Music permeates Shakespeare's plays. This comprehensive study explores the variety of its theatrical functions, situating them in the context of the Early Modern period's understanding of music.From the trumpet calls which animate the battle scenes of the histories and tragedies to the songs which inflect the moods of the comedies and romances, Shakespeare experiments throughout his career with music's potential to contribute to the effect of his dramas. David Lindley sets the musical scene of Shakespeare's England, outlining the period's theoretical understanding of music and discussing the experience of music heard in the streets, alehouses, private residences, courts and theatres, which an audience brought with them to the Globe and Blackfriars. Music could be praised as a symbol of divine and political harmony, or vilified as an incitement to lust and effeminacy; it could heal and cure, or fuel drunken rebellion. Focusing throughout on the plays as theatrical events, this work analyzes Shakespeare's dramatic and thematic exploitation of these conflicting perceptions of music.

It was the greatest scandal of the Jacobean age. In 1616, Frances Howard and her husband the Earl of Somerset were found guilty of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Frances Howard was branded a lewd woman, a wife, a witch, a murderess and a whore, and has gone down in history as the model of female villainy. But has she been misjudged? In an examination of both the historical evidence and cultural representations of Howard, David Lindley presents important new insights into the case against her. In doing so he challenges the assumptions that have constructed Howard as a deviant woman, raising questions not only about how women were perceived in the 17th century, but how society still judges women today.

It was the greatest scandal of the Jacobean age. In 1616, Frances Howard and her husband the Earl of Somerset were found guilty of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Frances Howard was branded "a lewd woman", "a wife, a witch, a murderess and a whore", and has gone down in history as the model of female villainy. But has she been misjudged? In a fascinating examination of both the historical evidence and cultural representations of Howard, David Lindley presents important new insights into the case against her. In doing so, he challenges the assumptions that have constructed Howard as a deviant woman, raising questions not only about how women were perceived in the 17th century, but how society still judges women today. Not just a historical biography, this book is also a close examination of the relationship between history and literature, the place of women in society, and the relationship between the law, politics and ideology.

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. For this second edition of The Tempest, David Lindley has thoroughly revised the Introduction to take account of the latest developments in criticism and performance. He has also added a completely new section on casting in recent productions of the play. The complex questions this new section raises about colonisation, racial and gender stereotypes and the nature of theatrical experience are explored throughout the introduction. Careful attention is paid to dramatic form, stagecraft, and the use of music and spectacle in The Tempest, a play that is widely regarded as one of Shakespeare's most elusive and suggestive. A revised and updated reading list completes the edition.

The masque had a brief but splendid life as the dominant mode of entertainment at the early Stuart court, and it has increasingly come to be recognized as a genre offering a fascinating insight into the culture and politics of the early seventeenth century. This selection of 18 masque for Charles I, performed just before the outbreak of civil war. It also includes examples of entertainments performed on royal progresses, as well as one domestic masque. Court masques were extravagant multi-media happenings, imbued with often arcane allegorical programmes by writers and designers, and frequently commenting on tipical political issues. In this, the most substantial available selection, readers are offered the annotation necessary for understanding the complexities of the individual texts. Under the General Editorship of Michael Cordner, of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition to the detailed notes there is a scholarly introduction, making this edition invaluable to students of Renaissance drama and court culture.

Music has been an essential constituent of Shakespeare's plays from the sixteenth century to the present day, yet its significance has often been overlooked or underplayed in the history of Shakespearean performance. Providing a long chronological sweep, this collection of essays traces the different uses of music in the theatre and in film from the days of the first Globe and Blackfriars to contemporary, global productions. With a unique concentration on the performance aspects of the subject, the volume offers a wide range of voices, from scholars to contemporary practitioners (including an interview with the critically acclaimed composer Stephen Warbeck), and thus provides a rich exploration of this fascinating history from diverse perspectives.

Werner Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" challenged centuries of scientific understanding, placed him in direct opposition to Albert Einstein, and put Niels Bohr in the middle of one of the most heated debates in scientific history. Heisenberg's theorem stated that there were physical limits to what we could know about sub-atomic particles; this "uncertainty" would have shocking implications. In a riveting account, David Lindley captures this critical episode and explains one of the most important scientific discoveries in history, which has since transcended the boundaries of science and influenced everything from literary theory to television.

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. For this second edition of The Tempest, David Lindley has thoroughly revised the Introduction to take account of the latest developments in criticism and performance. He has also added a completely new section on casting in recent productions of the play. The complex questions this new section raises about colonisation, racial and gender stereotypes and the nature of theatrical experience are explored throughout the introduction. Careful attention is paid to dramatic form, stagecraft, and the use of music and spectacle in The Tempest, a play that is widely regarded as one of Shakespeare's most elusive and suggestive. A revised and updated reading list completes the edition.

This selection of poems from David Lindley brings together published and unpublished poems from the last three decades. Most of the poems are short and there are also a number of translations and versions from the Japanese and Chinese.

We do not know how we came to be here and our lives, in a manner of speaking, are lived for us. We accept life because we are unable to refuse it. We suffer a given condition, and we ourselves are inescapably material elements of that given condition. All our anxieties about it, and all our attempts to redeem our condition by some solving word or idea never take us beyond the stuff of thinking, where questions and answers share the same uncertain and fictitious qualities. No answers come from a voice emanating from the external, objective condition, from the world into which we have been born (unable, as we are, to will anything different). Only our subjective experience of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, and ourselves as its creator, can rescue us from the confines of the objective and the given, from arbitrary existence.

Aphorisms, reflections and essays on order and meaning, and on the principle of aesthetic sufficiency as the only valid form of mental judgment.

The Arden Shakespeare, in association with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, presents a new series of volumes on Shakespeare's plays in performance. The series discusses and analyses the wide range of theatrical interpretation stimulated and provoked by the most frequently performed plays. Each volume explores how different directors, designers and actors have interpreted and adapted an individual play in terms of narrative focus, themes and characters, scenery and costume. The focus is on productions at Stratford-upon-Avon since 1945, on the basis that the record of Shakespeare performances at Stratford's theatres offers a wider, fuller and more various range of interpretation than is offered by any other theatre company. The volumes also set this record in a wider geographical and chronological context by means of a historical overview of earlier productions and of productions beyond Stratford. Published in conjunction with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, each volume features a wealth of photographs (many of them not previously seen in print) drawn from the archive of RSC performance materials held in the Trust's library at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford. Shakespeare at Stratford will surprise, inform and delight both students and scholars of Shakespeare and performance history and the general reader with an interest in theatre.

Few revolutions in science have been more far-reaching,but less understood,than the quantum revolution in physics. Everyday experience cannot prepare us for the sub-atomic world, where quantum effects become all-important. Here, particles can look like waves, and vice versa electrons seem to lose their identity and instead take on a shifting, unpredictable appearance that depends on how they are being observed and a single photon may sometimes behave as if it could be in two places at once. In the world of quantum mechanics, uncertainty and ambiguity become not just unavoidable, but essential ingredients of science,a development so disturbing that to Einstein "it was as if God were playing dice with the universe." And there is no one better able to explain the quantum revolution as it approaches the century mark than David Lindley. He brings the quantum revolution full circle, showing how the familiar and trustworthy reality of the world around us is actually a consequence of the ineffable uncertainty of the subatomic quantum world,the world we can't see.

The First Quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor is the most fascinatingly problematic of all the early Shakespearean texts. Was it an authorial first draft? Or a cut-down version of the better-known Folio text designed for acting? Or a text put together from faulty actors' memories? Or a reported text assembled by notetakers from attendance at the theatre? None of these theories, though advanced and interrogated for the last 250 years, is totally convincing. The Introduction to this edition explores the various attempts to make sense of the short version of the play, demonstrating the ways in which preferences for one theory or another reflect the changes in editorial theory and fashion over the centuries. The modernised text and its commentary enable the reader to enter into this ongoing and endlessly intriguing debate.

Mr. and Mrs. Peachum are horrified when they learn of their daughter Polly's secret marriage to the rebellious and notorious highwayman, Macheath. However, their fear is soon mitigated when they decide to kill him for his money. When Macheath is in the tavern, surrounded by women of 'ill repute', he discovers that he has been rumbled: two of these women are in cahoots with the Peachums and plan to kill him. He finds himself in Newgate and, worse than that, in the company of the jailer's daughter, Lucy, to whom he is also betrothed. Although Macheath is captured and destined to be hanged, Gay's action-packed and entertaining play subverts audience expectations by letting Macheath off the hook and not punishing its villains. John Gay's satirical opera, written in 1728, was revolutionary because it took poverty and corruption as its subject, and paupers and villains as its characters. The lyrics were set to famous songs of the day making it hugely popular with audiences and a radical departure from traditional opera. The introduction puts the play in its historical and theatrical contexts and details its stage history in modern times too. David Lindley is an expert on theatrical music and the new dramatic form of ballad opera this play created. The music for the songs is included in the text, making this an edition to be used for performance as well as for study.