Oxford Shakespeare Topics – serie

As a figurehead for the literary humanities, and a dramatist whose plays feature fairies, ghosts, and spirits, Shakespeare may not be the first author that comes to mind when thinking about science. Tom Rutter shows, however, that in his plays and poetry Shakespeare made detailed use of the knowledge and theories of the cosmos, the natural world, and human biology that were available to him. These range from astronomical and anatomical ideas derived from medieval scholars, Islamic philosophers, and ancient Greek and Roman authorities, through to the challenges issued to those earlier models by more recent figures such as Copernicus and Vesalius. Shakespeare's treatment of these materials was informed by the poetic and dramatic media in which he worked; the dialogic nature of drama enabled an approach that could be provisional, exploratory, and tolerant of uncertainty and contradiction. Shakespeare made the early modern playhouse a venue for the production of scientific understanding through performance, illusion, and the creative use of space.As well as surveying current scholarship that contextualizes Shakespeare's work in relation to histories of meteorology, matter theory, humoral physiology, racialization, mathematics, and more, Shakespeare and Science offers detailed original readings of a variety of texts including the Histories, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, the Sonnets, and Lucrece. It also makes extensive reference to works by Shakespeare's near-contemporaries such as Robert Recorde, William Fulke, Juan Huarte, and Thomas Elyot. Its four chapters focus on astronomy and meteorology, matter, the body, and mathematics. Rutter's overall approach is informed by recent studies that interrogate 'science' as a concept, and that question both the boundary between literature and science and the idea of a seventeenth-century 'scientific revolution'.

As a figurehead for the literary humanities, and a dramatist whose plays feature fairies, ghosts, and spirits, Shakespeare may not be the first author that comes to mind when thinking about science. Tom Rutter shows, however, that in his plays and poetry Shakespeare made detailed use of the knowledge and theories of the cosmos, the natural world, and human biology that were available to him. These range from astronomical and anatomical ideas derived from medieval scholars, Islamic philosophers, and ancient Greek and Roman authorities, through to the challenges issued to those earlier models by more recent figures such as Copernicus and Vesalius. Shakespeare's treatment of these materials was informed by the poetic and dramatic media in which he worked; the dialogic nature of drama enabled an approach that could be provisional, exploratory, and tolerant of uncertainty and contradiction. Shakespeare made the early modern playhouse a venue for the production of scientific understanding through performance, illusion, and the creative use of space.As well as surveying current scholarship that contextualizes Shakespeare's work in relation to histories of meteorology, matter theory, humoral physiology, racialization, mathematics, and more, Shakespeare and Science offers detailed original readings of a variety of texts including the Histories, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, the Sonnets, and Lucrece. It also makes extensive reference to works by Shakespeare's near-contemporaries such as Robert Recorde, William Fulke, Juan Huarte, and Thomas Elyot. Its four chapters focus on astronomy and meteorology, matter, the body, and mathematics. Rutter's overall approach is informed by recent studies that interrogate 'science' as a concept, and that question both the boundary between literature and science and the idea of a seventeenth-century 'scientific revolution'.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. Despite the presence of hundreds of Biblical allusions in Shakespeare, this is the first book to explore the pattern and significance of those references in relation to a selection of his greatest plays. It reveals the Bible as a rich source for Shakespeare's uses of myth, history, comedy and tragedy, his techniques of staging, and his ways of characterizing rulers, magicians and teachers in the image of the Bible's multifaceted God. This book also discloses ways in which Shakespeare's plays offer both pious and irreverent interpretations of the Scriptures comparable to those presented by his contemporary writers, artists, philosophers and politicians. After an opening chapter comparing the Bible as a fragmented yet unified collection of 46 books with the fragmented yet unified First Folio collection of Shakespeare's 36 plays, each of the following six chapters matches a book of the Bible with a representative play: the creation myth of Genesis with the first play in the Folio, The Tempest, the historical epic of Exodus with Henry V, the tragedy of Job with King Lear, the tragicomedy of the Gospel of Matthew with Measure for Measure, the homiletic disputation of Paul's Epistle to the Romans with The Merchant of Venice, and the apocalyptic masque of the Book of Revelation with The Tempest again. Though its subject matter and style appeal to a broad audience, this book is grounded in recent scholarship in Shakespeare and Biblical studies. Its intertextual readings are framed by descriptions of the historical circumstances of each work's composition and reception and by an emergent theory of allusion as a principle of creation and understanding.

Shakespeare and Women situates Shakespeare's female characters in multiple historical contexts, ranging from the early modern England in which they originated to the contemporary Western world in which our own encounters with them are staged. In so doing, this book seeks to challenge currently prevalent views of Shakespeare's women-both the women he depicted in his plays and the women he encountered in the world he inhabited.Chapter 1, 'A Usable History', analyses the implications and consequences of the emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression that has dominated recent feminist Shakespeare scholarship, while subsequent chapters propose alternative models for feminist analysis. Chapter 2, 'The Place(s) of Women in Shakespeare's World', emphasizes the frequently overlooked kinds of social, political, and economic agency exercised by the women Shakespeare would have known in both Stratford and London. Chapter 3, 'Our Canon, Ourselves', addresses the implications of the modern popularity of plays such as The Taming of the Shrew which seem to endorse women's subjugation, arguing that the plays-and the aspects of those plays-that we have chosen to emphasize tell us more about our own assumptions than about the beliefs that informed the responses of Shakespeare's first audiences. Chapter 4, 'Boys will be Girls', explores the consequences for women of the use of male actors to play women's roles. Chapter 5, 'The Lady's Reeking Breath', turns to the sonnets, the texts that seem most resistant to feminist appropriation, to argue that Shakespeare's rewriting of the idealized Petrarchan lady anticipates modern feminist critiques of the essential misogyny of the Petrarchan tradition. The final chapter, 'Shakespeare's Timeless Women', surveys the implication of Shakespeare's female characters in the process of historical change, as they have been repeatedly updated to conform to changing conceptions of women's nature and women's social roles, serving in ever-changing guises as models of an unchanging, universal female nature.

Shakespeare and Superman? Shakespeare and The Twilight Zone? Shakespeare and romance novels? What is Shakespeare doing in modern popular culture? In the first book-length study to consider the modern 'Shakespop' phenomenon broadly, Douglas Lanier examines how our conceptions of Shakespeare's works and his cultural status have been profoundly shapes by Shakespeare's diffuse presence in such popular forms as films, comic books, TV shows, mass-market fiction, children's books, kitsch, and advertising. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture offers an overview of issues raised in Shakespeare's appropriation in twentieth-century popular culture, amd argues that Shakespeare's appearances in these media can be seen as a form of cultural theorizing, a means by which popular culture thinks through its relationship to high culture. Through a series of case studies, the book examines how popular culture actively constructs, contests, uses, and perpetuates Shakespeare's cultural authority.

Structured around modes in which one might encounter Asian-themed performances and adaptations, Shakespeare and East Asia identifies four themes that distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theatres from works in other parts of the world: Japanese formalistic innovations in sound and spectacle; reparative adaptations from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; the politics of gender and reception of films and touring productions in South Korea and the UK; and multilingual, diaspora works in Singapore and the UK. These adaptations break new ground in sound and spectacle; they serve as a vehicle for artistic and political remediation or, in some cases, the critique of the myth of reparative interpretations of literature; they provide a forum where diasporic artists and audiences can grapple with contemporary issues; and, through international circulation, they are reshaping debates about the relationship between East Asia and Europe.Bringing film and theatre studies together, this book sheds new light on the two major genres in a comparative context and reveals deep structural and narratological connections among Asian and Anglophone performances. These adaptations are products of metacinematic and metatheatrical operations, contestations among genres for primacy, or experimentations with features of both film and theatre.

Structured around modes in which one might encounter Asian-themed performances and adaptations, Shakespeare and East Asia identifies four themes that distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theatres from works in other parts of the world: Japanese formalistic innovations in sound and spectacle; reparative adaptations from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; the politics of gender and reception of films and touring productions in South Korea and the UK; and multilingual, diaspora works in Singapore and the UK. These adaptations break new ground in sound and spectacle; they serve as a vehicle for artistic and political remediation or, in some cases, the critique of the myth of reparative interpretations of literature; they provide a forum where diasporic artists and audiences can grapple with contemporary issues; and, through international circulation, they are reshaping debates about the relationship between East Asia and Europe.Bringing film and theatre studies together, this book sheds new light on the two major genres in a comparative context and reveals deep structural and narratological connections among Asian and Anglophone performances. These adaptations are products of metacinematic and metatheatrical operations, contestations among genres for primacy, or experimentations with features of both film and theatre.

Stratford made the man, but London made the phenomenon that is Shakespeare. This volume takes an historical approach to Shakespeare's connections with London. It explores Stratford's various links with the capital, significant locations for Shakespeare's work, people with whom he associated, his resistance to pressure from the City authorities, and the cultural diversity of early modern London. Among many aspects of his life in the City and its environs, it covers the playhouses in Shoreditch, his associations with Bishopsgate, his brother Edmund's residence on Bankside, and elements of London life that went into the making of Falstaff. Being 'forest born', he was always an outsider and could never have been, or felt, accepted as a citizen. We find him repeatedly a sojourner in the City, on the move. His home and family lay in Stratford. Despite his success in the capital, we might almost imagine him to have been a reluctant Londoner. Shakespeare and London draws on a range of documentary sources including City parish registers, county sessions records and the archives of London's Bridewell Hospital. It sets out details about those who inhabited Shakespeare's milieu, or played some part in shaping his writing and acting career. This volume is Ideal reading for undergraduates, graduates, and specialists of Shakespeare studies.

Stratford made the man, but London made the phenomenon that is Shakespeare. This volume takes an historical approach to Shakespeare's connections with London. It explores Stratford's various links with the capital, significant locations for Shakespeare's work, people with whom he associated, his resistance to pressure from the City authorities, and the cultural diversity of early modern London. Among many aspects of his life in the City and its environs, it covers the playhouses in Shoreditch, his associations with Bishopsgate, his brother Edmund's residence on Bankside, and elements of London life that went into the making of Falstaff. Being 'forest born', he was always an outsider and could never have been, or felt, accepted as a citizen. We find him repeatedly a sojourner in the City, on the move. His home and family lay in Stratford. Despite his success in the capital, we might almost imagine him to have been a reluctant Londoner. Shakespeare and London draws on a range of documentary sources including City parish registers, county sessions records and the archives of London's Bridewell Hospital. It sets out details about those who inhabited Shakespeare's milieu, or played some part in shaping his writing and acting career. This volume is Ideal reading for undergraduates, graduates, and specialists of Shakespeare studies.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. By bringing together evidence from different sources–documentary, archaeological, and the play-texts themselves–Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres reconstructs the ways in which the plays were originally staged in the theatres of Shakespeare's own time, and shows how the physical possibilities and limitations of these theatres affected both the writing and the performances. The book explains the conditions under which the early playwrights and players worked, their preparation of the plays for the stage, and their rehearsal practices. It looks at the quality of evidence supplied by the surviving play-texts, and the extent to which audiences of the time differed from modern audiences; and it gives vivid examples of how Elizabethan actors made use of gestures, costumes, props, and the theatre's specific design features. Stage movement is analysed through a careful study of how exits and entrances worked on such stages. The final chapter offers a thorough examination of Hamlet as a text for performance, excitingly returning the play to its original staging at the Globe.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. William Shakespeare lived and worked during an extraordinary quarter-century in the history of English drama, which saw the development of new kinds of tragedy and comedy, and the birth of the entirely new genre of tragicomedy. Beginning with the institutional foundations that were laid with the emergence of the commercial theatre business in 1570s London, Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time describes the principal audience fashions, artistic conventions, and professional circumstances which defined, and enabled, his plays and those of his colleagues: plays of a range and sophistication undreamed of by earlier generations, and rarely equalled since. Throughout, Shakespeare's plays are shown to be intimately associated with those of his contemporaries, notably Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and John Fletcher.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. This is the first full account of Shakespeare's impact on the whole of Eastern and East Central Europe up to the present day. Starting with the tours of the English Comedians on the Continent during Shakespeare's lifetime and shortly after his death, it traces their routes as far as Poland (Gdánsk, Warsaw) and the core of the Habsburg Empire (Prague, Vienna, Graz). Later chapters explore the profound Shakespearian influence on Russian drama, literature, and criticism since the 18th century–Tsarina Catherine II's Russian adaptations of Merry Wives and Timon, Tolstoy's attack on King Lear, Stanislavsky's interpretation of Hamlet and Othello–and Shakespeare's major role in the national revivals in Poland, the Czech lands, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Chapters on Shakespeare after the Bolshevik revolution and behind the Iron Curtain deal with the appropriation of his plays for political interpretations but also with the ways his humanism became an increasingly inspiring voice of dissent from Stalinist totalitarianism. The book evaluates the Shakespearian achievements of the film-maker Grigori Kozintsev, the poet and translator Boris Pasternak, the composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich, and the stage designer Josef Svoboda as well as the more controversial contributions of the critic Jan Kott and the playwright and director Bertolt Brecht.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, including some general anthologies relating to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Reading explores Shakespeare's marvellous reshaping of sources into new creations. Beginning with a discussion of how and what Elizabethans read - manuscripts, popular pamphlets, and books - Robert S. Miola examines Shakespeare's use of specific texts such as Holinshed's Chronicles, Plutarch's Lives, and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. As well as reshaping other writers' work, Shakespeare transformed traditions - the inherited expectations, tropes, and strategies about character, action and genre. For example, the tradition of Italian love poetry, especially Petrarch, shapes Romeo and Juliet as well as the sonnets; the Vice figure finds new life in Richard III and Falstaff. Employing a traditional understanding of sources as well as more recent developments in intertextuality, this book traces Shakespeare's reading throughout his career, as it inspires his poetry, histories comedies, tragedies, and romances. Repeated references to the plays in performance enliven and enrich the account.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. For the modern reader or playgoer, English as Shakespeare used it can seem alien and puzzling: vocabulary and grammar are in transition, pronouns and verb-forms can seem unfamiliar. Moreover, the conventions of poetic drama may also pose an impediment. Shakespeare and the Arts of Language provides a clear and helpful guide to the linguistic and rhetorical dimensions of the plays and poems. Written in a lucid, non-technical style, the book starts with the story of how the English language changed throughout the sixteenth century. Subsequent chapters define Shakespeare's main artistic tools and illustrate their poetic and theatrical contributions: Renaissance rhetoric, imagery and metaphor, blank verse, prose speech, and wordplay. The conclusion surveys Shakespeare's multiple and often conflicting ideas about language, encompassing both his enthusiasm at what words can do for us and his suspicion of what words can do to us. Throughout, Russ McDonald helps his readers to appreciate a play's concerns and theatrical effects by thinking about its language in relation to other writings of the period. He also emphasizes pleasure in the physical properties of Shakespeare's words: their colour, weight, and texture, the appeal of verbal patterns, and the irresistible power of intensified language.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. The history of the genres, or kinds, of drama is one of contradictory traditions and complex cultural assumptions. The divisions established by the original edition of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (the First Folio, 1623) give shape to whole curricula; but, as Lawrence Danson reminds us in this lively book, there is nothing inevitable, and much unsatisfying, about that tripartite scheme. Yet students of Shakespeare cannot avoid thinking about questions of genre; often they are the unspoken reason why classrooms full of smart people fail to agree on basic interpretative issues. Danson's guide to the kinds of Shakespearian drama provides an accessible account of genre-theory in Shakespeare's day, an overview of the genres on the Elizabethan stage, and a provocative look at the full range of Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies.

For centuries, plays like Othello and The Tempest have spoken about 'race' to audiences whose lives have been, and continue to be, enormously affected by the racial question. But are concepts such as 'race' or 'racism', 'xenophobia', 'ethnicity', or even 'nation' appropriate for analysing communities and identities in early modern Europe? Did skin colour matter to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, or was religious difference more important to them? This book examines how Shakespeare's plays contribute to, and are themselves crafted from, contemporary ideas about social and cultural difference. It considers how such ideas might have been different from later ideologies of 'race' that emerged during colonialism, but also from older ideas about barbarism, blackness, and religious difference. Thus it places the racial question in Shakespeare's plays alongside the histories with which they converse. Shakespeare uses and plays with the vocabularies of difference prevailing in his time, repeatedly turning to religious and cultural cross-overs and conversions - their impossibility, or the traumas they engender, or the social upheavals they can generate. Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism looks in depth at Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and Titus Andronicus, and also shows how racial difference shapes the language and themes of other plays.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. Shakespeare in the Theatre offers a rich, varied, and wonderfully evocative collection of eye-witness accounts of Shakespearian performances over the centuries. Theatre generates an excitement that stimulates fine prose: here are Hazlitt's famous accounts of Edmund Kean as Richard III and Hamlet, Bernard Shaw on Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet and his hilarious descriptions of Augustin Daly's productions, Max Beerbohm on Gordon Craig, and Kenneth Tynan on Olivier and Wolfit. Here too are lesser-known pieces by great writers: the German novelist Theodor Fontane on Charles Kean, Evelyn Waugh on Olivier, Virginia Woolf on Twelfth Night at the Old Vic. Taken together these pieces represent an appreciation of the work of the finest Shakespearian interpreters, and a survey of changing styles of Shakespearian production - ranging right across the canon - from the seventeenth century to the present, in England, America, and further afield. The post-war period is amply represented, right up to the present day, with vivid accounts of landmark productions by directors such as Peter Brook, Peter Hall, John Barton, Deborah Warner, Trevor Nunn, and Declan Donnellan. Stanley Wells introduces the volume with an essay on 'Shakespeare and the Theatre Critics', and supplies each review with a helpful headnote and explanatory references.

Shakespeare in the Theatre offers a rich, varied, and wonderfully evocative collection of eye-witness accounts of Shakespearian performances over the centuries. Theatre generates an excitement that stimulates fine prose: here are Hazlitt's famous accounts of Edmund Kean as Richard III and Hamlet, Bernard Shaw on Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet and his hilarious descriptions of Augustin Daly's productions, Max Beerbohm on Gordon Craig, and Kenneth Tynan on Olivier and Wolfit. Here too are lesser-known pieces by great writers: the German novelist Theodor Fontane on Charles Kean, Evelyn Waugh on Olivier, Virginia Woolf on Twelfth Night at the Old Vic. Taken together these pieces represent an appreciation of the work of the finest Shakespearian interpreters, and a survey of changing styles of Shakespearian production - ranging right across the canon - from the seventeenth century to the present, in England, America, and further afield. The post-war period is amply represented, right up to the present day, with vivid accounts of landmark productions by directors such as Peter Brook, Peter Hall, John Barton, Deborah Warner, Trevor Nunn, and Declan Donnellan. Stanley Wells introduces the volume with an essay on `Shakespeare and the Theatre Critics', and supplies each review with a helpful headnote and explanatory references.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, including some general anthologies relating to Shakespeare.Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century traces the reception of Shakespeare in the critical literature from the end of Victorianism to the present day. It charts a course through the turbulent waters of the twentieth century's intense and prolific engagement with Shakespeare, dramatist and poet. This is not an exhaustive history: its aim is to describe the place of the major Shakespeare critics in the schools and movements of their times. Following an introductory overview of the major trends in Shakespeare criticism in their embattled state in the twentieth century, later chapters take up the various strands of this criticism in a more expansive manner. While recognizing that these strands work from genuine differences of principle and methodology, Taylor points out connections, parallels, and echoes between and among the critical approaches. The book ranges widely across the plays and poems, and canvasses all stages of Shakespeare's career.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, including some general anthologies relating to Shakespeare. Richard III, Romeo, Prince Harry, Malvolio, Hamlet, Lear, Antony, Coriolanus, Prospero: Shakespeare's roster of male protagonists is astonishingly various. Shakespeare and Masculinity juxtaposes these memorable characters with the medical beliefs, ethical ideals, and social realities that shaped masculine identity for Shakespeare, as for his fellow actors and their audiences. At the same time it explores the process of male self-definition against various sorts of 'others' - women, foreigners, social inferiors, sodomites. Reflecting the truth that the plays' principal existence is in the live theatre, the book finishes with a transhistorical, multicultural survey of how masculinity has been performed in productions of Shakespeare's plays - in France, Germany, Hungary, Iraq, Japan, and elsewhere - and with a challenge to imagine masculinity in fuller and more satisfying ways.

The question of what happens after death was a vital one in Shakespeare's time, as it is today. And, like today, the answers were by no means universally agreed upon. Early moderns held surprisingly diverse beliefs about the afterlife and about how earthly life affected one's fate after death. Was death akin to a sleep where one did not wake until judgment day? Were sick bodies healed in heaven? Did sinners experience torment after death? Would an individual reunite with loved ones in the afterlife? Could the dead communicate with the world of the living? Could the living affect the state of souls after death? How should the dead be commemorated? Could the dead return to life? Was immortality possible? The wide array of possible answers to these questions across Shakespeare's work can be surprising.Exploring how particular texts and characters answer these questions, Shakespeare and the Afterlife showcases the vitality and originality of the author's language and thinking. We encounter characters with very personal visions of what awaits them after death, and these visions reveal new insights into these individuals' motivations and concerns as they navigate the world of the living.Shakespeare and the Afterlife encourages us to engage with the author's work with new insight and new curiosity. The volume connects some of the best-known speeches, characters, and conflicts to cultural debates and traditions circulating during Shakespeare's time.

The question of what happens after death was a vital one in Shakespeare's time, as it is today. And, like today, the answers were by no means universally agreed upon. Early moderns held surprisingly diverse beliefs about the afterlife and about how earthly life affected one's fate after death. Was death akin to a sleep where one did not wake until judgment day? Were sick bodies healed in heaven? Did sinners experience torment after death? Would an individual reunite with loved ones in the afterlife? Could the dead communicate with the world of the living? Could the living affect the state of souls after death? How should the dead be commemorated? Could the dead return to life? Was immortality possible? The wide array of possible answers to these questions across Shakespeare's work can be surprising.Exploring how particular texts and characters answer these questions, Shakespeare and the Afterlife showcases the vitality and originality of the author's language and thinking. We encounter characters with very personal visions of what awaits them after death, and these visions reveal new insights into these individuals' motivations and concerns as they navigate the world of the living.Shakespeare and the Afterlife encourages us to engage with the author's work with new insight and new curiosity. The volume connects some of the best-known speeches, characters, and conflicts to cultural debates and traditions circulating during Shakespeare's time.

Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing offers a rich account of Shakespeare's artistic development in, against, and beyond collaboration. We see him afresh as a poetic innovator in continual flux, and in continual artistic debt: an author shaped by others in a collaborative network of intellectual influence and dynamic interchange, and, the book argues, one that he helped substantially to create. In considering collaboration as a practice defining almost all of his earliest works, it shows that he was particularly active in its development in the early theatre scene of his nascent career, changing our sense of his development as a creative artist quite radically. Chapters exploring collaboration via theatre history, book history, and attribution debates complement the central three chapters detailing the different phases of Shakespeare's collaborative work, which reorient our shifting sense of what it meant to him, and what he gained from it, at these other key moments of his artistic career. In reconstructing the circumstances and outcomes of his pairings with other dramatists, and scrutinizing more closely their artistic contributions, Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing reconsiders the ways in which they influenced and challenged him to adapt and experiment with his writing in ways that go beyond the features of his solo-authored canon. In undertaking a rigorous appreciation of the structures and poetics of his co-authored works, this book presents them as distinctive works of art that transform our understanding of Shakespeare the poet, dramatist, and enduring cultural icon.

Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing offers a rich account of Shakespeare's artistic development in, against, and beyond collaboration. We see him afresh as a poetic innovator in continual flux, and in continual artistic debt: an author shaped by others in a collaborative network of intellectual influence and dynamic interchange, and, the book argues, one that he helped substantially to create. In considering collaboration as a practice defining almost all of his earliest works, it shows that he was particularly active in its development in the early theatre scene of his nascent career, changing our sense of his development as a creative artist quite radically. Chapters exploring collaboration via theatre history, book history, and attribution debates complement the central three chapters detailing the different phases of Shakespeare's collaborative work, which reorient our shifting sense of what it meant to him, and what he gained from it, at these other key moments of his artistic career. In reconstructing the circumstances and outcomes of his pairings with other dramatists, and scrutinizing more closely their artistic contributions, Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing reconsiders the ways in which they influenced and challenged him to adapt and experiment with his writing in ways that go beyond the features of his solo-authored canon. In undertaking a rigorous appreciation of the structures and poetics of his co-authored works, this book presents them as distinctive works of art that transform our understanding of Shakespeare the poet, dramatist, and enduring cultural icon.

Shakespeare and Text is built on the research and experience of a leading expert on Shakespeare editing and textual studies. The first edition has proved its value as an indispensable and unique guide to its topic. It takes Shakespeare readers to the very foundation of his work, explaining how his plays first took shape in the theatre where writing was part of a larger collective enterprise. The account examines the early modern printing industry that produced the earliest surviving texts of Shakespeare's plays. It describes the roles of publisher and printer, the controls exerted through the Stationers' Company, and the technology of printing. A chapter is devoted to the book that gathered Shakespeare's plays together for the first time, the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare and Text goes on to survey the major developments in textual studies over the past century. It builds on the recent upsurge of interest in textual theory, and deals with issues such as collaboration, the instability of the text, the relationship between theatre culture and print culture, and the book as a material object. Later chapters examine the current critical edition, explaining the procedures that transform early texts in to a very different cultural artefact, the edition in which we regularly encounter Shakespeare.The new revised edition, which builds on Jowett's research for the New Oxford Shakespeare, engages with scholarship of the past decade, work that has transformed our understanding of textual versions, has opened up the taxonomy of Shakespeare's texts, and has significantly extended the picture of Shakespeare as a co-author. A new chapter describes digital text, digital editing, and their interface with the traditional media.

Shakespeare and Text is built on the research and experience of a leading expert on Shakespeare editing and textual studies. The first edition has proved its value as an indispensable and unique guide to its topic. It takes Shakespeare readers to the very foundation of his work, explaining how his plays first took shape in the theatre where writing was part of a larger collective enterprise. The account examines the early modern printing industry that produced the earliest surviving texts of Shakespeare's plays. It describes the roles of publisher and printer, the controls exerted through the Stationers' Company, and the technology of printing. A chapter is devoted to the book that gathered Shakespeare's plays together for the first time, the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare and Text goes on to survey the major developments in textual studies over the past century. It builds on the recent upsurge of interest in textual theory, and deals with issues such as collaboration, the instability of the text, the relationship between theatre culture and print culture, and the book as a material object. Later chapters examine the current critical edition, explaining the procedures that transform early texts in to a very different cultural artefact, the edition in which we regularly encounter Shakespeare. The new revised edition, which builds on Jowett's research for the New Oxford Shakespeare, engages with scholarship of the past decade, work that has transformed our understanding of textual versions, has opened up the taxonomy of Shakespeare's texts, and has significantly extended the picture of Shakespeare as a co-author. A new chapter describes digital text, digital editing, and their interface with the traditional media.

What is a 'Shakespearean actor'? Does the term still have any meaning? Drawing on the biographical and autobiographical accounts of actors and directors, as well as on interviews with actors from a wide range of backgrounds, this book looks at these questions in a variety of contexts, historical and contemporary. A survey of the training of the classical actor, with its increasing vocal and physical demands, considers how it, like its subsequent career path, is affected by class and gender. There is discussion of the uneasy balance of power between actors and directors, rehearsal practice, the difficulties faced by women as performers and directors, and attempts at undirected productions. Other chapters consider the roles that actors do and don't want to play, and why, their relation to the Shakespeare text and editorial practice, the complex relationship between actor and audience, and the popularity of anecdotes about things that go wrong. Throughout, examples are taken, as far as possible, from the author's own long experience of theatregoing. A final chapter looks at new trends in the theatre that have been accelerated by the long period of closure during the pandemic, particularly attempts at greater inclusivity in both actors and audiences. It concludes that the main reason Shakespeare is performed is that actors want to play the roles he wrote.

What is a 'Shakespearean actor'? Does the term still have any meaning? Drawing on the biographical and autobiographical accounts of actors and directors, as well as on interviews with actors from a wide range of backgrounds, this book looks at these questions in a variety of contexts, historical and contemporary. A survey of the training of the classical actor, with its increasing vocal and physical demands, considers how it, like its subsequent career path, is affected by class and gender. There is discussion of the uneasy balance of power between actors and directors, rehearsal practice, the difficulties faced by women as performers and directors, and attempts at undirected productions. Other chapters consider the roles that actors do and don't want to play, and why, their relation to the Shakespeare text and editorial practice, the complex relationship between actor and audience, and the popularity of anecdotes about things that go wrong. Throughout, examples are taken, as far as possible, from the author's own long experience of theatregoing. A final chapter looks at new trends in the theatre that have been accelerated by the long period of closure during the pandemic, particularly attempts at greater inclusivity in both actors and audiences. It concludes that the main reason Shakespeare is performed is that actors want to play the roles he wrote.

Shakespeare and Disability Studies argues that an understanding of disability theory is essential for scholars, teachers, and directors who wish to create more inclusive and accessible theatrical and pedagogical encounters with Shakespeare's plays. Previous work in the field of early modern disability studies has focused largely on Renaissance characters that a modern audience might view as disabled. This volume argues that the conception of disability as residing within individual literary characters limits understandings of disability in Shakespeare: by theorizing disability vis-a-vis characters, previous studies have largely overlooked readers, performers, and audience members who self-identify as disabled. Focusing on issues such as accessible performances, inclusive casting, and Shakespeare-based therapy, Shakespeare and Disability Studies reinvigorates textual approaches to disability in Shakespeare by reading accessibility as an art form and exploring both the powers and potential limits of universal design in theatrical performance. The book examines the complex interdependence among the concepts of theory, access, and inclusion--demonstrating the crucial role of disability theory in building access and examining the ways that access may both open and foreclose inclusive dramatic practice. Shakespeare and Disability Studies challenges Shakespearians, from students to audience members, from classroom teachers to theatre practitioners, to consider how Shakespeare, as industry, as high art, and as cultural symbol, impacts the lived reality of those with disabled bodies and/or minds.