E. Honigmann - Böcker

Myriad-minded Shakespeare introduces readers to the great variety of approaches to Shakespeare. For the second edition a new preface places the essays in the context of recent critical debate and a new chapter on Shakespeare's will provides a fascinating insight into Shakespeare's independent spirit.

This text, first published in 1976, has been extensively revised in this new edition and includes new chapters on "Henry V", "As You Like It" and on "the study of the audience and the study of response". Both readers and actors/theatre-goers should find that it opens up new ways of looking at the plays and at the mechanisms that underpin some of the most magical moments in Shakespeare's plays.

This edition, now available in paperback, constitutes an archive of source materials in the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. It is a collection of over one hundred wills left by those who participated in the life of the theatre – from actors and dramatists to carpenters and costumiers. The wills not only offer vital historical evidence but are also important human documents, testaments to the social, financial, religious and sentimental lives of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Of the wills reprinted here, one third were newly discovered, and many of the rest printed for the first time from the original wills, thus preserving the vacillations and abandoned intentions of the testators.