This lively and provocative study offers a radical reappraisal of a century of Shakespearean theatre. Topics addressed include modernist Shakespearean performance's relation with psychoanalysis, the hidden gender dynamics of the open stage movement, and the appropriation of Shakespeare himself as a dramatic fiction and theatrical icon.

This anthology of four Elizabethan and Jacobean comedies (George Peele's The Old Wives Tale, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, Philip Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday) offers fully modernised and annotated texts and demonstrates the range and variety of English Renaissance comedy. The general introduction surveys the theory and practice of early modern comedy in its time and ours, and each play is prefaced by a brief introduction addressing issues of authorship, theatrical provenance and subsequent performance...

This Companion explores the remarkable variety of forms that Shakespeare's life and works have taken over the course of four centuries, ranging from the early modern theatrical marketplace to the age of mass media, and including stage and screen performance, music and the visual arts, the television serial and popular prose fiction. The book asks what happens when Shakespeare is popularized, and when the popular is Shakespeareanized; it queries the factors that determine the definitions of and boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate, the canonical and the authorized and the...

This Companion explores the remarkable variety of forms that Shakespeare's life and works have taken over the course of four centuries, ranging from the early modern theatrical marketplace to the age of mass media, and including stage and screen performance, music and the visual arts, the television serial and popular prose fiction. The book asks what happens when Shakespeare is popularized, and when the popular is Shakespeareanized; it queries the factors that determine the definitions of and boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate, the canonical and the authorized and the...

William Shakespeare is one of the most widely studied and culturally significant writers of all time, his language interwoven through popular reference and imaginings of the Western canon. This title introduces Shakespeare's life, works, and his plays, considering issues of historical context, performance history, and contemporary criticism.

This 2007 collection offered the first definitive study of a surprisingly underdeveloped area of scholarly investigation, namely the relationship between Shakespeare, children and childhood from Shakespeare's time to the present. It offers a thorough mapping of the domain in which Shakespearean childhoods need to be studied, in order to show how studying Shakespearean childhoods makes significant contributions both to Shakespearean scholarship, and to the history of childhood and its representations. The book is divided into two sections, each with a substantial introduction outlining...

This text traces the changing theatrical and cultural identity of the History plays in the context of postwar social and political conflict. RSC's commitment to relevance has fostered close relationships between Shakespearean criticism and performance, and between the theatre and its audiences.