Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Shakespeare

King Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play, revealing it as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation which sees English life since Henry VIII's day as a series of bewildering changes in national and personal allegiance and represents 'history' as the product of varied and contradictory testimony. McMullan makes a powerful claim for the rehabilitation of Henry...

King Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play, revealing it as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation which sees English life since Henry VIII's day as a series of bewildering changes in national and personal allegiance and represents "history" as the product of varied and contradictory testimony. McMullan makes a powerful claim for the rehabilitation of...

This book sets Shakespeare in the religious context of his times, presenting a balanced, up-to-date account of current biographical and critical debates, and addressing the fascinating, understudied topic of how Shakespeare's writing was perceived by literary contemporaries - both Catholic and Protestant -- whose priorities were more obviously religious than his own. It advances new readings of several plays, especially Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale; these draw in many cases on new and under-exploited contemporary analogues, ranging from conversion narratives, books of devotion...

Readers of Shakespeare's language, from the playhouse to the classroom, have long been aware of his peculiar interest in legal words and concepts - Richard II's two bodies, Hamlet's quiddities and quillets, Pandarus' peine forte et dure. In this new introductory study, Andrew Zurcher takes a fresh, historically sensitive look at Shakespeare's meticulous resort to legal language, texts, concepts, and arguments in a range of plays and poems. Following a preface that situates Shakespeare's life within the various legal communities of his Stratford and London periods, Zurcher...

This text is designed as a supplement to the Arden Hamlet and refers to the Introduction and Appendices of that volume for a full discussion of dating, sources, textual matters, afterlife, and all other topics usually covered in an Arden edition. In order to make use of this volume, the reader will need access to the Arden Hamlet (but not vice versa).

This volume gives readers the First Quarto text of 1603 and the Folio Text of 1623, modernized and edited to the usual Arden standard. As a companion to the Second Quarto volume, the Arden Hamlet, it will be of...

Analysing six Greek tragedies - the Orestes triology, Ajax, Antigone and Philoctetes - and Hamlet, this book also contains a chapter on the Greek and the Elizabethan dramatic forms and one on religious drama. This is an important work from an author respected for a constructive and sensitive quality of criticism.

The originality, vitality and variety of Shakespeare's comedies do not suggest a writer at ease with a formula which works to his own satisfaction and the pleasure of his audience; against first impressions they suggest an artist seeking to express an idea which is always eluding a completely developed presentation. The second edition of this book contains an extensive new chapter on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

Spectral Shakespeares is an illuminating exploration of experimental adaptations of Shakespeare on film, TV, and the web. Drawing on adaptation studies, media theory, and Derrida's work, the "Shakespeare" that emerges from these adaptations is a fragmentary and mediatized presence that leaves a mark on our contemporary mediascape.