Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> Shakespeare

This book ascertains what sources Shakespeare used for the plots of his plays and discusses the use he made of them; and secondly illustrates how his general reading is woven into the texture of his work. Few Elizabethan dramatists took such pains as Shakespeare in the collection of source-material. Frequently the sources were apparently incompatible, but Shakespeare's ability to combine a chronicle play, one or two prose chronicles, two poems and a pastoral romance without any sense of incongruity, was masterly. The plays are examined in approximately...

• Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
  
• Examines each of Shakespeare's plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis.
  
• Volumes...

What do audiences do as they watch a Shakespearean play? What makes them respond in the ways that they do? This book examines a wide range of theatrical productions to explore the practice of being a modern Shakespearean audience. It surveys some of the most influential ideas about spectatorship in contemporary performance studies, and analyses the strategies employed both in the texts themselves and by modern theatre practitioners to position audiences in particular ways.

What do audiences do as they watch a Shakespearean play? What makes them respond in the ways that they do? This book examines a wide range of theatrical productions to explore the practice of being a modern Shakespearean audience. It surveys some of the most influential ideas about spectatorship in contemporary performance studies, and analyses the strategies employed both in the texts themselves and by modern theatre practitioners to position audiences in particular ways.

For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare's plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest...

John Mills spotlights the various ways in which the role of Hamlet has been performed over almost four centuries. He launches this work with the first Hamlet portrayal, that of Richard Burbage, and then, in chronological order, describes and analyzes the Hamlets of the other actors who make up the great tradition of English-language Shakespeare acting. Mills devotes an entire chapter to each actor, focusing on acting style, text interpretation, theatrical and critical influences, popular and critical responses, and more. He offers a scene-by-scene account of the central figure's...

One of a handful of great Shakespearean roles, the part of Richard of Gloucester has maintained its importance from the beginning of its performance history in the late 1690s and has assumed an identity extending even beyond the play. The range of interpretation has been startling, with many actors also taking liberties with the text. Most of the greatest Shakespearean actors have tried the part, though some have carefully avoided it. Successful Richards have had to create an archetype of evil who nonetheless must be comprehended in vivid human terms. Among the most memorable Richards are...

This study analyzes the role of the sentenia (proverb, maxim, adage) in the rhetorical process of invention and, particularly, Shakespeare's use of the proverb as a master theme. The plays have a characteristic structure in which the thematic statement is initiated in the early scenes and then repeated, with variations, throughout. In Hamlet, for instance, the sententia all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity is exemplified and concretized in scene after scene.

Donker demonstrates that Shakespeare was a product of his schooling in Tudor England in which simple...

In Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds, Carole Levin and John Watkins focus on the relationship between the London-based professional theater preeminently associated with William Shakespeare and an unprecedented European experience of geographic, social, and intellectual mobility. Shakespeare's plays bear the marks of exile and exploration, rural depopulation, urban expansion, and shifting mercantile and diplomatic configurations. He fills his plays with characters testing the limits of personal identity: foreigners, usurpers, outcasts, outlaws, scolds, shrews, witches, mercenaries, and...