From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's great drama of ambition, desire and guilt. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Macbeth in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors - Rupert Goold, Gregory Doran and Trevor Nunn - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Recession is a time for asking fundamental questions about value. At a time when governments are being forced to make swingeing savings in public expenditure, why should they continue to invest public money funding research into ancient Greek tragedy, literary value, philosophical conundrums or the aesthetics of design? Does such research deliver 'value for money' and 'public benefit'? Such questions have become especially pertinent in the UK in recent years, in the context of the drive by government to instrumentalize research across the disciplines and the prominence of discussions about 'economic impact' and 'knowledge transfer'. In this book a group of distinguished humanities researchers, all working in Britain, but publishing research of international importance, reflect on the public value of their discipline, using particular research projects as case-studies. Their essays are passionate, sometimes polemical, often witty and consistently thought-provoking, covering a range of humanities disciplines from theology to architecture and from media studies to anthropology.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's most loved comedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of A Midsummer Night's Dream in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors Michael Boyd, Gregory Doran and Tim Supple, providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

With an introduction by Simon Callow Judgements about the quality of works of art begin in opinion. But for the last two hundred years only the wilfully perverse (and Tolstoy) have denied the validity of the opinion that Shakespeare was a genius. Who was Shakespeare? Why has his writing endured? And what makes it so endlessly adaptable to different times and cultures? Exploring Shakespeare's life, including questions of authorship and autobiography, and charting how his legacy has grown over the centuries, this extraordinary book asks how Shakespeare has come to be such a powerful symbol of genius. Written with lively passion and wit, The Genius of Shakespeare is a fascinating biography of the life - and afterlife - of our greatest poet. Jonathan Bate, one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars, has shown how the legend of Shakespeare's genius was created and sustained, and how the man himself became a truly global phenomenon. 'The best modern book on Shakespeare' Sir Peter Hall

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's most loved comedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of A Midsummer Night's Dream in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors Michael Boyd, Gregory Doran and Tim Supple, providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare's imagination Ben Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having "small Latin and less Greek." But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatrical profession that had inherited the conventions and forms of classical drama, and he read deeply in Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca. In a book that combines stylistic brilliance, accessibility, and extraordinary range, acclaimed literary critic and biographer Jonathan Bate, one of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare, offers groundbreaking insights into how, perhaps more than any other influence, the classics made Shakespeare the writer he became.

First published in 1991, Romantic Ecology reassesses the poetry of William Wordsworth in the context of the abiding pastoral tradition in English Literature. Jonathan Bate explores the politics of poetry and argues that contrary to critics who suggest that the Wordsworth was a reactionary who failed to represent the harsh economic reality of his native Lake District, the poet's politics were fundamentally 'green'. As our first truly ecological poet, Wordsworth articulated a powerful and enduring vision of human integration with nature which exercised a formative influence on later conservation movements and is of immediate relevance to great environmental issues today. Challenging the orthodoxies of new historicist criticism, Jonathan Bate sets a new agenda for the study of Romanticism in the 1990s.

First published in 1991, Romantic Ecology reassesses the poetry of William Wordsworth in the context of the abiding pastoral tradition in English Literature. Jonathan Bate explores the politics of poetry and argues that contrary to critics who suggest that the Wordsworth was a reactionary who failed to represent the harsh economic reality of his native Lake District, the poet's politics were fundamentally 'green'. As our first truly ecological poet, Wordsworth articulated a powerful and enduring vision of human integration with nature which exercised a formative influence on later conservation movements and is of immediate relevance to great environmental issues today. Challenging the orthodoxies of new historicist criticism, Jonathan Bate sets a new agenda for the study of Romanticism in the 1990s.

"The text of any Shakespeare play is a living negotiable entity: scholarship and theatre practice work together to keep the plays alive and vividly present." - Greg Doran, RSC Artistic Director Emeritus Developed in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, this Complete Works of William Shakespeare combines exemplary textual scholarship with beautiful design. Curated by expert editors Sir Jonathan Bate and Professor Eric Rasmussen, the text in this collection is based on the iconic 1623 First Folio: the first and original Complete Works lovingly assembled by Shakespeare's fellow actors, and the version of Shakespeare's text preferred by many actors and directors today. This stunning revised edition goes further to present Shakespeare's plays as they were originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed on stage. Along with new colour photographs from a vibrant range of RSC productions, a new Stage Notes feature documenting the staging choices in 100 RSC productions showcases the myriad ways in which Shakespeare's plays can be brought to life. Now featuring the entire range of Shakespeare's plays, poems and sonnets, this edition is expanded to include both The Passionate Pilgrim and A Lover's Complaint. Along with Bate's excellent general introduction and short essays, this collection includes a range of aids to the reader such as on-page notes explaining unfamiliar terms and key facts boxes providing plot summaries and additional helpful context. A Complete Works for the 21st century, this versatile and highly collectable edition will inspire students, theatre practitioners and lovers of Shakespeare everywhere.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's bleakest and most profound tragedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of King Lear in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with three leading directors - Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner and Trevor Nunn - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

The object of this text is to provide a comprehensive selection of critical texts which address the connection between ecology, culture and literature. It aims to offer a complete guide to the growing area of "ecocriticism" and a wealth of material on green issues from the romantic period to the present. The most important aspects of this field are covered in depth. These include: romantic ecology and its legacy; the earth, memory and the critique of modernity; nature/culture/gender; ecocritical principles; environmental literary history; and the nature of the text. Included in this collection are extracts from leading modern ecocritics and figures from the past who pioneered a green approach to literature and culture. As a whole, the reader encourages a reassessment of the whole development of criticism and offers a prospect for its future. The book includes extracts from William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, William Morris, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Theodore W. Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Raymond Williams, Theodore Roszac, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jonathan Bate, Kate Soper, Terry Gifford, Louise Westling, Richard Kerridge and Jhan Hochman.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's magical vision. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of The Tempest in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors - Peter Brook, Sam Mendes and Rupert Goold - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

'What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world' Seamus Heaney John Clare (1793-1864) was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth or Shelley - and a life to match. The 'poet's poet', he has a place in the national pantheon and, more tangibly, a plaque in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, unveiled in 1989. Here at last is Clare's full story, from his birth in poverty and employment as an agricultural labourer, via his burgeoning promise as a writer - cultivated under the gaze of rival patrons - and moment of fame, in the company of John Keats, as the toast of literary London, to his final decline into mental illness and the last years of his life, confined in asylums. Clare's ringing voice - quick-witted, passionate, vulnerable, courageous - emerges through extracts from his letters, journals, autobiographical writings and poems, as Jonathan Bate brings this complex man, his revered work and his ribald world, vividly to life.

A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020 ‘Radical Wordsworth deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact’ Financial Times ‘Richly repays reading … It is hard to think of another poet who has changed our world so much’ Sunday Times A dazzling new biography of Wordsworth’s radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator, published to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth. William Wordsworth wrote the first great poetic autobiography. We owe to him the idea that places of outstanding natural beauty should become what he called ‘a sort of national property’. He changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about our connection to the natural environment, and about the purpose of poetry. He was born among the mountains of the English Lake District. He walked into the French Revolution, had a love affair and an illegitimate child, before witnessing horrific violence in Paris. His friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at the core of the Romantic movement. As he retreated from radical politics and into an imaginative world within, his influence would endure as he shaped the ideas of thinkers, writers and activists throughout the nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States. This wonderful book opens what Wordsworth called ‘the hiding places of my power’. W. H. Auden once wrote that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’. He was wrong. Wordsworth’s poetry changed the world. Award-winning biographer and critic Jonathan Bate tells the story of how it happened.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's touching fable of loss and reunion. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Pericles in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with three leading directors and an actor - Adrian Noble, Dominic Cooke, Adrian Jackson and Laura Rees - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of the most famous of all love stories. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Romeo and Juliet in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with a leading director and two actors - Michael Attenborough, David Tennant and Alexandra Gilbreath - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's magnificent tragedy of love, jealousy and explosive racial politics. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Othello in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are interviews with two leading directors and an actor - Trevor Nunn, Michael Attenborough and Antony Sher - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald. 'Highly engaging ... Go now, read this book' THE TIMES 'For awhile after you quit Keats,' Fitzgerald once wrote, 'All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.' John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age. In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender is the Night and other works from the poet's lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence. Luminous and vital, this biography goes through the looking glass to meet afresh two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers in their twinned centuries.

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work is available both individually and as a set, and each contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary printed at the back. The edition, which began with The Tempest and ended with The Sonnets, put into practice the techniques and theories that had evolved under the 'New Bibliography'. Remarkably by today's standards, although it took the best part of half a century to produce, the New Shakespeare involved only a small band of editors besides Dover Wilson himself. As the volumes took shape, many of Dover Wilson's textual methods acquired general acceptance and became an established part of later editorial practice, for example in the Arden and New Cambridge Shakespeares.

"O mother, mother! What have you done?"
--"Coriolanus"
Eminent Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen provide a fresh new edition of this gripping political and personal tragedy--along with more than a hundred pages of exclusive features, including
- an original Introduction to "Coriolanus"
- incisive scene-by-scene synopsis and analysis with vital facts about the work
- commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers
- photographs of key RSC productions
- an overview of Shakespeare's theatrical career and chronology of his plays
Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers, these modern and accessible editions from the Royal Shakespeare Company set a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century.