In this exciting new introduction to Shakespeare, Catherine Belsey takes traditional tales as a starting point to argue against the cultural materialists who claim Shakespeare's iconic status is no more than an accident of history. Each chapter shows how one of Shakespeare's best-known plays retells with a difference stories familiar both then and now. Belsey goes on to put forward new readings, teasing out the enigmas that constitute these texts and the interpretations they have inspired.

The second edition of this highly successful anthology makes available to the feminist reader a collection of essays which does justice to the range and diversity, as well as to the eloquence and the challenge of recent feminist critical theory and practice. The new, enlarged Feminist Reader includes Toni Morrison's brilliant discussion of a Hemingway short story, Line Pouchard's reading of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness, Marjorie Garber on Elvis and cross-dressing, and Diane Elam on the relation between feminist and postmodernism, in addition to a...

In these essays, collected here for the first time, renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the more familiar plays, she demonstrates the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also draws on the archive. A reading of the Sonnets, written specially for this book, analyses their intricate and ambivalent inscription of desire. Between them, these essays trace the progress of theory in the course of three decades,...

In these essays, collected here for the first time, renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the more familiar plays, she demonstrates the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also draws on the archive. A reading of the Sonnets, written specially for this book, analyses their intricate and ambivalent inscription of desire. Between them, these essays trace the progress of theory in the course of three decades,...

Why is Shakespeare as highly regarded now as he ever has been? This book's answer to this question counters claims that Shakespeare's iconic status is no more than an accident of history. The plays, Belsey argues, entice us into a world we recognize by retelling traditional fairy tales with a difference, each chapter providing a detailed reading.

This collection of contemporary criticism highlights the extent to which recent discussion of Shakespeare on film has drawn upon the theoretical perspectives of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, generating a radical reappraisal of a Shakespearean cinema which has itself experienced a revival in the last decade. Ranging widely across the canon of Shakespeare films, from Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream to Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, the essays address the cultural politics of film adaptation from a variety of angles, offering readings of individual...