The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's most varied, theatrically self-conscious, and emotionally wide-ranging plays. This 2007 edition provides a newly-edited text, a comprehensive introduction that takes into account current critical thinking, and a detailed commentary on the play's language designed to make it easily accessible to contemporary readers. Much of the play's copiousness inheres in its generic intermingling of tragedy, comedy, romance, pastoral, and the history play. In addition to dates and sources, the introduction attends to iterative patterns, the nature and cause of Leontes' jealousy, the staging and meaning of the bear episode, and the thematic and structural implications of the figure of Time. Special attention is paid to the ending and its tempered happiness. Performance history is integrated throughout the introduction and commentary. Textual analysis, four appendices - including the theatrical practice of doubling, and a select chronology of performance history - and a reading list complete the edition.

Originally published in 1988. Selections here are organised chronologically looking at both theatrical commentary and literary criticism. The organisation brings out the shifts in emphasis as each generation reinvents Shakespeare, and Othello, by the questions asked, those not asked, and the answers given. Chapters cover the theme of heroic action, Iago's motivation, guilt and jealousy, and obsession. Some entries from the world of theatre delve into the portrayal of the Moor, Desdemona and Iago from the 1940s on. Authors include A. C. Bradley, William Hazlitt, Ellen Terry, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Helen Gardner and Edward A. Snow.

Originally published in 1988. Selections here are organised chronologically looking at both theatrical commentary and literary criticism. The organisation brings out the shifts in emphasis as each generation reinvents Shakespeare, and Othello, by the questions asked, those not asked, and the answers given. Chapters cover the theme of heroic action, Iago's motivation, guilt and jealousy, and obsession. Some entries from the world of theatre delve into the portrayal of the Moor, Desdemona and Iago from the 1940s on. Authors include A. C. Bradley, William Hazlitt, Ellen Terry, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Helen Gardner and Edward A. Snow.

The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's most varied, theatrically self-conscious, and emotionally wide-ranging plays. This 2007 edition provides a newly-edited text, a comprehensive introduction that takes into account current critical thinking, and a detailed commentary on the play's language designed to make it easily accessible to contemporary readers. Much of the play's copiousness inheres in its generic intermingling of tragedy, comedy, romance, pastoral, and the history play. In addition to dates and sources, the introduction attends to iterative patterns, the nature and cause of Leontes' jealousy, the staging and meaning of the bear episode, and the thematic and structural implications of the figure of Time. Special attention is paid to the ending and its tempered happiness. Performance history is integrated throughout the introduction and commentary. Textual analysis, four appendices - including the theatrical practice of doubling, and a select chronology of performance history - and a reading list complete the edition.

Comic elements in Shakespeare's tragedies have often been noted, but while most critics have tended to concentrate on humorous interludes or on a single play, Susan Snyder seeks a more comprehensive understanding of how Shakespeare used the conventions, structures, and assumptions of comedy in his tragic writing. She argues that Shakespeare's early mastery of romantic comedy deeply influenced his tragedies both in dramaturgy and in the expression and development of his tragic vision. From this perspective she sheds new light on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The author shows Shakespeare's tragic vision evolving as he moves through three possibilities: comedy and tragedy functioning first as polar opposites, later as two sides of the same coin, and finally as two elements in a single compound. In the four plays examined here, Professor Snyder finds that traditional comic structures and assumptions operate in several ways to shape the tragedy: they set up expectations which when proven false reinforce the movement into tragic inevitability; they underline tragic awareness by a pointed irrelevance; they establish a point of departure for tragedy when comedy's happy assumptions reveal their paradoxical "shadow" side; and they become part of the tragedy itself when the comic elements threaten the tragic hero with insignificance and absurdity. Susan Snyder is Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Comic elements in Shakespeare's tragedies have often been noted, but while most critics have tended to concentrate on humorous interludes or on a single play, Susan Snyder seeks a more comprehensive understanding of how Shakespeare used the conventions, structures, and assumptions of comedy in his tragic writing. She argues that Shakespeare's early mastery of romantic comedy deeply influenced his tragedies both in dramaturgy and in the expression and development of his tragic vision. From this perspective she sheds new light on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The author shows Shakespeare's tragic vision evolving as he moves through three possibilities: comedy and tragedy functioning first as polar opposites, later as two sides of the same coin, and finally as two elements in a single compound. In the four plays examined here, Professor Snyder finds that traditional comic structures and assumptions operate in several ways to shape the tragedy: they set up expectations which when proven false reinforce the movement into tragic inevitability; they underline tragic awareness by a pointed irrelevance; they establish a point of departure for tragedy when comedy's happy assumptions reveal their paradoxical "shadow" side; and they become part of the tragedy itself when the comic elements threaten the tragic hero with insignificance and absurdity. Susan Snyder is Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Pastoral Process" draws a basic distinction between two aspects of the pastoral ideal: the Arcadian pastoral, which locates the unspoiled paradise in space, apart from the complexities of city and court, and finds it accessible for limited periods of recuperation and reorientation; and the Golden Age mode, which locates the ideal pastoral life in time gone by, always already lost as soon as it is apprehended as paradise.
The author's central aim is an archaeology of the nostalgia-based pastoral of the vanished Golden Age. On the surface level, her close readings of certain Renaissance poems and sequences--Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender, " Marvell's Mower poems, and Milton's "Lycidas--"clarify "pastoral process": the dislocating transition from innocence to experience, from secure centeredness in a comfortable, self-mirroring world to a new condition of division, displacement, and alienation. The advent of individuation and sexual desire, and the internalization of undirectional time and universal death, transform the pastoral paradise into a wasteland or leave the newly self-conscious protagonist outside his former idyll, looking in.
Excavation beneath these initial readings uncovers the master myth of Eden that informs them, as well as parallel narratives of loss such as the various accounts of the Golden Age or the tale in Plato's "Symposium" of beings fallen from original wholeness into fragmentation and lack. Ramifications of the master myth include Christian and Jewish commentaries that helped shape traditional understandings of the story, and especially the subversive tradition that persisted, against the strong tide of orthodox interpretation, in reading the Fall of Man in terms of childhood wholeness breaking down in the wake of sexual knowledge and the burden of full, separated consciousness.
Below the poetic utterances and the shaping myths lies the deeper archaeological stratum of the unconscious and the mechanisms that construct, always retrospectively and often counterfactually, a blissful childhood. Beyond Freud's own theories, later offshoots and reworkings of his psychology are invoked to explore psychological experiences and needs that inform both myths and poems: Jung, the developmental psychologists, and especially Lacan. The study concludes by returning to the surface to consider the pastoral impulse in historical terms, as a defining moment in the careers of Spenser, Marvell, and Milton and as a special urgency in the early modern times they inhabited.

Usually classifed as a 'problem comedy', All's Well that Ends Well invites a fresh assessment. Its psychologically disturbing presentation of an agressive, designing woman and a reluctant husband wooed by trickery won it little favour in earlier centuries, and both directors and critics have frequently tried to avoid or simplify its uncomfortable elements. More recently, several distinguished productions have revealed it as an exceptionally penetrating study of both personal and social issues. In her introduction Susan Snyder makes the play's clashing ideologies of class and gender newly accessible. She explains how the very discords of style can be seen as a source of theatrical power and complexity, and offers a fully reconsidered, helpfully annotated text for both readers and actors. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.