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" focuses on and encourages the growing dissolution of boundaries between literature and philosophy.
"Philosophical Shakespeares" includes contributions from the first rank of contemporary criticism,...

This text studies female impersonation and the connections between dramatic and political representation in Shakespeare's plays. The author explores what it means to secure cultural and political representation in patriarchy for women and other oppressed groups. The book centres on the abscence of women and uses the problem of female impersonation in Shakespeare to focus on wider problems in feminism.

"Marxist Shakespeares" uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to look at Shakespeare's plays afresh. The essays collected here reveal the continuing power of Marxist thought to address many issues including:
* the relationship of texts to social class
* the historical construction of the aesthetic
* the utopian dimensions of literary production.
This book offers new 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 a...

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 fascinating collection of original essays shows how writers' efforts to imitate, contradict, compete with, and reproduce Shakespeare keep him in the cultural conversation.
The essays:
* analyze the methods and motives of Shakespearean appropriation
* investigate theoretically the return of the repressed author in discussions of Shakespeare's cultural function
* put...

This fascinating collection traces the ways in which Shakespeare has been reassessed over the years and explores many issues concerning Shakespeare's modernity.

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...

In this controversial 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, and in particular: the influential training methods of Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg the history of the RSC Women's Group Gale Edwards' production of The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare and Feminist Performance demonstrates how actor training, company management and gender politics fundamentally affect both how a production is created and the interpretations it can suggest. By examining the...

This volume is about the role of sound in Shakespeare's art, about how he heard the world around him and about what it means for us to listen to him. It describes the kinds of things Shakespeare learned, through sound, about the early modern world he lived in and the people he shared it with. One of the primary goals of this book is to discover the different aesthetic and ethical dispositions Shakespeare regularly associates with sound, which include connections with vulnerability, community, access to the deeply subjective or pre-articulated self, grotesque continuity and transformation,...

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 analyses 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.
The volume provides:
. an account of previous traditions of shame and of the Renaissance context
. a...