Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive is a ground-breaking and movingly written exploration of what remains when actors evacuate the space and time of performance. An analysis of 'leftovers', it moves between tracking the politics of what is consciously archived and the politics of visible and invisible theatrical labour to trace the persistence of performance. In this fascinating volume, Hodgdon considers how documents, material objects, sketches, drawings and photographs explore scenarios of action and behaviour - and embodied practices. Rather than viewing these leftovers as indexical signs of a theatrical past, Hodgdon argues that the work they do is neither strictly archival nor documentary but performative - that is, they serve as sites of re-performance. Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive creates a deeply materialized historiography of performance and attempts to make that history do something entirely new. Barbara Hodgdon is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, now retired. Her major interest is in theatrical performances, especially performed Shakespeare. She is the author of: The End Crowns All, The Shakespeare Trade, and most recently the Arden edition of The Taming of the Shrew.

In 1623 Ben Jonson touted Shakespeare as the soul of his age; three centuries later, a newspaper advertisement used Shakespeare's reputation to market Budweiser, "The King of All Bottled Beers." Spanning the past hundred years, The Shakespeare Trade looks at how present-day representations of Shakespeare borrow from and negotiate with his cultural authority to shore up particular obsessions, preoccupations, and myths while making and remaking Anglo-American images of gender and subjectivity. In these provocative case studies, Barbara Hodgdon examines not only how Shakespeare's plays are staged and restaged by readers and critics as well as by performers and directors but also how the Elizabethan age itself is recirculated and marketed. Hodgdon's look at "The Taming of the Shrew" scans from silent films to the Shrew episode of the eighties television show Moonlighting, to the most recent Royal Shakespeare Company productions. Moving beyond Shakespeare's plays themselves, she considers how film and television have marketed Queen Elizabeth I's popular cultural memory and how Stratford's various museum spaces celebrate and exhibit an "authentic" Shakespeare side by side with the "Shakespeare kitsch": T-shirts, ties, thimbles, savings banks, and other mass market souvenirs. Styled as a "collector's history," The Shakespeare Trade offers an absorbing and timely account of the means through which Shakespeare's plays, the figure of Shakespeare, and Elizabethan England function in twentieth-century British and American cultures.

Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive is a ground-breaking and movingly written exploration of what remains when actors evacuate the space and time of performance. An analysis of 'leftovers', it moves between tracking the politics of what is consciously archived and the politics of visible and invisible theatrical labour to trace the persistence of performance. In this fascinating volume, Hodgdon considers how documents, material objects, sketches, drawings and photographs explore scenarios of action and behaviour - and embodied practices. Rather than viewing these leftovers as indexical signs of a theatrical past, Hodgdon argues that the work they do is neither strictly archival nor documentary but performative - that is, they serve as sites of re-performance. Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive creates a deeply materialized historiography of performance and attempts to make that history do something entirely new. Barbara Hodgdon is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, now retired. Her major interest is in theatrical performances, especially performed Shakespeare. She is the author of: The End Crowns All, The Shakespeare Trade, and most recently the Arden edition of The Taming of the Shrew.

"The Taming of the Shrew" is unique among Shakespeare's plays and is a perennial and compelling success in the theatre. Its reception is marked, however, by ongoing polarized debate over the meaning and worth of the play. This edition disengages Shakespeare's exuberant and disturbing marital farce from the tangled history of its reception. It views the two sixteenth-century Shrew plays as textually independent but theatrically interdependent and so includes the full text of "The Taming of A Shrew" in an appendix. While the Introduction and Commentary focus on the critical and theatrical debate surrounding the play, the original and comprehensive editing of the playtext makes available a 'different' Shrew, more open to the reader's interpretation than is usually the case. For more than a century educators, students and general readers have relied on The Arden Shakespeare to provide the very best scholarship and most authoritative texts available.
The Third Series editions' added emphasis on all aspects of Shakespeare performance extended the Arden editions readership to also become the preferred text for theatre professionals.

In this bold reconceptualization of Shakespeare's histories as plays that ultimately generate and seek to legitimize new kings, Barbara Hodgdon examines how closure contests as well as celebrates power relations dominant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean society--particularly those between sovereign and subjects. Taking a broad view of closure as a developing process in which narrative structures, generic signs, and rhetorical conventions play contributory, and often contradictory, roles, she also considers how theatrical representations interpret, or reinterpret, closural features to recuperate and redirect their social energies. By giving special emphasis to theatrical reproduction as a form of textuality and to the intertextual relations between drama and other forms of history writing, Hodgdon situates performance as a type of new historicism and shows how theatrical productions, like critical discourse, participate in cultural work. Through a study of playtexts and selected performance texts, she negotiates between the critical and theatrical guises of Shakespeare to assess how past and present-day theatrical practice has appropriated his work to serve particular institutional and social practices. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this bold reconceptualization of Shakespeare's histories as plays that ultimately generate and seek to legitimize new kings, Barbara Hodgdon examines how closure contests as well as celebrates power relations dominant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean society--particularly those between sovereign and subjects. Taking a broad view of closure as a developing process in which narrative structures, generic signs, and rhetorical conventions play contributory, and often contradictory, roles, she also considers how theatrical representations interpret, or reinterpret, closural features to recuperate and redirect their social energies. By giving special emphasis to theatrical reproduction as a form of textuality and to the intertextual relations between drama and other forms of history writing, Hodgdon situates performance as a type of new historicism and shows how theatrical productions, like critical discourse, participate in cultural work. Through a study of playtexts and selected performance texts, she negotiates between the critical and theatrical guises of Shakespeare to assess how past and present-day theatrical practice has appropriated his work to serve particular institutional and social practices.

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Henry of Bolingbroke was one of the most important noblemen of the later fourteenth century. Brave, chivalrous and cultured, a talented musician, he excelled at the jousts held at his cousin Richard II's Court, acquiring military experience at Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire and later fighting with the Teutonic Knights in Prussia. A great medieval traveller, he visited Konigsberg as Earl of Derby, travelling to Danzig, Prague and later Venice and Jerusalem. Bitterly opposed to Richard II's favourites, Bolingbroke as one of the Lords Appellant played a vital part. Henry's most controversial actions were the deposition of Richard II (1399) and the execution of Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, after he had usurped Richard's throne. As Henry IV, an usurper, the King knew little peace, incessantly engrossed as he was in preserving his throne; and the French and Scots never allowed him to forget his usurpation. For many years he fought a savage and frustrating war against the great Welsh rebel Owain Glyn Dwr, but defeated the immortal Harry Percy (Hotspur) at the Battle of Shrewsbury (1403). In his relations with his Parliaments, Henry showed acumen and praiseworthy restraint, unlike his predecessor who was determined to be an absolute King. His short reign was remarkable for the development of Parliament.

"The Taming of the Shrew" is unique among Shakespeare's plays and is a perennial and compelling success in the theatre. Its reception is marked, however, by ongoing polarized debate over the meaning and worth of the play. This edition disengages Shakespeare's exuberant and disturbing marital farce from the tangled history of its reception. It views the two sixteenth-century Shrew plays as textually independent but theatrically interdependent and so includes the full text of "The Taming of A Shrew" in an appendix. While the Introduction and Commentary focus on the critical and theatrical debate surrounding the play, the original and comprehensive editing of the playtext makes available a 'different' Shrew, more open to the reader's interpretation than is usually the case. For more than a century educators, students and general readers have relied on The Arden Shakespeare to provide the very best scholarship and most authoritative texts available.
The Third Series editions' added emphasis on all aspects of Shakespeare performance extended the Arden editions readership to also become the preferred text for theatre professionals.