This clearly introduces the many critical issues surrounding this complex and haunting play. Ioppolo examines sources, from Holinshed to Spencer, and in the Interpretations section looks at critical readings and notable performances of the play. These range from early critical responses and performances to recent stage and screen interpretations. Edited key passages connect the play to its contexts and criticism, providing both a guide and a new perspective on King Lear. Careful annotation explains Shakespeare's language. This Routledge Literary Sourcebook is ideal introduction for undergraduates, providing orientation in the play, its reception history and the critical material which surrounds it. It examines King Lear within its literary and cultural contexts, bringing together:
*contemporary documents surrounding King Lear
*performance history
*early critical reception from major critics
*twentieth-century criticism
*key passages.
All documents are discussed and explained. The volume also offers carefully annotated key passages from the play itself and concludes with a list of recommended editions and further reading, allowing readers to pursue their study in the areas that interest them most. Grace Ioppolo's broad-ranging analysis and the wealth of materials she brings together make this the ideal guide for any student of King Lear.

This clearly introduces the many critical issues surrounding this complex and haunting play. Ioppolo examines sources, from Holinshed to Spencer, and in the Interpretations section looks at critical readings and notable performances of the play. These range from early critical responses and performances to recent stage and screen interpretations. Edited key passages connect the play to its contexts and criticism, providing both a guide and a new perspective on King Lear. Careful annotation explains Shakespeare's language. This Routledge Literary Sourcebook is ideal introduction for undergraduates, providing orientation in the play, its reception history and the critical material which surrounds it. It examines King Lear within its literary and cultural contexts, bringing together:
*contemporary documents surrounding King Lear
*performance history
*early critical reception from major critics
*twentieth-century criticism
*key passages.
All documents are discussed and explained. The volume also offers carefully annotated key passages from the play itself and concludes with a list of recommended editions and further reading, allowing readers to pursue their study in the areas that interest them most. Grace Ioppolo's broad-ranging analysis and the wealth of materials she brings together make this the ideal guide for any student of King Lear.

"Sources" helps readers navigate King Lear's rich history and includes the nine essential primary sources from which Shakespeare borrowed significantly in creating his play, along with two additional likely sources. "Criticism"provides thirteen major critical interpretations and three provocative adaptations and responses to King Lear. Critical interpretation is provided by Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, Peter Brook, Michael Warren, Lynda E. Boose, Janet Adelman, and R. A. Foakes, among others. The adaptations and responses are by Nahum Tate, John Keats, and Edward Bond. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

This book presents new evidence about the ways in which English Renaissance dramatists such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton composed their plays and the degree to which they participated in the dissemination of their texts to theatrical audiences. Grace Ioppolo argues that the path of the transmission of the text was not linear, from author to censor to playhouse to audience - as has been universally argued by scholars - but circular. Authors returned to their texts, or texts were returned to their authors, at any or all stages after composition . The reunion of authors and their texts demonstrate that early modern dramatists collaborated in various ways and degrees in the theatrical production and performance of their plays, and that for early modern dramatists and their theatrical colleagues authorship was a continual process. Extant dramatic manuscripts, theatre records and accounts, as well as authorial contracts, memoirs, receipts and other archival evidence, are used to prove that the text returned to the author at various stages, including during rehearsal and after performance. This monograph provides much new information and case studies, and will be a fascinating contribution to the fields of Shakespeare studies, English Renaissance drama studies, manuscript studies, textual study and bibliography and theatre history.

This book presents new evidence about the ways in which English Renaissance dramatists such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton composed their plays and the degree to which they participated in the dissemination of their texts to theatrical audiences. Grace Ioppolo argues that the path of the transmission of the text was not linear, from author to censor to playhouse to audience - as has been universally argued by scholars - but circular.
Extant dramatic manuscripts, theatre records and accounts, as well as authorial contracts, memoirs, receipts and other archival evidence, are used to prove that the text returned to the author at various stages, including during rehearsal and after performance. This monograph provides much new information and case studies, and will be a fascinating contribution to the fields of Shakespeare studies, English Renaissance drama studies, manuscript studies, textual study and bibliography and theatre history.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and widely performed across the world, is now available as a Norton Critical Edition. Included are a preface, critical essay and explanatory annotations by Grace Iopollo, along with essays by acclaimed Shakespeare scholars, and reviews and interpretative essays spanning over four centuries.

The Shakespearean Originals Series takes as its point of departure the question: "What is it that we read Shakespeare?" The answer may seem self-evident: we read the words that Shakespeare wrote. But do we? In the case of all the major editions of Shakespeare available in the market, the fact of the matter is that many of the words that we read in an edition of, say, Hamlet, never appeared in the text as it was printed during or shortly after Shakespeare's own lifetime. They are the interpetations and interpolations of a series of editors who have been systematically changing Shakespeare's text from the eighteenth century onwards. This volume offers the text of Measure for Measure, as printed in the 1623 First Folio.

Thomas Heywood (c.1573-1641), who claimed to have had 'an entire hand, or at least a maine finger' in two hundred and twenty plays, was one of the most prolific and influential dramatists of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and early Caroline theatre. Heywood was also recognized in his own time as a master essayist, producing numerous prose tracts, miscellanies, treatises, pamphlets, and broadsides, and in them, to use his own terms, he 'dissected' and 'anatomised' the religious and political dilemmas of contemporary monarchs and their courts. As city poet and principal writer of pageants for the Lord Mayor's Day from 1631 to 1639, Heywood was in a unique position to celebrate civic governance and local policy. He also produced and circulated translations of ancient Greek and Latin texts, as well as writing his own poetry, and, uniquely, edited the plays and poems of his collaborators and contemporaries, often describing in detail in prefaces and epistles how these texts were transmitted from author to audience. In sum, he participated in, epitomised and helped to establish the entire range of author in the early modern age. This modern edition of his works makes him accessible to students, scholars, general readers, actors and directors and rightfully establishes him as a major and seminal contributor to early modern English drama, poetry and prose. Heywood's motto was Aut prodesse solent aut delectare, adapted from the Ars Poetica of Horace and proclaiming the poet's purpose to produce profit and pleasure in his audience. Volume 3 of the edition, Middle Plays, features the five Age plays that he wrote to delight and teach. Heywood set himself the task to chronicle the entire range of classical myth, 'an entire history from Jupiter and Saturn to the utter subversion of Troy'. With ancient Homer acting as chorus (or master of ceremonies) in The Golden Age, The Silver Age, and The Brazen Age, Heywood takes his audiences from the Golden Age of Gods (who embody the worst of human faults) through the exploits of Hercules. The last two plays, The Iron Age, Parts I and II, focus on the carnage of the Trojan war and its aftermath. Redemption lies in the potential of a 'New Troy' in London and Rome. In these plays, Heywood reveals himself as a master of stagecraft, especially of pyrotechnics and flying entrances. His theatre is always exciting.