Shakespeare Studies is an annual peer-reviewed volume featuring the work of performance scholars, literary critics and cultural historians. The journal focuses primarily on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but embraces theoretical and historical studies of socio-political, intellectual and artistic contexts that extend well beyond the early modern English theatrical milieu. In addition to articles, Shakespeare Studies offers opportunities for extended intellectual exchange through its thematically-focused forums, and includes substantial reviews. An international Editorial Board maintains the quality of each volume so that Shakespeare Studies may serve as a reliable resource for all students of Shakespeare and the early modern period – for research scholars and also for teachers, actors and directors. Volume 51 includes a Forum on the work of Michael D Bristol, with contributions from J. F. Bernard, Gail Kern Paster, James Siemon, Jill Ingram, Unhae Park Langis and Julia Reinhard Lupton, Anna Lewton-Brain and Brooke Harvey, Nicholas Utzig, and Paul Yachnin. Volume 51 includes articles from the Next Generation Plenary of the Shakespeare Association of America and essays by Laurence Senelick ("A Gift to Anti-Semites: Shylock on the Pre-Revolutionary Russian Stage"), Christopher D'Addario ("Metatheater and the Urban Everyday in Ben Jonson's Epicoene and The Alchemist"), and Denise A. Walen ("Elbowing Katherine of Valois"). Book reviews consider eleven important publications on liberty of speech and female voice; theaters of catastrophe; adaptations of Macbeth; staging touch in Shakespeare's England; the criticism of Hugh Grady; Shakespeare and World War II film; Shakespeare and digital pedagogy; Shakespeare and forgetting; Shakespeare and disability studies, and Shakespeare's private life.

The world that William Shakespeare creates in The Tempest has many features that make it recognizably like the world we live in. There are bad, self-seeking people; brothers fall out with brothers; people who have power are reluctant to give it up; people fall in love; children love their fathers but want to break free. But there are elements in The Tempest's world that are very unlike the world we live in. There is a fairy-spirit; there is music in the very air of the island; and there is a powerful magician who can command the elements and even, he tells us, bring the dead back to life. Combining reality and magic, Shakespeare creates an uncanny but morally coherent world through the play's genre, design, themes, and characters. This edition features a variety of interleaved materials that expand upon allusions in the play and explore elements of its stagecraft. Appendices offer excerpts from Shakespeare's key sources and inspirations, along with historical materials on exploration and colonialism.

Argues that Shakespeare transforms philosophies of comedy and melancholy by revising them concomitantly Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and sorrow. This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare's comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy. In fashioning his own comic interpretation of the humour, Shakespeare distils an impressive array of philosophical discourses on the matter, from Aristotle to Robert Burton and as a result, transforms the theoretical afterlife of both notions. The book suggests that the deceptively potent sorrow at the core of plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, or The Winter's Tale influences modern accounts of melancholia elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and others. What's so funny about melancholy in Shakespearean comedy? It might just be its reminder that, behind roaring laughter, one inevitably finds the subtle pangs of melancholy. Key Features Offers new readings of nine Shakespearean comedies centred on their extensive, interconnected treatments of melancholy Underscores Shakespeare's significant revisions of philosophical discourses on melancholy, both classical and early modern, while tailoring the concept to specific comic purposes Argues that the particular sense of melancholy that Shakespeare develops throughout his comic canon informs later theorizations of melancholia and related concepts in psychoanalysis, performance studies and affect theory Contributes to the ongoing interdisciplinary critical effort to deepen our understanding of the nature, history and impact of melancholy on Western culture by drawing particular attention to its conflation of emotional and artistic overtones

Argues that Shakespeare transforms philosophies of comedy and melancholy by revising them concomitantly Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and sorrow. This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare's comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy. In fashioning his own comic interpretation of the humour, Shakespeare distils an impressive array of philosophical discourses on the matter, from Aristotle to Robert Burton and as a result, transforms the theoretical afterlife of both notions. The book suggests that the deceptively potent sorrow at the core of plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, or The Winter's Tale influences modern accounts of melancholia elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and others. What's so funny about melancholy in Shakespearean comedy? It might just be its reminder that, behind roaring laughter, one inevitably finds the subtle pangs of melancholy. Key Features Offers new readings of nine Shakespearean comedies centred on their extensive, interconnected treatments of melancholy Underscores Shakespeare's significant revisions of philosophical discourses on melancholy, both classical and early modern, while tailoring the concept to specific comic purposes Argues that the particular sense of melancholy that Shakespeare develops throughout his comic canon informs later theorizations of melancholia and related concepts in psychoanalysis, performance studies and affect theory Contributes to the ongoing interdisciplinary critical effort to deepen our understanding of the nature, history and impact of melancholy on Western culture by drawing particular attention to its conflation of emotional and artistic overtones