Shakespeare continues to articulate the central problems of our intellectual inheritance. The plays of a Renaissance playwright still seem to be fundamental to our understanding and experience of modernity.
Key philosophical questions concerning value, meaning and justice continue to resonate in Shakespeare's work. In the course of rethinking these issues, Philosophical Shakespeares actively encourages the growing dissolution of boundaries between literature and philosophy. The approach throughout is interdisciplinary, and ranges from problem-centred readings of particular plays...

Uses analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to engage in a fresh way with Shakespeare's works. The essays collected here bring together work by both established and younger scholars to reveal the continuing power of Marxist thought to address: the relationship of texts to social class; the historical construction of the aesthetic; and the utopian dimensions of literary production. This book offers insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeare's representations of class and gender emerged, and into Shakespeare's role in the global culture industry stretching from...

The link between psychoanalysis as a mode of interpretation and Shakespeare's works is well known. But rather than merely putting Shakespeare on the couch, Philip Armstrong focuses on the complex and fascinatingly fruitful mutual relationship between Shakespeare's texts and psychoanalytic theory. He shows how the theories of Freud, Rank, Jones, Lacan, Erikson, and others are themselves in a large part the product of reading Shakespeare.
Armstrong provides an introductory cultural history of the relationship between psychoanalytic concepts and Shakespearean texts.
This is played out in...

The vitality of our culture is still often measured by the status Shakespeare has within it. Contemporary readers and writers continue to exploit Shakespeare's cultural afterlife in a vivid and creative way. This collection of essays shows how writers' efforts to intimate, contradict, compete with and reproduce Shakespeare keep him in the cultural conversation. The contributors analyze the methods and motives of Shakespearean appropriation by looking at a wide range of works and people including: Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet; A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley; Mama Day by Gloria Naylor; Robert...

Shakespeare has variously been seen as the last great exponent of pre-modern Western culture, a crucial inaugurator of modernity and a prophet of postmodernity. This collection of essays traces the changing reception of Shakespeare over the past 400 years. Along the way it provides insights into: the nature of individuality, identity, and the self; the inter-relations of the rise of capitalism, nation-states, and secular culture; the sexual division of labour and gender identity; and the beginnings of Western colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism. This examination of Shakespeare's plays...

Shakespeare's works are now performed for an increasingly diversified cultural market. At the start of the 21st century, film, video and live performance have overtaken the printed book as the main ways in which people are introduced to Shakespeare. Therefore, is there any reason to ask people to read Shakespeare's plays anymore? The essays in this volume explore this question and the institutional practices that shape contemporary performances of Shakespeare's plays. The book gathers together contributors from across the literary-performative divide to examine the relationship between...

How do performances of Shakespeare change the meanings of the plays?
In this controversial new book, Sarah Werner argues that the text of a Shakespeare play is only one of the many factors that give a performance its meaning. By focusing on The Royal Shakespeare Company, Werner demonstrates how actor training, company management and gender politics fundamentally affect both how a production is created and the interpretations it can suggest.
Werner concentrates particularly on:
The influential training methods of Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg
The history of the RSC Women's...

The 'Sound of Shakespeare' reveals the surprising extent to which Shakespeare's art is informed by the various attitudes, beliefs, practices and discourses that pertained to sound and hearing in his culture.
In this engaging study, Wes Folkerth develops listening as a critical practice, attending to the ways in which Shakespeare's plays express their author's awareness of early modern associations between sound and particular forms of ethical and aesthetic experience. Through readings of the acoustic representation of deep subjectivity in Richard III, of the 'public ear' in...

One of the most intense and painful of our human passions, shame is typically seen in contemporary culture as a disability or a disease to be cured. Shakespeare's ultimately positive portrayal of the emotion challenges this view. Drawing on philosophers and theorists of shame, Shame in Shakespeare analyzes the shame and humiliation suffered by the tragic hero, providing not only a new approach to Shakespeare but a committed and provocative argument for reclaiming shame.

Spiritual Shakespeares is the first book to explore the scope for reading Shakespeare spiritually in the light of contemporary theory and current world events. Ewan Fernie has brought together an exciting cast of critics in order to respond to the religious turn in recent literary theory and to the spiritualized politics of terrorism and the War on Terror .

Exploring a genuinely new perspective within Shakespeare Studies, the volume suggests that experiencing the spiritual intensities of the plays could lead us back to dramatic intensity as such. It tests...