Shakespeare's Storytelling: An Introduction to Genre, Character, and Technique is a textbook focused on specific storytelling techniques and genres that Shakespeare invented or refined. Drawing on examples from popular novels, plays, and films (such as IT, Beloved, Sex and the City, The Godfather, and Fences) the book provides an overview of how Shakespearean storytelling techniques including character flaws, conflicts, symbols, and more have been adapted by later writers and used in the modern canon. Rather than taking a historicist or theoretical approach, Nate Eastman uses recognizable references and engaging language to teach the concepts and techniques most applicable to the future study of Creative Writing, English, Theater, and Film and Media. Students will be prepared to interpret Shakespeare's plays and understand Shakespeare as the beginning of a literary tradition. A readable introduction to Shakespeare and his significance, this book is suitable for undergraduates.

By 1597, years of torrential rains had devastated English agriculture, flooding fields and folds and raising the price of grain beyond the means of the market dependent poor - a misfortune made crisis by a long term decline in wages and the incidental crippling of traditional charitable supports. But, perhaps for the first time in English history, Crown and municipal interventions in grain markets promised to relieve the worst effects of these harvest failures, demonstrating both the potential benefits of comprehensive government policy and the potential disasters of policy failure. Famine consequently emerged in the late sixteenth century as a grammar of social and political organization, becoming a rhetoric through which the abstractions of governance were made visible in Shakespearean poetry and drama.