The Tempest is one of the most suggestive, yet most elusive of all Shakespeare's plays, and has provoked a wide range of critical interpretations. It is a magical romance, yet deeply and problematically embedded in seventeenth-century debates about authority and power. In this updated edition, David Lindley has thoroughly revised the introduction and reading list to take account of the latest directions in criticism and performance. Including a new section on casting in recent productions, Lindley's introduction explores the complex questions this raises about colonization, racial and gender...

This unique and comprehensive study examines how music affects Shakespeare's plays and addresses the ways in which contemporary audiences responded to it. David Lindley sets the musical scene of Early Modern England, establishing the kinds of music heard in the streets, the alehouses, private residences and the theatres of the period and outlining the period's theoretical understanding of music. Focusing throughout on the plays as theatrical performances, this work analyzes the ways Shakespeare explores and exploits the conflicting perceptions of music at the time and its dramatic and...

The Tempest is a strange and elusive play; which critics have interpreted in very different ways: as a drama of forgiveness and reconciliation, as an exploration of the limits of theatrical art, or as a play complicit with colonial exploitation. Prospero's island is a fearful yet enchanting place; a place suffused with music, and its storm, disappearing banquet and elaborate betrothal masque demand imaginative stagecraft. Stratford productions have steered their way through the play's complex, even contradictory potential, in fascinatingly varied fashion, and Daivd Lindley explores that...

Music permeates Shakespeare's plays. This comprehensive study explores the variety of its theatrical functions, situating them in the context of the Early Modern period's understanding of music.From the trumpet calls which animate the battle scenes of the histories and tragedies to the songs which inflect the moods of the comedies and romances, Shakespeare experiments throughout his career with music's potential to contribute to the effect of his dramas. David Lindley sets the musical scene of Shakespeare's England, outlining the period's theoretical understanding of music and discussing the...

The Song of Myself, whose title takes its cue from Walt Whitman's celebration of the self, Song of Myself, is a modern, free-flowing verse rendition of the classic Sanskrit text, The Bhagavad Gita. It provides a fresh reading of a much translated work that has become overlaid with both Eastern and Western ideas of spirituality which have obscured, and sometimes distorted, the central teaching: to know what the self is, what action is and what non-action is. In this new translation the author has sought to make those ideas clear through a readable verse translation that does not sacrifice...