An authoritative, accessible overview of history's greatest literary figure

The great dramatist Ben Jonson wrote that William Shakespeare ""was not of an age, but for all time."" In the nearly four centuries since his death, Shakespeare's plays still have a tremendous impact on everything from the classroom to popular culture. Now you can have at your fingertips all the vital details on the most influential writer in the history of the English language--straight from one of the most trusted sources of information in the world.
In Shakespeare, Encyclopaedia Britannica presents a concise and balanced overview of the Bard's life, work, and legacy. From his upbringing in Stratford to his early theater career in London, from his poetry and plays to the controversy surrounding his authorship, from his contemporaries and collaborators to his critics past and present, this comprehensive guide provides the necessary background to appreciate Shakespeare's unique place in world literature.
This informative volume also looks at new interpretive approaches to Shakespeare and his work and offers insights from the foremost Shakespeare scholars in the world, including David Bevington (University of Chicago), Stephen J. Greenblatt (Harvard University), and Gail Kern Paster (Folger Shakespeare Library), among others. Every concise entry--from All's Well That Ends Well to The Winter's Tale--promotes a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's life, times, writings, and influence that only Encyclopaedia Britannica can provide.
Since 1768, Encyclopaedia Britannica has been a leading provider of learning products and one of the world's most trusted sources of information.

An authoritative, accessible overview of history's greatest literary figure

The great dramatist Ben Jonson wrote that William Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time." In the nearly four centuries since his death, Shakespeare's plays still have a tremendous impact on everything from the classroom to popular culture. Now you can have at your fingertips all the vital details on the most influential writer in the history of the English language--straight from one of the most trusted sources of information in the world.

In Shakespeare, Encyclopaedia Britannica presents a concise and balanced overview of the Bard's life, work, and legacy. From his upbringing in Stratford to his early theater career in London, from his poetry and plays to the controversy surrounding his authorship, from his contemporaries and collaborators to his critics past and present, this comprehensive guide provides the necessary background to appreciate Shakespeare's unique place in world literature.

This informative volume also looks at new interpretive approaches to Shakespeare and his work and offers insights from the foremost Shakespeare scholars in the world, including David Bevington (University of Chicago), Stephen J. Greenblatt (Harvard University), and Gail Kern Paster (Folger Shakespeare Library), among others. Every concise entry--from All's Well That Ends Well to The Winter's Tale--promotes a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's life, times, writings, and influence that only Encyclopaedia Britannica can provide.

Since 1768, Encyclopaedia Britannica has been a leading provider of learning products and one of the world's most trusted sources of information.

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism--blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm--early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In "Humoring the Body, "Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience.
Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

Reading the Early Modern Passions Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion Edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson "Thanks to the collection as a whole, the complex history of the passions in the early modern mind and body will now take a more prominent place in our study of the literature, art, and music of the period."--"MLR" "Provides an engaging and extremely useful introduction to historicized explorations of the early modern passions through the lens of the creative arts."--"Sixteenth Century Journal" How translatable is the language of the emotions across cultures and time? What connotations of particular emotions, strongly felt in the early modern period, have faded or shifted completely in our own? If Western culture has traditionally held emotion to be hostile to reason and the production of scientific knowledge, why and how have the passions been lauded as windows to higher truths? Assessing the changing discourses of feeling and their relevance to the cultural history of affect, "Reading the Early Modern Passions" offers fourteen interdisciplinary essays on the meanings and representations of the emotional universe of Renaissance Europe in literature, music, and art. Many in the early modern era were preoccupied by the relation of passion to action and believed the passions to be a natural force requiring stringent mental and physical disciplines. In speaking to the question of the historicity and variability of emotions within individuals, several of these essays investigate specific emotions, such as sadness, courage, and fear. Other essays turn to emotions spread throughout society by contemporary events, such as a ruler's death, the outbreak of war, or religious schism, and discuss how such emotions have widespread consequences in both social practice and theory. Addressing anxieties about the power of emotions; their relation to the public good; their centrality in promoting or disturbing an individual's relation to God, to monarch, and to fellow human beings, the authors also look at the ways emotion serves as a marker or determinant of gender, ethnicity, and humanity. Contributors to the volume include Zirka Filipczak, Victoria Kahn, Michael Schoenfeldt, Bruce Smith, Richard Strier, and Gary Tomlinson. Gail Kern Paster is Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the author of "The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England." Katherine Rowe is Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of "Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern." Mary Floyd-Wilson teaches English literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is the author of "English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama." 2004 392 pages 6 x 9 27 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3760-3 Cloth $75.00s 49.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-1872-5 Paper $28.95s 19.00 World Rights Cultural Studies, History Short copy: Authors here investigate specific emotions, such as sadness, courage, and fear. Others turn to emotions spread throughout society by contemporary events, such as a ruler's death, the outbreak of war, or religious schism, and discuss how such emotions have widespread consequences in both social practice and theory.

This edition of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" reprints the Bevington edition of the play accompanied by four sets of primary documents and illustrations thematically arranged to offer a richly textured understanding of early modern culture and Shakespeare's work within that culture. The texts, including facsimiles of period documents, conduct literature, county records, reports of court entertainments, and Queen Elizabeth's speeches, contextualize the play's treatment of popular and royal festivity, communities of women (including Amazons, gossips, and nuns), marriage expectations, and the supernatural. Editorial features designed to help students read the play in light of the historical documents include an intelligent and engaging general introduction, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, thorough headnotes and glosses for the primary documents (presented in modern spelling), and an extensive bibliography.

Gail Kern Paster explores the role of the city in the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and Ben Jonson. Paster moves beyond the usual presentation of the city-country dichotomy to reveal a series of oppositions that operate within the city's walls. These oppositions--city of God and city of man, Jerusalem and Rome, bride of the Lamb and whore of Babylon, ideal and real--together create a dual image of the city as a visionary ideal society and as a predatory trap, founded in fratricide, shadowed in guilt. In the theater, this duality affects the fate of early modern city dwellers, who exemplify even as they are controlled by this contradictory reality.

Men and women in early modern Europe experienced their bodies very differently from the ways in which contemporary men and women do. In this challenging and innovative book, Gail Kern Paster examines representations of the body in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama in the light of humoral medical theory, tracing the connections between the history of the visible social body and the history of the subject's body as experienced from within. Focusing on specific bodily functions and on changes in the forms of embarrassment associated with them, Paster extends the insights of such critics and theorists as Mikhail Bakhtin, Norbert Elias, and Thomas Laqueur. She first surveys comic depictions of incontinent women as "leaky vessels" requiring patriarchal management and then considers the relation between medical bloodletting practices and the gender implications of blood symbolism. Next she relates the practice of purging to the theme of shame and assays ideas about pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing in medical and other nonliterary texts. Paster then turns to the use of reproductive processes in the plot structures of key Shakespeare plays and in Dekker's, Ford's, and Rowley's Witch of Edmonton. Including twelve vivid illustrations, The Body Embarrassed will be fascinating reading for students and scholars in the fields of Renaissance studies, gender studies, literary theory, the history of drama, and cultural history.