Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Shakespeare

In this revisionist history of comic characterization, Karen Newman argues that, contrary to received opinion, Shakespeare was not the first comic dramatist to create self-conscious characters who seem 'lifelike' or 'realistic'. His comic practice is firmly set within a comic tradition which stretches from Plautus and Menander to playwrights of the Italian Renaissance.

The title of this collection, Profiling Shakespeare, is meant strongly in its double sense. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought by biographers from his time to our own. They also show the effects, the ephemera, the clues and cues, welcome and unwelcome, out of which Shakespeare's admirers and dedicated scholars have pieced together a vision of the playwright, whether as sage, psychologist, lover, theatrical entrepreneur, or moral authority. This collection brings together classic pieces, hard-to-find chapters, and two new essays....

Many readers first encounter Shakespeare's plays in a book rather than a theater. Yet Shakespeare was through and through a man of the stage. So what do we lose when we leave Shakespeare the practitioner behind, and what do we learn when we think about his plays as dramas to be performed?

David Bevington answers these questions with This Wide and Universal Theater, which explores how Shakespeare's plays were produced both in his own time and in succeeding centuries. Making use of historical documents and the play scripts themselves, Bevington brings Shakespeare's original...

In reshaping Lodge's "Rosalynde" into "As You Like It, " Shakespeare not only undermines the Petrarchan and pastoral traditions of the romance, but also refutes the implicit gender structures upon which such Petrarchanisms are based. In refashioning "The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir" into the tragedy of "King Lear, " Shakespeare does not simply reject the explicit Christian setting and happy ending of "Leir, " but engages and responds to the highly Reformational and Calvinistic assumptions that shape and inform the source play. In rewriting Greene's "Pandosto" into "The Winter's...

• Redraws the boundaries of Shakespeare performance studies.


• Considers performance in a range of media, including in print, in the classroom, in the theatre, in film, on television and video, in multimedia and digital forms.


• Introduces important terms and contemporary areas of enquiry in Shakespeare and performance.


• Raises questions about the...