The Arden Shakespeare – serie

Hamlet is arguably the most famous play on the planet, and the greatest of all Shakespeare’s works. Its rich story and complex leading role have provoked intense debate and myriad interpretations. To play such a uniquely multi-faceted character as Hamlet represents the supreme challenge for a young actor. Performing Hamlet contains Jonathan Croall’s revealing in-depth interviews with five distinguished actors who have played the Prince this century: Jude Law: ‘You get to speak possibly the most beautiful lines about humankind ever given to an actor.’Simon Russell Beale: ‘Hamlet is a very hospitable role: it will take anything you throw at it.’David Tennant: ‘No other part has been so satisfying. It was tough, but utterly compelling.’Maxine Peake: ‘Hamlet was a way of accessing bits of me as an actress I’ve not been able to access before.’Adrian Lester: ‘Working with Peter Brook on Hamlet changed me as an actor, and for the better.’The book benefits from the author’s interviews with six leading directors of the play during these years: Greg Doran, Nicholas Hytner, Michael Grandage, John Caird, Sarah Frankcom and Simon Godwin. Many other productions are described, from those starring Michael Redgrave, Alec Guinness and Paul Scofield in the 1950s, to the performances of Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Scott and Paapa Essiedu in recent times. The volume also includes an updated text of the author’s earlier book Hamlet Observed, and an account of actors’ experiences of performing at Elsinore.

This open access study offers queer readings of 10 key film productions of Shakespeare plays from the past 80 years.A range of mainstream and independent English language film productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice take centre stage in Queering the Shakespeare Film. This study critiques the various representations of the queer – broadly understood as that which is at odds with what has been deemed to be the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant, particularly, but not exclusively, as regards sexual matters - in the Shakespeare film. The movies chosen for analysis correspond deliberately with those Shakespeare plays that, as written texts, have been subjected to a great deal of productive study in a queer context since the beginnings of queer theory in the early 1990s. Thus the book extends the ongoing queer discussion of these written texts to their counterpart cinematic texts. Queering the Shakespeare Film is a much-needed alternative and complementary critical history of the Shakespeare film genre.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-ND licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy is an international collection of fresh digital approaches for teaching Shakespeare. It describes 15 methodologies, resources and tools recently developed, updated and used by a diverse range of contributors in Great Britain, Australia, Asia and the United States. Contributors explore how these digital resources meet classroom needs and help facilitate conversations about academic literacy, race and identity, local and global cultures, performance and interdisciplinary thought. Chapters describe each case study in depth, recounting needs, collaborations and challenges during design, as well as sharing effective classroom uses and offering accessible, usable content for both teachers and learners.The book will appeal to a broad range of readers. College and high school instructors will find a rich trove of usable teaching content and suggestions for mounting digital units in the classroom, while digital humanities and education specialists will find a snapshot of and theories about the field itself. With access to exciting new content from local archives and global networks, the collection aids teaching, research and reflection on Shakespeare for the 21st century.

In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and King James I inherited the English throne. During James’s reign, England continued to hark back to Elizabeth, comparing him with his predecessor – not always in a way that was either flattering or pleasing to James. Critics have traditionally assumed that Shakespeare avoided involving himself in this discourse. In this study of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, however, Yuichi Tsukada demonstrates that, far from not involving himself in the phenomenon of nostalgia for Elizabeth, Shakespeare interacted closely with retrospective writings on Elizabeth and illuminated the complex politics behind the nostalgia. Based upon close readings of Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, together with a range of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, the book traces the ongoing cultural negotiation of the memory of Elizabeth.Yuichi Tsukada offers fresh insights into enigmatic aspects of Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama. For instance, what was the original significance of the two contentious prophecies – 'none of woman born' and the march of Birnam Wood – in Macbeth? Or that of the seemingly out-of-place triumphal procession of Volumnia near the tragic end of Coriolanus? Although her memory recurred in all forms of discourse throughout the first decade of James’s reign, the impact of this cultural undercurrent on Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama has been ignored or underestimated. Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia reveals the unnoticed richness of Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama by focusing on the growing cultural and political nostalgia for England’s dead queen.

This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women’s work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.

Deanne Williams offers the very first study of the medieval and early modern girl actor. Whereas previous histories of the actress begin with the Restoration, this book demonstrates that the girl is actually a well-documented category of performer and a key participant in the drama of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It explores evidence of the girl actor in archival records of payment, eyewitness accounts, stage directions, paintings, and in the plays and masques that were explicitly composed for girls, and, in some cases, by them.Contradicting previous scholarly assumptions about the early modern stage as male-dominated, this evidence reveals girls’ participation in medieval religious drama, Tudor civic pageants and royal entries, Elizabethan country house entertainments, and Stuart court and household masques. This book situates its historical study of the girl actor within the wider contexts of 'girl culture', including girls as singers, translators and authors. By examining the impact of the girl actor on constructions of girlhood in the work of Shakespeare – whose girl characters register and evoke the power of the performing girl – Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance argues that girls’ dramatic, musical and literary performances actively shaped medieval and early modern culture. It shows how the active presence and participation of girls shaped medieval and Renaissance culture, and it reveals how some of its best-known literary and dramatic texts address, represent, and reflect upon girl children, not as an imagined ideal, but as a lived reality.

This book provides readers with the tools to unravel the complexities of one of the most difficult sonnet sequences, introducing them to the literary tradition, themes, stylistic features and cultural contexts of the genre and the collection, and offering close readings of more than 100 sonnets.This combined approach enables readers not only to disentangle the complex relationships of the poems’ characters but also to appreciate their philosophical, sensual, topical and subversive qualities.Of the book’s two sections, the first, ‘Contexts and Forms’, includes chapters on the sonnet tradition, early publication history, the structural features of the sequence and the Shakespearean sonnet, as well as the main characteristics of the dramatis personae. The second section, ‘Themes’, consists of 5 chapters and explores the theme clusters that can be identified throughout the sequence (preservation, writing, desire, deception, imagination). Additional features of the book include a step-by-step approach to a Shakespeare sonnet, a model interpretation of a sonnet, as well as charts and tables identifying and summarizing the sequence’s mini-narratives, groups, addressees and themes. For easy reference, the sonnets discussed in the book are cross-referenced and listed in the index, which also includes key terms and names of works and people. Suggestions for further reading are provided at the end of each chapter, and the annotated bibliography includes brief descriptions of the most useful works for further study.

As one of the most popular early modern plays, Mucedorus provides new insights into romance narratives and the understudied history of amateur and regional performance. A story of a disguised prince and a rebellious princess surviving various perils in a pastoral forest, Kim Gilchrist highlights how this anonymous play encompasses the common themes through which early modern performance was most widely experienced.He explores the rich landscape of regional performance that existed after the play’s original performance in London playhouses and its later revival by Shakespeare’s King’s Men before the Stuart court. As the play was widely performed outside of London by non-professionals, the book draws attention to theatrical culture independent of the capital with distinct dramaturgical characteristics. This expands our understanding of the relationships between commercial, literary and elite drama, and wider national traditions of playing. Gilchrist corrects the play’s critical neglect by situating its value to early modern performers and audiences. The reasons for this neglect focus on the class and gendered aspects of the romance genre, which we learn was vital for so many, even as it endured literary derision.

This wide-ranging collection reflects on the various motivations that caused the Folio to come into being in 1623, 7 years after Shakespeare’s death, and on how the now iconic book has been continually reimagined after its initial publication to the present day.In honour of its original publication, Shakespeare’s First Folio 1623-2023: Text and Afterlives brings together a remarkable set of ground-breaking essays by an international group of scholars. From the beginning, the publication that came to be called the ‘First Folio’ was defined by the tension between the book as text and the book as a material object. In this volume, the individual contributions move between these two meaningsin that they consider precursors to the First Folio in the form of reader-assembled volumes; the poetic identity of Shakespeare; and how misfortunes and successes in the early modern printing house shaped Shakespeare’s text.Chapters examine the unpredictable and often surprising subsequent histories of the book that has even been given a sacred status and become the basis of Shakespeare’s unique position in the history of literature. They consider: the afterlife of the text, in relation to the reception of Shakespeare’s First Folio in Spain; its presence in and influence on James Joyce’s Ulysses; the role that Meisei University of Japan’s Shakespeare Collection has played in the education and research of the institution; and what the collection of 82 copies at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, tells us about the ongoing role of these books within the study of Shakespeare and the early modern period.

This book shows that Shakespeare’s dramatization of compassion, far from expressing a sense of universal empathy, stages a conflicted emotion available to be solicited, manipulated and at times even monopolized as a discursive vehicle for the exclusion of others.Drawing on the history of emotions and on Shakespearean classical studies, Anne Sophie Refskou argues both that Shakespeare’s compassion expresses his own historical and cultural moment and is at the same time the product of his close engagement with literature from the classical past. In so doing, she traces a set of recurrent strands in Shakespeare’s engagement with discourses of compassion throughout his playwriting career, situating them in relation to plays written for the early modern stage by contemporaries, including Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. Individual chapters offer readings of Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Hamlet and King Lear by way of comparative analysis of key classical texts – including Euripides’ Hecuba and The Trojan Women, Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – from which Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights drew sustained inspiration. Together, the chapters demonstrate how Shakespeare’s engagement with the classical literature, from which he inherited a spacious understanding of the social efficacy of emotion, enables his dramatization of issues that are central to the current critical field, including questions of race, gender, sexuality and the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals.

This book shows that Shakespeare’s dramatization of compassion, far from expressing a sense of universal empathy, stages a conflicted emotion available to be solicited, manipulated and at times even monopolized as a discursive vehicle for the exclusion of others.Drawing on the history of emotions and on Shakespearean classical studies, Anne Sophie Refskou argues both that Shakespeare’s compassion expresses his own historical and cultural moment and is at the same time the product of his close engagement with literature from the classical past. In so doing, she traces a set of recurrent strands in Shakespeare’s engagement with discourses of compassion throughout his playwriting career, situating them in relation to plays written for the early modern stage by contemporaries, including Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. Individual chapters offer readings of Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Hamlet and King Lear by way of comparative analysis of key classical texts – including Euripides’ Hecuba and The Trojan Women, Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – from which Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights drew sustained inspiration. Together, the chapters demonstrate how Shakespeare’s engagement with the classical literature, from which he inherited a spacious understanding of the social efficacy of emotion, enables his dramatization of issues that are central to the current critical field, including questions of race, gender, sexuality and the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals.

Early modern Europe provides a rich context from which to challenge the rigid opposition between science and religion in this bold new edited collection. Rethinking Science and Religion in Early Modern Culture approaches “science” and “religion” as overlapping and mutually defining modes of thought, belief, and practice. In addition to reconceptualizing the boundaries between science and religion as practiced and represented in early modern culture, essays develop new perspectives on gender and embodiment in considering works and ideas of the past. Some authors demonstrate how early modern natural philosophers understood their objects of inquiry, from human bodies to the cosmos, in theological terms. Others demonstrate how religious ideas shaped colonial exploration and the nascent slave trade as scientific enterprises. Still others put early modern poetry and drama in conversation with influential debates between religion and science. Across these various inquiries, our contributors challenge received narratives of secular disenchantment and liberal progress while questioning conventional assumptions about divisions between scientific and religious communities.Together, these essays seek to redefine both early modern religion and science as fluid and expansive discourses in which the rhetoric of the past continues to return uncannily within the controversies of the present. Science and religion were and remain mutually and dialogically constituted forms of knowledge, belief, practice, and power. These wide-ranging explorations return to fundamental questions and assumptions that underwrite both fields while also working to establish new questions, archives, and intellectual genealogies.

In this bold, original study Hedrick proposes an early modern ‘entertainment value’ revolution, to which Shakespeare contributed and in which he played a competitive role.As London’s nascent capitalist industry developed and the variety of entertainments proliferated, theatre contributes to the birth of entertainment value and a commercial trajectory toward what Marxist critic Adorno theorizes as ‘fun,’ seen contemporaneously in LasVegasization and the election of Donald Trump to U.S. Presidency.In this innovative approach to Shakespeare’s plays through their compulsory, competitive relation to other choices from London’s entertainment industry, such as sex work and gaming, Hedrick recovers a coherent internal dynamic of theatre’s ‘pleasure enclosure’ accompanying the revolutionary logic of capital’s new cultural and economic extremes.Applying these relations to original, insightful readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, and The Taming of the Shrew, Hedrick draws from cultural studies, contemporary and personal parallels, wide-ranging historical materials, and political theory. These include: the semantic shifts in keywords of pleasure, the practice of betting on actors, the psychology of paying admission before an entertainment, and various ‘reality shows’ such as contests of prose and verse. Continual insights emerge, both broad and specific: from ten ‘entertainment value axioms’ to Shakespeare’s awareness of entertainment value’s birth at moments in his late plays, marking a logic of value crisis, bubbles, and the danger of ‘too much fun.’

Early modern English theatre provides countless examples of the tropes and feelings we associate with the horror genre. Depictions of obscenity and violence designed to elicit a mixture of loathing, fear, repugnance, shock, awe, and desire in their audiences abound. From the bodily mutilations of Titus Andronicus, to the demonic, ghostly, and psychological terrors of Macbeth and Hamlet, to the sensory shocks of torture and imprisonment within The Duchess of Malfi. This collection of essays argues that the horror genre as we know it should be extended back to the 16th century to include classic early modern plays from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Witch of Edmonton.Contributors plot a new theory of horror through its roots as a conscious and complex generic mode in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century. Drawing together essays on topics such as bodily torture and experimentation, necrophilia and decomposition, psychological and supernatural torment, scholars critically engage with categories such as tragedy, comedy, parody, and folk horror. The volume offers new interpretations of both famous and obscure early modern plays, and places them in conversation with contemporary horror films like Midsommar, The Wicker Man, The Substance, and the works of David Cronenberg, providing a new route into the burgeoning field of early modern horror for scholars and students.

Silvia Bigliazzi explores the dynamics between the individual and the collective in 16th century English tragedies in this vibrant study of the chorus in early modern tragedy. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, Bigliazzi examines the performative, political and cultural implications of chorality in early modern English tragedy over five decades.From the first English language translations of Seneca’s play, Troas, Horace’s Ars Poetica, and the reinvention of the Italo-Euripidean Jocasta to the use of prologue in plays like Romeo and Juliet and Pericles, Bigliazzi traces the appearance and transformation of the ancient Graeco-Roman chorus in early modern English theatre between the late 1590s to the mid-1590s. Through a reinterpretation of the ancient threnos/kommos and female lament to a regendering of collective or choric mourning in tragedies such as David and Bethsabe, Tamburlaine, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet. A nuanced understanding of tragedy and the politics of gendered choral performance emerges through a complex reworking of ancient models, where the essence of tragic drama was rooted in the interplay between the chorus and individual characters. From the early Inns of Court drama to Shakespeare, this study reveals a fresh understanding of early modern tragedy as part of a thrilling encounter between the ancient and the new.

Who said " Neither a lender nor a borrower be"? Who are the star-crossed lovers? Which Shakespearean lady protests "too much"? If you have ever been stuck trying to identify a Shakespearean quote then this is the book for you! With over 3,000 quotes from single lines to quite long extracts, organized by topic and by play, this is an essential book for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare. The key word index makes it easy to use and it also includes a glossary of unfamiliar terms and a brief biography of Shakespeare. The Dictionary is easy to dip into by word or theme (love, greed, disease, war etc) or by play, and the indexes allow readers to track down a half-remembered quote easily. An ideal companion for all students, teachers or performers of Shakespeare, this Dictionary is a useful and entertaining reference work.

Long held as Britain's 'national poet', Shakespeare’s role in the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad confirmed his status as a global icon in the modern world. From his prominent positioning in the Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies, to his major presence in the cultural programme surrounding the Games, including the Royal Shakespeare Company's World Shakespeare Festival and the Globe's Globe to Globe Festival, Shakespeare played a major role in the way the UK presented itself to its citizens and to the world.This collection explores the cultural forces at play in the construction, use and reception of Shakespeare during the 2012 Olympic Moment, considering what his presence says about culture, politics and identity in twenty-first century British and global life.

This book's underlying claim is that English Renaissance tragedy addresses live issues in the experience of readers and spectators today: it is not a genre to be studied only for aesthetic or “heritage” reasons. The book considers the way in which tragedy in general, and English Renaissance tragedy in particular, addresses ideas of freedom, understood both from an individual and a sociopolitical perspective. Tragedy since the Greeks has addressed the constraints and necessities to which human life is subject (Fate, the gods, chance, the conflict between state and individual) as well as the human desire for autonomy and self-direction. In short, English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom shows how the tragic drama of Shakespeare’s age addresses problems of freedom, slavery, and tyranny in ways that speak to us now.

What skills did Shakespeare’s actors bring to their craft? How do these skills differ from those of contemporary actors? Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre: Thinking with the Body examines the ‘toolkit’ of the early modern player and suggests new readings of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their many skills.Theatre is an ephemeral medium. Little remains to us of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: some printed texts, scattered documents and records, and a few scraps of description, praise, and detraction. Because most of what survives are printed playbooks, students of English theatre find it easy to forget that much of what happened on the early modern stage took place within the gaps of written language: the implicit or explicit calls for fights, dances, military formations, feats of physical skill, song, and clowning. Theatre historians and textual editors have often ignored or denigrated such moments, seeing them merely as extraneous amusements or signs that the text has been ‘corrupted’ by actors. This book argues that recapturing a positive account of the skills and expertise of the early modern players will result in a more capacious understanding of the nature of theatricality in the period.

Shakespeare’s plays are works of art made out of words. To read the plays closely, that is, to pay careful attention to the multiple, shifting meanings of and relationships between their words, is to gain a deep and lasting appreciation for the complex artistry of their construction and of their effects. In fourteen chapters, the book takes readers on a guided tour through some of the most productive sites in Shakespeare’s plays for analysis, providing an introduction to the practice of reading Shakespeare’s plays closely, and some examples of the interpretive work that such close reading can enable. Topics of analysis include verbal patterning, dramatic structure, staging and stage directions, soliloquies and character-construction and poetic meter.This is an ideal teaching text for introductory courses on Shakespeare. Offering a wide range of examples from nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays, it will give students the analytical tools they need to develop sustained close readings of their own.