This book considers early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness, uncovering and historicizing the complex negotiations among physical embodiment, emotional response, and communally-sanctioned behavior in Shakespeare's literary and material world. The volume visits a series of questions about the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor, emotional competence or satisfaction, and joy or self-fulfillment. Individual essays investigate the purported disabilities of the "crook-back" King Richard...

This volume introduces 'civic Shakespeare' as a new and complex category entailing the dynamic relation between the individual and the community on issues of authority, liberty, and cultural production. It investigates civic Shakespeare through Romeo and Juliet as a case study for an interrogation of the limits and possibilities of theatre and the idea of the civic. The play's focus on civil strife, political challenge, and the rise of a new conception of the individual within society makes it an ideal site to examine how early modern civic topics were received and reconfigured on...

This book recovers a sense of the high stakes of Shakespearean comedy, arguing that the comedies, no less than the tragedies, serve to dramatize responses to the condition of being human, responses that invite scholarly investigation and explanation. Taking its cue from Stanley Cavell's influential readings of Othello and Lear, the book argues that exposure or vulnerability to others is the source of both human happiness and human misery; while the tragedies showcase attempts at the evasion of such vulnerability through the self-defeating pursuit of epistemological certainty,...

This book is the first to explore the rich archive of Shakespeare in Indian cinemas, including less familiar, Indian language cinemas to contribute to the assessment of the expanding repertoire of Shakespeare films worldwide. Essays cover mainstream and regional Indian cinemas such as the better known Tamil and Kannada, as well as the less familiar regions of the North Eastern states. The volume visits diverse filmic genres, starting from the earliest silent cinema, to diasporic films made for global audiences, television films, independent films, and documentaries, thus expanding the very...

This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare s drama. The discourse of folly s wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. Like Erasmus, More, and Montaigne before him, Shakespeare employs folly as a mode of understanding that does not arrogantly insist upon the veracity of its own claims a fool s truth, after all, is spoken by a fool. Yet, as this study demonstrates, Shakespearean folly is not the...

This book asks new questions about how and why Shakespeare engages with source material, and about what should be counted as sources in Shakespeare studies. The essays demonstrate that source study remains an indispensable mode of inquiry for understanding Shakespeare, his authorship and audiences, and early modern gender, racial, and class relations, as well as for considering how new technologies have and will continue to redefine our understanding of the materials Shakespeare used to compose his plays. Although source study has been used in the past to construct a conservative view of...

This volume gives Asia s Shakespeares the critical, theoretical, and political space they demand, offering rich, alternative ways of thinking about Asia, Shakespeare, and Asian Shakespeare based on Asian experiences and histories. Challenging and supplementing the dominant critical and theoretical structures that determine Shakespeare studies today, close analysis of Shakespeare s Asian journeys, critical encounters, cultural geographies, and the political complexions of these negotiations reveal perspectives different to the European. Exploring what Shakespeare has done to Asia along with...

This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare's drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare's work and...