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For this updated critical edition of Romeo and Juliet, Hester
Lees-Jeffries has written a completely new introduction. It draws
on recent research in theatre to set Romeo and Juliet in its
mid-1590s context, making connections with other plays by
Shakespeare and other literature of the period, as well as with the
social and cultural contexts of the day, with discussions of London
and Italy, dancing and duelling, marriage, gender and sexuality. It
includes detailed discussion of the play in performance from the
Restoration to the present day, with a particular focus on film
(including global cinema), music and dance, and also explores other
adaptations and afterlives, including young-adult fiction. The
edition retains the commentary and Textual Analysis of the previous
editor, G. Blakemore Evans; the Textual Analysis is prefaced with a
short note contextualising its conclusions in the light of more
recent research.
Hamlet's father's Ghost asks his son to 'Remember me!', but how did
people remember around 1600? And how do we remember now?
Shakespeare and Memory brings together classical and early modern
sources, theatre history, performance, material culture, and
cognitive psychology and neuroscience in order to explore ideas
about memory in Shakespeare's plays and poems. It argues that, when
Shakespeare was writing, ideas about memory were undergoing a kind
of crisis, as both the technologies of memory (print, the theatre
itself) and the belief structures underpinning ideas about memory
underwent rapid change. And it suggests that this crisis might be
mirrored in our own time, when, despite all the increasing gadgetry
at our disposal, memory can still be recovered, falsified,
corrupted, or wiped: only we ourselves can remember, but the
workings of memory remain mysterious. Shakespeare and Memory draws
on works from all stages of Shakespeare's career, with a particular
focus on Hamlet, the Sonnets, Twelfth Night, and The Winter's Tale.
It considers some little things: what's Hamlet writing on? And why
does Orsino think he smells violets? And it asks some big
questions: how should the dead be remembered? What's the
relationship between memory and identity? And is it art, above all,
that enables love and beauty, memory and identity, to endure in the
face of loss, time, and death?
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