In All of Shakespeare, Maurice Charney, former president of the Shakespeare Association of America, provides a play by play, poem by poem guide to all of Shakespeare's works. In succinct and lucid chapters, Charney brings to life every play, from The Comedy of Errors to The Tempest, in addition to the long poems and the Sonnets.

The book is divided into sections according to genre: comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and poems. Charney also considers works that may be only partly by Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles, and A...

The complex and sometimes contradictory expressions of love in Shakespeare's works--ranging from the serious to the absurd and back again--arise primarily from his dramatic and theatrical flair rather than from a unified philosophy of love. Untangling his witty, bawdy (and ambiguous) treatment of love, sex, and desire requires a sharp eye and a steady hand. In Shakespeare on Love and Lust, noted scholar Maurice Charney delves deeply into Shakespeare's rhetorical and thematic development of this largest of subjects to reveal what makes his plays and poems resonate with contemporary...

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is one of the preeminent figures of the modern European theater. His masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author, set loose a riot during its first performance in Rome in 1921. This play about six unfortunate characters abandoned by their author in the middle of a tawdry drama, is an unsettling, supremely self-conscious work that is ultimately about theatrical artifice and artistic creation itself.

Pirandello and Film examines Pirandello's many efforts--none of them finally successful--to transform Six...

In this broad-ranging exploration of the nature of comedy Professor Charney considers its popular roots as well as the major issues in comic theory. Comedy High and Low seeks to bridge the gap between comic literature, especially stage comedy, and the popular comedy of jokes, graffiti, and comic happenings of everyday life. With examples taken mainly from major figures of stage comedy from Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Jonson, the Restoration dramatists, and Moliere to Beckett, Pinter, Durrenmatt, Stoppard, and Orton, it brings a historical perspective to the subject, and also includes...