Considering the close associations of service and patronage with childhood or youth, marriage and friendship, Judith Weil sheds new light on social practice and dramatic action in Shakespeare's plays. Approached as dynamic explorations of a familiar custom, the plays demonstrate a surprising consciousness of obligations, and fascination with how dependants actively affect each other. Weil also emphasizes the linguistic ambiguities created by service relationships. The book includes detailed studies of dramatic sequences in twelve plays, including Hamlet, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and...

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of The First Part of King Henry IV offers a theatrical perspective on the origins of Shakespeare's play and the history of its interpretation. In their introduction the editors, Herbert and Judith Weil, clarify the play's de-centred dramatic structure and call...

Mrs Weil challenges two widely accepted views of Marlowe. He is not the poet and dramatist of heroic energy, 'daring God out of heaven' with his outrageous heroes. Nor is he a dogmatic moralist. Instead, he belongs to Merlin's race, as his contemporary Robert Greene suggested. An ironic writer of riddling plays, he does not endorse his characters, but cunningly manipulates our responses to them. Like Erasmus or Rabelais, he uses the knowledge of his audience in a variety of surprising ways. This approach is carefully argued for each play. The reader perhaps initially sceptical will find...