Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing presents a battle of the sexes in more ways than one: as both a lightning-fast skirmish of wits between two famously disputatious lovers, and a near-deadly conflict built on conventions of gender and male rivalry.

Claire McEachern's new introduction brings this best-seller right up to date, analysing recent developments in criticism and the latest productions of this comedy.

Much Ado About Nothing presents a battle of the sexes in more ways than one: as both a lightning-fast skirmish of wits between two famously disputatious lovers, and a near-deadly conflict built on conventions of gender and male rivalry.

Claire McEachern's new introduction brings this best-seller right up to date, analysing recent developments in criticism and the latest productions of this comedy.

Uniquely, this guide analyses the play's critical and performance history and recent criticism, as well as including five essays offering radically new paths for contemporary interpretation.

The subject matter of these essays is rich and diverse, ranging across the play's philosophical identification of sexual love with self-realization, the hermeneutic implications of an editor's textual choices, the minor characters of the play in relation to Renaissance performance traditions, Romeo and Juliet in opera and ballet, and the play's Italian sources and afterlives.

The...

Human identities unravel under the light of the Midsummer moon . . .

Shakespeare's popular comedy probes both the light and the dark side of desire, as unseen beings manipulate individual perceptions in the forest beyond the civilized world. Andrew Bretz's thought-provoking introduction to the play reminds us of the early modern concept of fairies: far from the ethereal creatures of the Victorian imagination, we see them here as amoral, energetic, and dangerous.

While fairies may have come and gone in the course of 150 years of Canadian productions of A Midsummer...

Reading Antony and Cleopatra is particularly challenging because of Shakespeare's masterful embodiment of Rome and Egypt's contrasting worlds in language, structure, and characterization.
Instead of seeing the interaction of Roman and Egyptian perspectives in Antony and Cleopatra as a type of double image of reality that changes as one moves from one location to another, students often find themselves compelled to pick sides. The more romantic opt for Cleopatra as the most sympathetic character, while the pragmatists dismiss her lifestyle as self-indulgent. The central challenge...