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.

This book is a authoritative account of Shakespeare's plays as they were transformed from scripts to be performed into books to be read, and eventually from popular entertainment into the centerpieces of the English literary canon. Kastan examines the motives and activities of Shakespeare's first publishers; the curious eighteenth-century schizophrenia that saw Shakespeare radically modified on stage at the very moment that scholars were working to establish and restore the "genuine" texts, and the exhilarating possibilities of electronic media for presenting Shakespeare now to new generations of readers. This is an important contribution to Shakespearean textual scholarship, to the history of the early English book trade, and to the theory of drama itself.

The essays in Staging the Renaissance show the theatre to be the site of a rich confluence of cultural forces, the place where social meanings are both formed and transformed. The volume unites some of the most challenging issues in contemporary Renaissance studies and some of our best-known critics, including Stephen Orgel, Margaret Ferguson, Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Goldberg, Marjorie Garber, Lisa Jardine, and Jonathan Dollimore-- demonstrating the variety and vitality not only of contemporary criticism, but of Renaissance drama itself.

The most familiar assertion of Shakespeare scholarship is that he is our contemporary. Shakespeare After Theory provocatively argues that he is not, but what value he has for us must at least begin with a recognition of his distance from us. David Scott Kastan compellingly restores Shakespeare's plays to the rich densities of the world in which and to which they were created.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203901657

The most familiar assertion of Shakespeare scholarship is that he is our contemporary. Shakespeare After Theory provocatively argues that he is not, but what value he has for us must at least begin with a recognition of his distance from us. David Scott Kastan compellingly restores Shakespeare's plays to the rich densities of the world in which and to which they were created.

This book is a authoritative account of Shakespeare's plays as they were transformed from scripts to be performed into books to be read, and eventually from popular entertainment into the centerpieces of the English literary canon. Kastan examines the motives and activities of Shakespeare's first publishers; the curious eighteenth-century schizophrenia that saw Shakespeare radically modified on stage at the very moment that scholars were working to establish and restore the "genuine" texts, and the exhilarating possibilities of electronic media for presenting Shakespeare now to new generations of readers. This is an important contribution to Shakespearean textual scholarship, to the history of the early English book trade, and to the theory of drama itself.

David Scott Kastan lucidly explores the remarkable richness and the ambitious design of King Henry IV Part 1 and shows how these complicate any easy sense of what kind of play it is. Conventionally regarded as a history play, much of it is in fact conspicuously invented fiction, and Kastan argues that the non-historical, comic plot does not simply parody the historical action but by its existence raises questions about the very nature of history. The full and engaging introduction devotes extensive discussion to the playas language, indicating how its insistent economic vocabulary provides texture for the social concerns of the play and focuses attention on the central relationship between value and political authority.

On 19 December 1601, John Croke, then Speaker of the House of Commons, addressed his colleagues: "If a question should be asked, What is the first and chief thing in a Commonwealth to be regarded? I should say, religion. If, What is the second? I should say, religion. If, What the third? I should still say, religion." But if religion was recognized as the "chief thing in a Commonwealth," we have been less certain what it does in Shakespeare's plays. Written and performed in a culture in which religion was indeed inescapable, the plays have usually been seen either as evidence of Shakespeare's own disinterested secularism or, more recently, as coded signposts to his own sectarian commitments. Based upon the inaugural series of the Oxford-Wells Shakespeare Lectures in 2008, A Will to Believe offers a thoughtful, surprising, and often moving consideration of how religion actually functions in them: not as keys to Shakespeare's own faith but as remarkably sensitive registers of the various ways in which religion charged the world in which he lived. The book shows what we know and can't know about Shakespeare's own beliefs, and demonstrates, in a series of wonderfully alert and agile readings, how the often fraught and vertiginous religious environment of Post-Reformation England gets refracted by the lens of Shakespeare's imagination.

On 19 December 1601, John Croke, then Speaker of the House of Commons, addressed his colleagues: "If a question should be asked, What is the first and chief thing in a Commonwealth to be regarded? I should say, religion. If, What is the second? I should say, religion. If, What the third? I should still say, religion." But if religion was recognized as the "chief thing in a Commonwealth," we have been less certain what it does in Shakespeare's plays. Written and performed in a culture in which religion was indeed inescapable, the plays have usually been seen either as evidence of Shakespeare's own disinterested secularism or, more recently, as coded signposts to his own sectarian commitments. Based upon the inaugural series of the Oxford-Wells Shakespeare Lectures in 2008, A Will to Believe offers a thoughtful, surprising, and often moving consideration of how religion actually functions in them: not as keys to Shakespeare's own faith but as remarkably sensitive registers of the various ways in which religion charged the world in which he lived. The book shows what we know and can't know about Shakespeare's own beliefs, and demonstrates, in a series of wonderfully alert and agile readings, how the often fraught and vertiginous religious environment of Post-Reformation England gets refracted by the lens of Shakespeare's imagination.

"King Lear," by William Shakespeare, is part of the "Barnes & Noble Shakespeare" series. This unique series features newly edited texts prepared by leading scholars from America and Great Britain, in collaboration with one of the world's foremost Shakespeare authorities, David Scott Kastan of Columbia University. Together they have produced texts as faithful as possible to those that Shakespeare wrote. Each volume in the "Barnes & Noble Shakespeare" includes:

• New Scholarship - Premiere scholars introduce each play with contemporary scholarship. An essay on editing the text provides an in-depth look at the quartos and folios used in the edition.
• Contextualizing Essays - Essays on Shakespeare's England, language, and life, along with essays on performing Shakespeare and significant performances frame the play in both historical and theatrical context for readers. A look at the lasting influence of the play on music, art, film, and dance creates an interdisciplinary framework with which to approach the play.
• Better Notes - Through one-word margin definitions, facing-page glosses, and longer end notes after the play, our innovative approach to notes pulls readers away from the text fewer times while providing them with more information and comprehensive analysis.
• Further Reading - An annotated bibliography of titles, hand-selected by the introduction author, takes readers beyond the edition for further reading.One of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, "King Lear" portrays with frightening power the collapse of royal and parental authority. The editor, Andrew Hadfield, restores the play to its historical context, showing how the names and places in the ancient Britain of the play connect to Shakespeare's England.

"Twelfth Night," by William Shakespeare, is part of the "Barnes & Noble Shakespeare" series. This unique series features newly edited texts prepared by leading scholars from America and Great Britain, in collaboration with one of the world's foremost Shakespeare authorities, David Scott Kastan of Columbia University. Together they have produced texts as faithful as possible to those that Shakespeare wrote. Each volume in the "Barnes & Noble Shakespeare" includes:

• New Scholarship - Premiere scholars introduce each play with contemporary scholarship. An essay on editing the text provides an in-depth look at the quartos and folios used in the edition.
• Contextualizing Essays - Essays on Shakespeare's England, language, and life, along with essays on performing Shakespeare and significant performances frame the play in both historical and theatrical context for readers. A look at the lasting influence of the play on music, art, film, and dance creates an interdisciplinary framework with which to approach the play.
• Better Notes - Through one-word margin definitions, facing-page glosses, and longer end notes after the play, our innovative approach to notes pulls readers away from the text fewer times while providing them with more information and comprehensive analysis.
• Further Reading - An annotated bibliography of titles, hand-selected by the introduction author, takes readers beyond the edition for further reading.Widely regarded as Shakespeare's most perfect comedy, "Twelfth Night" follows the twisting paths that lead to love. The editor, Claire McEachern, provides an illuminating context for the play, showing how England's struggle to define a national religious identity underlies many of the play's conflicts.

From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia, which is now also available as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf, covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant. The Encyclopedia of British Literature is now available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf. An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: Newly edited texts of the 1604 (A-Text) and the 1616 (B-Text) versions of the play. Editorial matter by David Scott Kastan and Matthew Hunter. Sources and background materials related to Christopher Marlowe, the composition and publication of Doctor Faustus, early performance of the play, the Faust legend, and Renaissance magic, including a new selection from James I and IV’s Of Daemonologie. Eighteen critical essays: five classic assessments and—new to the Second Edition—thirteen recent interpretations. A chronology and an updated selected bibliography.

Apples from Shinar was Hyam Plutzik's second complete collection. Originally published in 1959 as a part of Wesleyan University Press's newly minted poetry series, the collection includes "The Shepherd"--a section of the book-length poem "Horatio," which earned Plutzik a finalist position for the Pulitzer Prize. "The love and the words and the simplicity," that mark Plutzik's poetry, writes Philip Booth, "are all here in Apples from Shinar], and the poems come peacefully, and wonderfully, alive." With a previously unpublished foreword by Hyam Plutzik and a new afterword by David Scott Kastan, this edition marks the centenary of Plutzik's birth and will introduce a new generation of readers to the work of one of the best mid-century American poets.

Staging the Renaissance demonstrates the variety and vitality of both contemporary criticism and of Renaissance drama. The collected essays analyse the dynamic process within Renaissance drama where texts stage multiple collaborations between playwright, actor, stage, audience, and the pressures of the social, economic and political environment. They offer inspired critical reassessments of individual non-Shakespearean plays, rethinking both canonical classics and rediscovering such marginal texts as The Tragedy of Mariam.
Through such critical analysis, the Renaissance theatre emerges as a site of rich confluence of cultural forces; a place where social meanings are both formed and transformed.

Paradise Lost remains as challenging and relevant today as it was in the turbulent intellectual and political environment in which it was written. This edition aims to bring the poem as fully alive to a modern reader as it would have been to Milton's contemporaries. It provides a newly edited text of the 1674 edition of the poem--the last of Milton's lifetime--with carefully modernized spelling and punctuation. Marginal glosses define unfamiliar words, and extensive annotations at the foot of the page clarify Milton's syntax and poetics, and explore the range of literary, biblical, and political allusions that point to his major concerns. David Kastan's lively Introduction considers the central interpretative issues raised by the poem, demonstrating how thoroughly it engaged the most vital--and contested--issues of Milton's time, and which reveal themselves as no less vital, and perhaps no less contested, today. The edition also includes an essay on the text, a chronology of major events in Milton's life, and a selected bibliography, as well as the first known biography of Milton, written by Edward Phillips in 1694.

For many years the study of pre-seventeenth-century English drama was shaped largely by an understanding that everything written revolved around the individual author, either as part of the tradition that prepared the way for Shakespeare or as part of his legacy.

Now twenty-five original essays by leading theorists and historians chart a paradigmatic shift within the field. In contrast to the traditional emphasis on individual authors, the contributors here explore the place of the stage within the larger society, as well as issues of performance and physical space.

The essays are organized into three sections: "Early English Drama and Physical Space" examines the settings in which plays were acted; "Early English Drama and Social Space" juxtaposes the theater with such contemporary subcultures as the church, the city, and the court. Finally, "Early English Drama and Conditions of Performance and Publication" explores a wide range of material conditions and contexts, from props to printers.

A major summary of contemporary scholarship and a storehouse of new theoretical and historical information, "A New History of Early English Drama" skillfully illustrates the complex influence of physical and social elements woven into the texts, and provides an innovative approach to literary studies and cultural history.