Shakespeare: Bloomsbury Academic Collections – serie

In this work of scholarship and creativity, Meagher argues that Shakespeare has been misunderstood because of a failure to recognize his own directions as a playwright. Through an examination of several of his plays Meagher uncovers Shakespeare as artist, director, and actor.

Antoine de Montchrestien’s tragedies have been the object of increased critical attention over the years. This annotated edition makes two of his most interesting plays available – Hector, often recognised as one of the masterpieces of French regular rhetorical tragedy, and La Reine d’Escosse, a showcase of Montchrestien’s concept of tragedy.

This book assesses William Shakespeare in the context of political and religious crisis, paying particular attention to his Catholic connections, which have heretofore been underplayed by much Protestant interpretation. Bourgeois Richmond’s most important contribution is to study the genre of romance in its guise as a ‘cover’ for recusant Catholicism, drawing on a long tradition of medieval-religious plays devoted to the propagation of Catholic religious faith.

Shakespeare is the national poet of many nations besides his own, though a peculiarly subversive one in both east and west. This volume contains a score of essays by scholars from Britain, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain, Ukraine and the USA, written to show how the momentous changes of 1989 were mirrored in the way Shakespeare has been interpreted and produced. The collection offers a valuable record of what Shakespeare has meant in the modern world and some pointers to what he may mean in the future.

Passionate, controversial and illuminating – this collection contains Empson’s best short pieces on Shakespeare, a sally on George Herbert, a defence of Coleridge, and an eager introduction to a French farce, a group of incomparably witty autobiographical articles, and the text to his extraordinary Inaugural Lecture as Professor of English Literature at Sheffield University.