'The magic in The Tempest is real ... It contains a great many unanswered questions' Margaret Atwood A storm rages. Prospero and his daughter watch from their desert island as a ship carrying the royal family is wrecked. Miraculously, all on board survive. Plotting, mistaken identities, bewitching love and enchantment follow as the travellers explore this mysterious place of spirits and monsters, and discover that all is not as it seems. Shakespeare's late, great play is a work filled with marvels, music and strangeness, fully exploiting the power of language and the magic of theatre. Used and Recommended by the National Theatre General Editor Stanley Wells Edited with an Introduction by Martin Butler

Martin Butler knows what it takes to succeed when it comes to the modern customer. As an entrepreneur, a marketeer, and more recently author, lecturer and high-end retail consultant, he has worked with many leading names. In this book he distils the essence of a lifetime's work into 50 Steps for true customer excellence. Packed with examples, anecdotes, and quotes from top retailers and businesses around the world, the book will entertain as it will instruct. Butler's knowledge and expertise in this area is well-known. At the end for him, it boils down to one guiding principle: It's Not About Us, It's All About Them! Commerce is going through a period of rapid and fundamental change. To thrive, organisations must find an emotional edge. They must look to be chosen. They must be customer-obsessed. Above all, they must care...This book will show them how

This provocative and candid book goes behind the scenes to reveal the secret of success behind a number of leading UK retailers. It includes in-depth case studies on John Lewis, Selfridges, Carphone Warehouse, Odd bins, Topshop, B&Q and HMV and unique insight from a number of top retail analysts and commentators. It challenges conventional wisdom and makes the case that what the retailer stands for (the brand) is more important than what is sold (the merchandise). Targeted at anyone involved, or simply interested, in retail selling, this important book will help you become a better, smarter retailer in an increasingly competitive and changing world. It will give you the perspective and the retail branding tools to make a difference, whatever your level.

Bringing together leading Jonson scholars, Ben Jonson and Posterity provides new insights into this remarkable writer's reception and legacy over four centuries. Jonson was recognised as the outstanding English writer of his day and has had a powerful influence on later generations, yet his reputation is one of the most multifaceted and conflicted for any writer of the early modern period. The volume brings together multiple critical perspectives, addressing book history, the practice of reading, theatrical influence and adaptation, the history of performance, cultural representation in portraiture, film, fiction, and anecdotes to interrogate Jonson's 'myth'. The collection will be of great interest to all Jonson scholars, as well as having a wider appeal among early modern literary scholars, theatre historians, and scholars interested in intertextuality and reception from the Renaissance to the present day.

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. Edited and introduced by Martin Butler, this first New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Cymbeline takes full account of the critical and historical scholarship produced in the late twentieth century. It foregrounds the romance, tragicomedy and Jacobean stagecraft that shape the play and offers a refreshingly unsentimental reading of the heroine, Innogen. Butler pays greater attention than his predecessors to the politics of 1610, especially to questions of British union and nationhood. He also offers a lively account of Cymbeline's stage history from 1610 to the present day. The text has been edited from the 1623 Folio and features a detailed commentary on its linguistic and historical features.

Intimately affecting the lives of everyone on the planet, retail is the world's largest business. But what does it take to be truly successful in this highly competitive and cut-throat arena? Face to face, Martin Butler interviewed nearly 100 of the world's most successful retail bosses and now takes you behind the scenes of their victories. From New Zealand to New York, China to Cape Town, this ground-breaking book delivers extraordinary access to some sensationally big thinking from the biggest names in retail including: Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Tesco, Macy's, M&S and Starbucks. This robust and exhaustive two-year research programme has led Martin to identify six guiding principles for retail success - no matter how large or small a retail business may be. From Aldo to Zara, this revolutionary book includes 54 easily digestible case studies, packed full of insight and innovation. To thrive, retailers must look to establish a competitive edge. This book will show them how.

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. Edited and introduced by Martin Butler, this first New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Cymbeline takes full account of the critical and historical scholarship produced in the late twentieth century. It foregrounds the romance, tragicomedy and Jacobean stagecraft that shape the play and offers a refreshingly unsentimental reading of the heroine, Innogen. Butler pays greater attention than his predecessors to the politics of 1610, especially to questions of British union and nationhood. He also offers a lively account of Cymbeline's stage history from 1610 to the present day. The text has been edited from the 1623 Folio and features a detailed commentary on its linguistic and historical features.

The author's highly individualized treatment of names, verb forms and punctuation is preserved in this volume of three of his greatest plays--Sejanus (1603), Volpone (1606) and Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (1609).

This volume brings together four of Ben Jonson's plays, two of his major works - The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and two from his later oeuvre: The New Inn (1629) and A Tale of a Tub (1633). The Alchemist is a major satire on folly and greed, brilliantly plotted and dazzling in its use of language. Bartholomew Fair, possibly Jonson's greatest achievement, reveals a panoramic depiction of London society. The New Inn and A Tale of a Tub suggest a different Jonson, exploring new forms and writing from a profoundly modified perspective. In The New Inn, a romantic comedy overlaid with an atmospheric melancholy and an ethical urgency, Jonson engages seriously for the first time with the conventions of non-satiric comedy. A Tale of a Tub, a riotous farce set in the early years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, is now widely regarded as a nostalgic Jonsonian pastiche of Elizabethan popular drama. In recent criticism, Jonson's later career has been undergoing considerable reassessment, and this edition is the first that attempts to take this new view of Jonson into account. Dr Butler's edition is full and informative in its annotations and survey of criticisms to date, and cautiously respectful of Jonsonian punctuation.

This is a thorough re-evaluation of the drama written and performed in the decade leading up to the Civil War, the most seriously neglected period of English theatre. Martin Butler overturns long-held assumptions about the nature of Caroline theatre, its playwrights, plays and audiences. The theatrical tradition that was cut short in September 1642 was neither exhausted nor in retreat. Far from being subservient to or dependent on the court, the theatres were expressing sharply critical points of view. Dr Butler makes a strong argument for the value and vitality of Caroline theatre by tracing a drama of political unorthodoxy at court, in the non-courtly indoor theatres, and especially in the open-air theatres which voiced grievances that anticipated the political radicalism of the 1640s. At the heart of the book is a complete re-evaluation of two neglected playwrights, Richard Brome and James Shirley, and a fresh examination of the late plays of Philip Massinger. As a piece of closely integrated historical and literary criticism, with implications for Renaissance drama in general, this is an important and challenging book which will be read by historians as well as scholars and students of seventeenth-century drama.

This volume introduces a new concept that boldly breaks through the traditional dichotomy of high and low culture while offering a fresh approach to both: unpopular culture. From the works of David Foster Wallace and Ernest Hemingway to fanfiction and The Simpsons, from natural disasters to 9/11 and beyond, the essays find the unpopular across media and genres, analysing the politics and aesthetics of a side to culture that has been overlooked by previous theories and methods in cultural studies.

Work on Ben Jonson has long been dominated by the 11-volume Oxford text of his Works , edited by C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson (1925-52). In this monumental edition, Jonson seems a remote and forbidding figure, an author of formidable learning and literariness. This collection of essays by twelve leading scholars, editors, historians and bibliographers explores ways in which modern understanding of Jonson's texts has undermined the emphasis of the Oxford edition, and generated a Jonson whose Works and career look quite different. Addressing the competing needs of future readers, teachers and performers, it asks how this reconceptualized Jonson might best be transmitted into the next century. The volume also includes a new Jonson text, The Entertainment at Britain's Burse , written in 1609 to celebrate the royal opening of the Earl of Salisbury's commercial development in the Strand. Discovered in 1996, it is the most significant addition to Jonson's canon this century, and is here printed for the first time.

All around the world and throughout history, resistance has played an important role - and it still does. Some strive to raise it to cause change. Some dare not to speak of it. Some try to smother it to keep a status quo. The contributions to this volume explore phenomena of resistance in a range of historical and contemporary environments. In so doing, they not only contribute to shaping a comparative view on subjects, representations, and contexts of resistance, but also open up a theoretical dialogue on terms and concepts of resistance both in and across different disciplines. With contributions by Micha Brumlik, Peter McLaren, and others.

Starting from an analysis of practices of participation in contemporary print and other media, the volume opens up a historical perspective, probing the potential of the concept of participatory cultures for the exploration of past forms of collaboration between individual and collective actors (i.e. authors, editors, publishers, fans, critics etc.). In doing so, the volume sheds new light on the historically, culturally, and medially specific forms and functions as well as on the economic, political and institutional parameters that contributed to the emergence and transformation of what turn out to be precarious alliances.

Bringing together leading Jonson scholars, Ben Jonson and Posterity provides new insights into this remarkable writer's reception and legacy over four centuries. Jonson was recognised as the outstanding English writer of his day and has had a powerful influence on later generations, yet his reputation is one of the most multifaceted and conflicted for any writer of the early modern period. The volume brings together multiple critical perspectives, addressing book history, the practice of reading, theatrical influence and adaptation, the history of performance, cultural representation in portraiture, film, fiction, and anecdotes to interrogate Jonson's 'myth'. The collection will be of great interest to all Jonson scholars, as well as having a wider appeal among early modern literary scholars, theatre historians, and scholars interested in intertextuality and reception from the Renaissance to the present day.

Dieser Sammelband widmet sich dem komplexen Zusammenhang zwischen Sprachhandeln und Fachunterricht aus interdisziplinarer Perspektive: Er bringt fachdidaktische sowie bildungs-, sprach- und kulturwissenschaftliche Ansatze miteinander in den Dialog, fragt nach Voraussetzungen und Effekten von sprachlicher Interaktion in Lehr- und Lernprozessen und identifiziert so unterschiedliche Dimensionen von Sprachsensibilitat als Chance und Herausforderung im schulischen Kontext. Er beleuchtet zudem die nicht selten impliziten sprachlichen Anforderungen des Fachunterrichts sowie deren normative Referenzen und spricht sich fur eine starkere Berucksichtigung der Sprachlichkeit von Fachunterricht in der Lehrkraftebildung aus.

Court masques were multi-media entertainments, with song, dance, theater, and changeable scenery, staged annually at the English court to celebrate the Stuart dynasty. They have typically been regarded as frivolous and expensive entertainments. This book dispels this notion, emphasizing instead that they were embedded in the politics of the moment, and spoke in complex ways to the different audiences who viewed them. Covering the whole period from Queen Anne s first masque at Winchester in 1603 to Salmacida Spolia in 1640, Butler looks in depth at the political functions of state festivity. The book contextualizes masque performances in intricate detail, and analyzes how they shaped, managed, and influenced the public face of the Stuart kingship. Butler presents the masques as a vehicle through which we can read the early Stuart court s political aspirations and the changing functions of royal culture in a period of often radical instability.

Woody Guthrie's songs about the Dust Bowl Migration and the Great Depression give expression to one of the bleakest periods in the history of the United States, bearing witness both to the economic and political turmoil and to the human erosion of the 1930s. Following a New Historicist approach, this study, incorporating a variety of previously unpublished materials, sets out to reconstruct the social and cultural potential of Guthrie's songs by exploring their manifold and intricate relationships with the cultural environment in which they were composed and performed. As a result, Guthrie's songs are shown to be deeply ingrained in the decade's culture: they criticize the deplorable social and political situation at the time, make sense of the incomprehensible and hint at those responsible for the disaster, thus amplifying the unheard voices of the down and out. By revealing that Guthrie's oeuvre was not only culturally produced, but also culturally productive in that it took an active part in shaping, perpetuating or undermining elements and patterns of the decade's cultural knowledge, the study also sheds new light on the social and cultural significance of the sung word.