Women Beware Women is among the most powerful and adroitly plotted of Jacobean tragedies. Written by Thomas Middleton, a later contemporary of Shakespeare, the play deals with topics of enduring fascination such as sexual and financial greed, the sexual exploitation of women by a manipulative older woman, murderous revenge and the sexual predatoriness of a man in a position of power. The storyline is based on the most public of Medici scandals in late sixteenth-century Florence, with the Grand Duke Francesco seducing and then marrying a beautiful Venetian runaway, after arranging the murder...

The rebuilding of the Globe theater (1599-1613) on London's Bankside, a few yards from the site of the playhouse in which many of Shakespeare's plays were first performed, must rank as one of the most imaginative enterprises of recent decades. The realization of the vision of Sam Wanamaker and his architect Theo Crosby, it has aroused intense interest among scholars and the general public worldwide. In anticipation of the official opening and the first performance season, visitors have been drawn in large numbers to the auditorium and exhibition. Shakespeare's Globe Rebuilt offers a...

In this book, originally published in 1999, leading Shakespeare scholars from Japan and the West broke new ground by studying the interaction of Japanese and Western conceptions of Shakespeare, and the assimilation of Shakespeare into richly traditional theatre practice. The first part deals with key twentieth-century moments in the production of Shakespeare, including the work of world-famous Japanese directors such as Ninagawa, Suzuki and Noda, while the second part considers parallels and differences between Japanese and western theatre over a longer timespan, focusing on the relationship...