Shakespeare Criticism – serie

Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the international contributors to Hamlet: New Critical Essays contribute major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of Hamlet. This book is the most up-to-date and comprehensive critical analysis available of one of Shakespeare's best-known and most engaging plays.

This volume is a collection of all-new original essays covering everything from feminist to postcolonial readings of the play as well as source queries and analyses of historical performances of the play.The Merchant of Venice is a collection of seventeen new essays that explore the concepts of anti-Semitism, the work of Christopher Marlowe, the politics of commerce and making the play palatable to a modern audience. The characters, Portia and Shylock, are examined in fascinating detail. With in-depth analyses of the text, the play in performance and individual characters, this book promises to be the essential resource on the play for all Shakespeare enthusiasts.

Including twenty-one groundbreaking chapters that examine one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies. Othello:Critical Essays explores issues of friendship and fealty, love and betrayal, race and gender issues, and much more.

Arguably the first play in a Shakespearean tetralogy, Richard II is a unique and compelling political drama whose themes still resonate today. It is one of the few Shakespeare plays written entirely in verse and its format presents unique theatrical challenges. Politically engaged and controversial, it raises crucial debates about the relationship between early modern art, audience response and state power.This collection provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the critical and theatrical history of the play. The substantial introduction surveys the history of critical interpretations of Richard II since the eighteenth century. The eleven newly written critical essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field then adopt an eclectic range of critical approaches that encourage scholars and students to pursue new and imaginative directions with the text.

Described as one of Shakespeare’s most intriguing plays, All’s Well That Ends Well has only recently begun to receive the critical attention it deserves. Noted as a crucial point of development in Shakespeare’s career, this collection of new essays reflects the growing interest in the play and presents a broad range of approaches to it, including historical, feminist, performative and psychoanalytical criticisms.In addition to fourteen essays written by leading scholars, the editor’s introduction provides a substantial overview of the play’s critical history, with a strong focus on performance analysis and the impact that this has had on its reception and reputation. Demonstrating a variety of approaches to the play and furthering recent debates, this book makes a valuable contribution to Shakespeare criticism.

Complementing other volumes in the Shakespeare Criticism Series, this collection of twenty original essays will expand the critical contexts in which Antony and Cleopatra can be enjoyed as both literature and theater. The essays will cover a wide spectrum of topics and utilize a diversity of scholarly methodologies, including textual and performance-oriented approaches, intertextual studies, as well as feminist, psychoanalytical, Marxist, and postcolonial inquiries. The volume will also feature an extensive introduction by the editor surveying the under-examined performance history and critical trends/legacy of this complex play. Contributors include prominent Shakespeare scholars David Bevington, Dympna Callaghan, Leeds Barroll, David Fuller, Dorothea Kehler, and Linda Woodbridge.

This book explores traditional approaches to the play, which includes an examination of the play in light of current history, in the context of Renaissance England, and in relation to Shakespeare's other Roman plays as well as structural examination of plot, language, character, and source material. Julius Caesar: CriticalEssays also examines the current debates concerning the play in Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, queer, and gender contexts.

The Tempest: Critical Essays traces the history of Shakespeare's controversial late romance from its early reception (and adaptation) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present. The volume reprints influential criticism, and it also offers eight originalessays which study The Tempest from a variety of contemporary perspectives, including cultural materialism, feminism, deconstruction, performance theory, and postcolonial studies. Unlike recent anthologies about The Tempest which reprint contemporary articles along with a few new essays, this volume contains a mixture of old and new materials pertaining to the play's use in the theater and in literary history.

Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare’s original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises ‘the play’ is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink

The Merry Wives of Windsor has recently experienced a resurgence of critical interest. At times considered one of Shakespeare’s weaker plays, it is often dismissed or marginalized; however, developments in feminist, ecocritical and new historicist criticism have opened up new perspectives and this collection of 18 essays by top Shakespeare scholars sheds fresh light on the play. The detailed introduction by Phyllis Rackin and Evelyn Gajowski provides a historical survey of the play and ties into an evolving critical and cultural context. The book’s sections look in turn at female community/female agency; theatrical alternatives; social and theatrical contexts; desire/sexuality; nature and performance to provide a contemporary critical analysis of the play.

This essay collection offers a lengthy introduction describing trends in criticism and theatrical interpretation of As You Like It. Twenty-six major essays on the play, including several written especially for this volume highlight the work, coupled with twenty-three reviews of various productions, ranging from 1741 to 1919. Edward Tomarken edited this valuable collection with a contents that includes pieces by Samuel Johnson, Charles Gildon, J. Payne Collier, Denton J. Snider, Charles Wingate, Victor O. Freeburg, J.B. Priestly, Cumberland Clark, Margaret Maurer and others.

Pericles: Critical Essays brings together the most essential critical essays and theatrical reviews of Shakespeare's play from the late 17th century to the present, providing a representative gathering of critical opinion of Pericles over the centuries. David Skeele's introduction identifies the critical issues and problems the play has raised, cites and evaluates significant critical works, and gives readers a guide to research on the play.

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

Complementing other volumes in the Shakespeare Criticism Series, this collection of twenty original essays will expand the critical contexts in which Antony and Cleopatra can be enjoyed as both literature and theater. The essays will cover a wide spectrum of topics and utilize a diversity of scholarly methodologies, including textual and performance-oriented approaches, intertextual studies, as well as feminist, psychoanalytical, Marxist, and postcolonial inquiries. The volume will also feature an extensive introduction by the editor surveying the under-examined performance history and critical trends/legacy of this complex play. Contributors include prominent Shakespeare scholars David Bevington, Dympna Callaghan, Leeds Barroll, David Fuller, Dorothea Kehler, and Linda Woodbridge.

Described as one of Shakespeare’s most intriguing plays, All’s Well That Ends Well has only recently begun to receive the critical attention it deserves. Noted as a crucial point of development in Shakespeare’s career, this collection of new essays reflects the growing interest in the play and presents a broad range of approaches to it, including historical, feminist, performative and psychoanalytical criticisms.In addition to fourteen essays written by leading scholars, the editor’s introduction provides a substantial overview of the play’s critical history, with a strong focus on performance analysis and the impact that this has had on its reception and reputation. Demonstrating a variety of approaches to the play and furthering recent debates, this book makes a valuable contribution to Shakespeare criticism.

This volume in the Shakespeare Criticism series offers a range of approaches to Twelfth Night, including its critical reception, performance history, and relation to early modern culture. James Schiffer’s extensive introduction surveys the play’s critical reception and performance history, while individual essays explore a variety of topics relevant to a full appreciation of the play: early modern notions of love, friendship, sexuality, madness, festive ritual, exoticism, social mobility, and detection. The contributors approach these topics from a variety of perspectives, such as new critical, new historicist, cultural materialist, feminist and queer theory, and performance criticism, occasionally combining several approaches within a single essay.The new essays from leading figures in the field explore and extend the key debates surrounding Twelfth Night, creating the ideal book for readers approaching this text for the first time or wishing to further their knowledge of this stimulating, much loved play.

This volume offers a wealth of critical analysis, supported with ample historical and bibliographical information about one of Shakespeare’s most enduringly popular and globally influential plays. Its eighteen new chapters represent a broad spectrum of current scholarly and interpretive approaches, from historicist criticism to performance theory to cultural studies. A substantial section addresses early modern themes, with attention to the protagonists and the discourses of politics, class, gender, the emotions, and the economy, along with discussions of significant ‘minor’ characters and less commonly examined textual passages. Further chapters scrutinize Macbeth’s performance, adaptation and transformation across several media—stage, film, text, and hypertext—in cultural settings ranging from early nineteenth-century England to late twentieth-century China. The editor’s extensive introduction surveys critical, theatrical, and cinematic interpretations from the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, while advancing a synthetic argument to explain the shifting relationship between two conflicting strains in the tragedy’s reception. Written to a level that will be both accessible to advanced undergraduates and, at the same time, useful to post-graduates and specialists in the field, this book will greatly enhance any study of Macbeth.Contributors: Rebecca Lemon, Jonathan Baldo, Rebecca Ann Bach, Julie Barmazel, Abraham Stoll, Lois Feuer, Stephen Deng, Lisa Tomaszewski, Lynne Bruckner, Michael David Fox, James Wells, Laura Engel, Stephen Buhler, Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson, Bruno Lessard, Pamela Mason.

This anthology examines Love's Labours Lost from a variety of perspectives and through a wide range of materials. Selections discuss the play in terms of historical context, dating, and sources; character analysis; comic elements and verbal conceits; evidence of authorship; performance analysis; and feminist interpretations. Alongside theater reviews, production photographs, and critical commentary, the volume also includes essays written by practicing theater artists who have worked on the play. An index by name, literary work, and concept rounds out this valuable resource.

Twenty-nine collected essays represent a critical history of Shakespeare's play as text and as theater, beginning with Samuel Johnson in 1765, and ending with a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1991. The criticism centers on three aspects of the play: the love/friendship debate.

A collection that includes a lengthy introduction describing historical trends in critical interpretations and theatrical performances of Shakespeare's play; 20 essays on the play, including two written especially for this volume (by Maurice Hunt and David Bergeron).

This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's AComedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on TheComedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time.

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

This is the first collection of critical essays devoted exclusively to Shakespeare's first published work, his long narrative poem Venus and Adonis which established his reputation as the literary darling of London and the heir of Ovid.  Particularly important is the book's coverage of the little-known presence of Venus and Adonis on stage.A substantial introduction of 65 pagessurveys the history of criticism about the poem and its significance, and addresses such issues as the burdens of readership and the poem as a staged production. Following are 19 reprinted works from the 18th to late 20th centuries and seven original essays by leading scholars that examine the poem from a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives-Lacanian desire, semiotics and Elizabethan wardship, female readership, mythology, aesthetics and art history. An extensive chronological bibliography of scholarship, editions, and theatrical and literary reviews makes this volume indispensable.

Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays is the essential Sonnets anthology for our time. This important collection focuses exclusively on contemporary criticism of the Sonnets, reprinting three highly influential essays from the past decade and including sixteen original analyses by leading scholars in the field. The contributors' diverse approaches range from the new historicism to the new bibliography, from formalism to feminism, from reception theory to cultural materialism, and from biographical criticism to queer theory. In addition, James Schiffer's introduction offers a comprehensive survey of 400 years of criticism of these fascinating, enigmatic poems.

The Tempest: Critical Essays traces the history of Shakespeare's controversial late romance from its early reception (and adaptation) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present. The volume reprints influential criticism, and it also offers eight originalessays which study The Tempest from a variety of contemporary perspectives, including cultural materialism, feminism, deconstruction, performance theory, and postcolonial studies. Unlike recent anthologies about The Tempest which reprint contemporary articles along with a few new essays, this volume contains a mixture of old and new materials pertaining to the play's use in the theater and in literary history.

Pericles: Critical Essays brings together the most essential critical essays and theatrical reviews of Shakespeare's play from the late 17th century to the present, providing a representative gathering of critical opinion of Pericles over the centuries. David Skeele's introduction identifies the critical issues and problems the play has raised, cites and evaluates significant critical works, and gives readers a guide to research on the play.

This collection of original essays provides a selection of current criticism on the Henry VI plays. Topics addressed will include feminist commentaries on the play, the principal of unity in the trilogy, the tradition of illumination of the play, textual variations, and finally, anachronism and allegory.

This book explores traditional approaches to the play, which includes an examination of the play in light of current history, in the context of Renaissance England, and in relation to Shakespeare's other Roman plays as well as structural examination of plot, language, character, and source material. Julius Caesar: CriticalEssays also examines the current debates concerning the play in Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, queer, and gender contexts.

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.