Randall Martin – författare

Shakespeare's early history plays have come into new prominence following their triumphant revival by the RSC under the title of This England. This new edition of the precursor to Richard III offers a fresh interpretation of the relationship between the two earliest texts - The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (octavo, 1595) and the First Folio Henry VI Part Three (1623) - arguing that the former is a memorially reported and original version of the play later revised for the Folio. The two therefore represent Shakespeare's early and revised conceptions of the play. Unlike all previous editions, the text here is based rigorously on the Folio, with a re-examination of the dates of composition, memorial reporting, and revision. The introduction provides a useful synopsis of the historical events dramatized by Shakespeare, and appendices present extracts from his two chronicle sources and a detailed analysis of his dramatization of particular passages. The play's stage history and critical interpretations are considered as cultural and artistic responses to its multiply-focused dramatic structure: they are thus integrated, instead of being treated in separated sections on characters and themes, critical fortunes, and stage performance. The commentary fully explains meanings of archaic words and phrases, identifies historical figures and events in relation to Shakespeare's sources, and illustrates characters and scenes by reference to a variety of modern stage performers and productions in England and the USA - the first edition of the play to do so.

Shakespeare, St Paul, and Dramatic Emancipation: Disability, Gender, Race, Ecology breaks new ground by revealing the playwright's dramatic reinvention of early modern Pauline texts and paratexts in a wide range of plays. Their common thread is Pauline-allusive characters who resist political, social, and/or physical subjection and aspire -- with mixed degrees of failure and success -- to emancipated lives of fulfilled being and belonging. Historically contextualized case-studies of Henry VI Part Three and Richard III, Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and King John explore desires for freedom on authorial and theatrical as well as thematic levels. They seek out new critical directions by bringing post-typological and postsecular 'Pauline Shakespeare' into conversation with contemporary theories of disability, gender, race, and ecocriticism. A further original feature of the book is intertextual attention to parallel critical approaches to St Paul by several early modern women writers. Shakespeare, St Paul, and Dramatic Emancipation rediscovers a polyvocal, complex, and emancipatory Paul as a significant career-long resource for the playwright's innovative characterization and dramaturgy.

The Oxford ShakespeareGeneral Editor Stanley WellsThe Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers.- a new, modern-spelling text, based on the 1623 First Folio - detailed introduction considers composition, sources, historical events, performances and changing critical attitudes to the play- on-page commentary and notes explain meaning, staging, identify historical figures and events, and much else- appendices include extracts from the chronicle sources and new research on the use of boy actors in Elizabethan performance- illustrated with production photographs and related art- full index to introduction and commentary- durable sewn binding for lasting use'not simply a better text but a new conception of Shakespeare. This is a major achievement of twentieth-century scholarship.' Times Literary Supplement 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.

Shakespeare and Ecology is the first book to explore the topical contexts that shaped the environmental knowledge and politics of Shakespeare and his audiences. Early modern England experienced unprecedented environmental challenges including climate change, population growth, resource shortfalls, and habitat destruction which anticipate today's globally magnified crises. Shakespeare wove these events into the poetic textures and embodied action of his drama, contributing to the formation of a public ecological consciousness, while opening creative pathways for re-imagining future human relationships with the natural world and non-human life. This book begins with an overview of ecological modernity across Shakespeare's work before focusing on three major environmental controversies in particular plays: deforestation in The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Tempest; profit-driven agriculture in As You Like It; and gunpowder warfare and remedial cultivation in Henry IV Parts One and Two, Henry V, and Macbeth. A fourth chapter examines the interdependency of local and global eco-relations in Cymbeline, and the final chapter explores Darwinian micro-ecologies in Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. An epilogue suggests that Shakespeare's greatest potential for mobilizing modern ecological ideas and practices lies in contemporary performance. Shakespeare and Ecology illuminates the historical antecedents of modern ecological knowledge and activism, and explores Shakespeare's capacity for generating imaginative and performative responses to today's environmental challenges.

Shakespeare and Ecology is the first book to explore the topical contexts that shaped the environmental knowledge and politics of Shakespeare and his audiences. Early modern England experienced unprecedented environmental challenges including climate change, population growth, resource shortfalls, and habitat destruction which anticipate today's globally magnified crises. Shakespeare wove these events into the poetic textures and embodied action of his drama, contributing to the formation of a public ecological consciousness, while opening creative pathways for re-imagining future human relationships with the natural world and non-human life. This book begins with an overview of ecological modernity across Shakespeare's work before focusing on three major environmental controversies in particular plays: deforestation in The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Tempest; profit-driven agriculture in As You Like It; and gunpowder warfare and remedial cultivation in Henry IV Parts One and Two, Henry V, and Macbeth. A fourth chapter examines the interdependency of local and global eco-relations in Cymbeline, and the final chapter explores Darwinian micro-ecologies in Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. An epilogue suggests that Shakespeare's greatest potential for mobilizing modern ecological ideas and practices lies in contemporary performance. Shakespeare and Ecology illuminates the historical antecedents of modern ecological knowledge and activism, and explores Shakespeare's capacity for generating imaginative and performative responses to today's environmental challenges.

This book presents the first comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers. Individual cases are illuminated in relation to changing legal, religious, and political contexts, as well as the dynamic growth of commercial crime-news and readership.

This book presents the first comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers. Individual cases are illuminated in relation to changing legal, religious, and political contexts, as well as the dynamic growth of commercial crime-news and readership.

As voyeuristic and prurient as today's tabloid newspapers, early modern crime pamphlets and broadside ballads about women murderers tell of furtive love affairs and domestic poisonings, of battered wives who kill their abusive husbands, and of troubled mothers who murder their children. On first acquaintance, many pamphlets leave an impression of shallow sensationalism yoked to idealised repentance, and for that reason modern critics and historians have often discounted their importance as culturally significant artifacts. This volume presents a selection of over forty texts and is intended to encourage a reconsideration of these views. In his Introductory Note to the volume, Randall Martin discusses the narrative content and social commentary of these ballads, pamphlets and trial reports, and the contribution that they make to the discursive construction of the early modern female murderer through their representational strategies and evolving legal and gender contexts.

Of all the new developments in literary theory, feminism has proved to be the most widely influential, leading to an expansion of the traditional English canon in all periods of study. This book aims to make the work of Renaissance women writers in English better known to general and academic readers so as to strengthen the case for their future inclusion in the Renaissance literary canon.This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about women as writers within the period and suggests potential intertextual connections with works by well-known male authors of the same time.Individual authors and works are given concise introductions, with both modern and historical critical analysis, setting them in a theoretical and historicised context. All texts are made readily accessible through modern spelling and punctuation, on-the-page annotation and headnotes. The substantial, up-to-date bibliography provides a source for further study and research.