This Handbook provides an introductory guide to Richard II offering a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of three or four key performances and productions, a survey of film and TV adaptations, a wide sampling of critical opinion and further reading.

This book provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Focusing on the relationship between the repertory system and the conventions and content of the plays, Jeremy Lopez proposes that understanding the potential for theatrical failure (the way playwrights anticipated it and audiences responded to it) is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on the stage.

For one hundred years the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries has been consistently represented in anthologies, edited texts, and the critical tradition by a familiar group of about two dozen plays running from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy to Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by way of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Webster. How was this canon created, and what ideological and institutional functions does it serve? What preceded it, and is it possible for it to become something else? Jeremy Lopez takes up these questions by tracing a history of anthologies of 'non-Shakespearean' drama from Robert Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) through those recently published by Blackwell, Norton, and Routledge. Containing dozens of short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book will benefit those who seek a broader sense of the period's dazzling array of forms.

Shakespeare's plays are works of art made out of words. To read the plays closely, that is, to pay careful attention to the multiple, shifting meanings of and relationships between their words, is to gain a deep and lasting appreciation for the complex artistry of their construction and of their effects. In fourteen chapters, the book takes readers on a guided tour through some of the most productive sites in Shakespeare's plays for analysis, providing an introduction to the practice of reading Shakespeare's plays closely, and some examples of the interpretive work that such close reading can enable. Topics of analysis include verbal patterning, dramatic structure, staging and stage directions, soliloquies and character-construction and poetic meter. This is an ideal teaching text for introductory courses on Shakespeare. Offering a wide range of examples from nearly all of Shakespeare's plays, it will give students the analytical tools they need to develop sustained close readings of their own.

This revised edition preserves the play text as it was edited by Marvin Spevack for the 1988 first edition. Jeremy Lopez's new introduction provides a detailed discussion of Julius Caesar's strange and innovative form by focusing on the interpretive challenges the play has presented to audiences, scholars and theatre companies from Shakespeare's time to our own. The textual commentary has been revised and updated with an eye, and an ear, to the contemporary student reader, and the list of further reading has been updated to reflect the latest developments in Shakespearean criticism. Like the first edition, this edition concludes with an appendix containing relevant excerpts from Shakespeare's main source, Plutarch's histories of the lives of Caesar and Brutus as translated by Sir Thomas North in 1579.