Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> Shakespeare

Timon of Athens has struck many readers as rough and unpolished, perhaps even unfinished, though to others it has appeared as Shakespeare's most profound tragic allegory. Described by Coleridge as "the stillborn twin of King Lear," the play has nevertheless proved brilliantly effective in performance over the past thirty or forty years.

This edition accepts and contributes to the growing scholarly consensus that the play is not Shakespeare's solo work, but is the result of his collaboration with Thomas Middleton, who wrote about a third of it. The editors offer an...

Distinguished editor T.W. Craik makes an independent and balanced examination of the many textual problems of Henry V, providing many new emendations. He begins his illustrated introduction with a commentary on the date and sources of the play, before taking up the problem of the Quarto and Folio texts; in Craik's view, the Quarto texts are evolving and incomplete versions of the play, with the First Folio best representing what was written by Shakespeare himself and performed to the public. Following his own substantial critical analysis King Henry V, the editor surveys...

The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare's only thoroughly English comedy, created an archetypal literary figure in the shape of the devious, irrepressible John Falstaff. This edition celebrates the play as a joyous exploration of language, but also places elements of its plot firmly in a continental, specifically Italian, tradition of romantic comedy.

In the introduction, Melchiori draws out the complexities of Merry Wives as a multi-plot play, taking a fresh and challenging look at both textual and dating issues and examining the play's comic elements and influences....

This Roman play is one of Shakespeare's last tragedies, best known for its political and military themes. Its hero, Coriolanus, is a proud General who does not hesitate to show his arrogant and outspoken contempt of the Roman rabble. The Tribunes banish him and he raises an army to take his revenge on Rome. He finally concedes to the pleas of his mother to spare the city and leaves only to be publicly killed by his former allies.

Peter Holland is a former Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and President of the Shakespeare Association of America. He is a...

David Scott Kastan lucidly explores the remarkable richness and the ambitious design of King Henry IV Part 1 and shows how these complicate any easy sense of what kind of play it is. Conventionally regarded as a history play, much of it is in fact conspicuously invented fiction, and Kastan argues that the non-historical, comic plot does not simply parody the historical action but by its existence raises questions about the very nature of history. The full and engaging introduction devotes extensive discussion to the play's language, indicating how its insistent economic vocabulary...

This edition of Sir Thomas More is the first to bring the play into the context of a major Shakespeare series, to provide a substantial critical analysis, and to offer a comprehensive modern stage history. The introduction deals with issues such as the strange involvement of the anti-Catholic spy-hunter Anthony Munday as chief dramatist, the place of Sir Thomas More as a Catholic martyr in Protestant late Elizabethan culture, and the play's representation of a multi-cultural London. The text itself, supported by a searching and detailed commentary, adopts a distinctive presentation...

Why would Elizabethan audiences find Shakespeare's Porter in Macbeth so funny? And what exactly is meant by the name the 'Weird' Sisters? Jonathan Hope, in a comprehensive and fascinating study, looks at how the concept of words meant something entirely different to Elizabethan audiences than they do to us today. In Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance, he traces the ideas about language that separate us from Shakespeare.

Our understanding of 'words', and how they get their meanings, based on a stable spelling system and dictionary...

Medieval culture pervaded Shakespeare's life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatization of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he...