussion about a single feature of style in a chosen Shakespeare play. Topics examine include: a discussion of a key image or images, both verbal and nonverbal; consideration of the way a character is put together; reflection of the changing audience response to a character; and audience response to an account of the speech rhythms of a single play. This book will be of interest to audiences who see Shakespeare's plays, readers of the printed page, and students aiding them in concentrating on the significant ways that Shakespeare expresses himself.

A collection of 154 sonnets reflecting on love, death, marriage and economic theory, each taking its inspiration from Shakespeare's 154. These poems have wit and a kick coming from a middle-aged woman in the middle of Scotland in the twenty-first century.

This book contains everything you need to write better A-Level and Undergraduate English essays on William Shakespeare's 'Hamlet', all presented in a helpful and entertaining way to make study and revision easier. There are clear notes on the characters, themes, language techniques and critical context, plus practice questions to make sure you understand the main points. There's also a section dedicated to writing about 'Hamlet' to help you improve your grades.

The collection, edited by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight, features essays by scholars interested in exploring how the material culture of sixteenth and early seventeenth English theatrical culture influenced the creation and presentation of drama and how understanding this culture can enrich scholars' current interactions with these plays as well as offer insights to actors and directors. The essays include discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton as well as lesser known works and playwrights. This collection is unique in that it includes the body of the actor as a material object that is encountered and manipulated by other actors on the stage. These essays demonstrate how props, bodies and the architectural dimensions of early modern stages have both practical and symbolic registers.

My book presents striking new evidence which shows that ""William Shakespeare"" was the pen-name of William Stanley, younger son of the Earl of Derby, born 1561. He was educated at Oxford, travelled for three years abroad, and studied Law in London, mixing with poets and playwrights; in 1592 Spenser recorded that he had written several plays. In 1594 he unexpectedly inherited the Earldom--hence the pen-name. In 1601 he became a Knight of the Garter, eligible to bear the canopy over King James at his coronation anointing, prompting Sonnet 125's Wer't ought to me I bore the canopy?; he is the only authorship candidate ever in a position to bear the canopy (only ever carried over royalty). Love's Labour's Lost parodies an obscure poem by his tutor, which few others would have read. Hamlet's situation closely mirrors Derby's situation in 1602. His name is concealed in the list of actors' names in the First Folio. His handwriting matches Shakespeare's as deduced from the early printed plays. He was patron of players who performed several times at Court, and financed the troupe known as Paul's Boys. No other member of the upper classes was so thoroughly immersed in everything theatrical.

A new biography of William Shakespeare that explores his private life in Stratford-upon-Avon, his personal aspirations, his self-determination, and his relations with the members of his family and his neighbours. The Private Life of William Shakespeare tells the story of Shakespeare in Stratford as a family man. The book offers close readings of key documents associated with Shakespeare and develops a contextual understanding of the genres from which these documents emerge. It reconsiders clusters of evidence that have been held to prove some persistent biographical fables. It also shows how the histories of some of Shakespeare's neighbours illuminate aspects of his own life. Throughout, we encounter a Shakespeare who consciously and with purpose designed his life. Having witnessed the business failures of his merchant father, he determined not to follow his father's model. His early wedding freed him from craft training to pursue a literary career. His wife's work, and probably the assistance of his parents and brothers, enabled him to make the first of the property purchases that grounded his life as a gentleman. With his will, he provided for both his daughters in ways that were suitable to their circumstances; Anne Shakespeare was already protected by dower rights in the houses and lands he had acquired. His funerary monument suggests that the man of 'small Latin and less Greek' in fact had some experience of an Oxford education. Evidences are that he commissioned the monument himself.

A number of the most influential thinkers of the past two hundred and fifty years, Herder, Goethe, Hegel, Benjamin, Marx, Schmitt, Lukacs, Derrida, Cavell, Agnes Heller, and others, have grappled with Shakespeare. This is the first volume to bring together their engagements with his drama, which are part of an underexplored philosophical tradition. "Philosophers on Shakespeare" comes at a time when the critical paradigm of Shakespeare studies in the academy is shifting from a historicist and cultural materialist model toward a renewed interest in theoretical readings of the plays. Shakespeare's work is currently being taught and performed more than ever, and there is a proliferation of new critical editions of the plays themselves to which this volume will serve as a timely and much-needed companion. It is useful for the light it sheds on individual plays as well as for its survey of literary criticism, aesthetic theory, theories of tragedy and dramatic criticism since the mid-eighteenth century.

Impressive Shakespeare reassesses Shakespeare's relationship with "print culture" in light of his plays' engagement with the language and material culture of three interrelated "impressing technologies": wax sealing, coining, and typographic printing. It analyses the material and rhetorical forms through which drama was thought to "imprint" early modern audiences and readers with ideas, morals and memories, and-looking to our own cultural moment-shows how Shakespeare has been historically constructed as an "impressive" dramatist. Through material readings of four plays-Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale-Harry Newman argues that Shakespeare deploys the imprint as a self-reflexive trope in order to advertise the value of his plays to audiences and readers, and that in turn the language of impression has shaped, and continues to shape, Shakespeare's critical afterlife. The book pushes the boundaries of what we understand by "print culture", and challenges assumptions about the emergence of concepts now central to Shakespeare's perceived canonical value, such as penetrating characterisation, poetic transformation, and literary fatherhood. Harry Newman's suggestive analysis of techniques and tropes of sealing, coining and printing produces a revelatory account of Shakespearean creative poetics. It's sustainedly startling in its rereading of familiar lines - but the chapter I found most original is on Measure for Measure: Newman is the first critic to attempt to interpret the play's authorial status as part of its own thematic and linguistic interrogation of illegitimacy and counterfeiting. He makes authorship matter in a literary and creative, rather than a quantitative and statistical, sense. Impressive Shakespeare is a brilliant scholarly debut. - Emma Smith Editor, Shakespeare Survey Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College, Oxford