Literary studies: plays and playwrights Books

Addressing for the first time Shakespeare's place in counter-cultural cinema, this book examines and theorizes counter-hegemonic, postmodern, and post-punk Shakespeare in late 20th and early 21st century film. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies,...

'Adrian Noble vigorously highlights the extraordinary rhythmic, linguistic patterns Shakespeare gives the speaker. Any actor will find this book invaluable. For any student of Shakespeare it should be essential.' (From the Foreword by Ralph Fiennes)'How...

Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot After Brecht

Casual Shakespeare is the first full-length study of the thousands of quotations both in and of Shakespeare's works which represent intertextuality outside of what is conventionally appreciated as literary value. Drawing on the insights...

In Canada, adaptation is a national mode of survival, but it is also a way to create radical change. Throughout history, Canadians have been inheritors and adaptors: of political systems, stories, and customs from the old world and the new. More than...

This book argues that Shakespeare was permanently preoccupied with the brutality, corruption, and ultimate groundlessness of the political order of his state, and that the impact of original Tudor censorship, supplemented by the relatively depoliticizing...

In this new monograph, Claire Hansen demonstrates how Shakespeare can be understood as a complex system, and how complexity theory can provide compelling and original readings of Shakespeare's plays. The book utilises complexity theory to illuminate...

This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically crucial phenomenon in Shakespeare's work with ramifications for contemporary thought and practice. Drawing a multifaceted picture of Shakespeare's scenes of hospitality-with their...

This volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies today: memory and sexuality. The contributors show that not only Shakespeare but also a broad range of his contemporaries were deeply interested in how memory and sexuality interact...

Presentist Shakespeares is the first extended study of the principles and practice of 'presentism', a critical movement that takes account of the never-ending dialogue between past and present.In this bold and consistently thought-provoking collection of...

Speaking to readers in a voice that is adventurous rather than authoritative, innovative rather than institutional and speculative rather than orthodox, Linda Charnes' provocative study of Shakespeare's legacy in contemporary American and British...

With its many rites of initiation (religious, educational, professional or sexual), Elizabethan and Jacobean education emphasized both imitation and discovery in a struggle to bring population to a minimal literacy, while more demanding techniques were...

In this timely study, Puga compares contemporary Southern Cone playwrights and their aesthetic strategies for subverting ideologies of dictatorship; in the process, she traces the shaping of a resistant identity in memory, its direct expression...

Focusing on plays (Richard II, Henry V, and Hamlet) which appear prominently in the writing of the Irish nationalist movement of the early twentieth century, this study explores how Irish writers such as Sean O'Casey, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, G. B...

This study explores the relationship between performances of Shakespeare's plays and the ways in which they engage with traumatic events and histories. It investigates the ethical and political implications of attempts to represent trauma in performance,...

This is the first book to explore the scope for reading Shakespeare spiritually in the light of contemporary theory and current world events.

Demystifying and contextualising Shakespeare for the twenty-first century, this book offers both an introduction to the subject for beginners as well as an invaluable resource for more experienced Shakespeareans. In this friendly, structured guide,...

The 'Sound of Shakespeare' reveals the surprising extent to which Shakespeare's art is informed by the various attitudes, beliefs, practices and discourses that pertained to sound and hearing in his culture. In this engaging study, Wes Folkerth develops...

This book explores the ways in which the early modern hobby-horse featured in different productions of popular culture between 1580s-1630s. The book will appeal to those with interest in early modern drama and theatre, dramaturgy, popular culture,...

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance investigates the works of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists from within the context of the European Renaissance and, more specifically, from within the context of Italian cultural, dramatic, and literary...

Contending that criticism of Marlowe's plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the...

'What's in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.' So says Juliet in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet but, originally published in 1978, Murray Levith shows just how wrong Juliet was.Shakespeare was extremely...

The potential duality of human character and its capacity for dissembling was a source of fascination to the Elizabethan dramatists. Where many of them used the Machiavellian picture to draw one fair-faced scheming villain after another, Shakespeare...

Returning to Shakespeare addresses two broad areas of Shakespeare criticism: the unity of form and meaning, and the history of the plays' reception. Originally published in 1989, the collection represents the best of Brian Vickers' work from the previous...

For its eighteenth volume, The Shakespearean International Yearbook surveys the present state of Shakespeare studies, addressing issues that are fundamental to our interpretive encounter with Shakespeare's work and his time, across the whole spectrum of...

Is modernity synonymous with progress? Did the Renaissance really break with the cyclical, agrarian time of the Middle Ages, inaugurating a new concept of irreversible time in a secular culture defined by development? How does methodology affect...

This is a collection of original essays about how Shakespeare and how his plays are increasingly being used as a means of furthering literacy, language arts, creative and dramatic learning for children in and out of the classroom. It is divided into...

This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The...

This book restores the rich tradition of the Sibyls to the position of prominence they once held in the culture and society of the English Renaissance. The sibyls - figures from classical antiquity - played important roles in literature, scholarship and...

This title presents new evidence about the ways in which English Renaissance dramatists composed their plays and the degree to which they participated in the dissemination of their texts to theatrical audiences.

An interdisciplinary exploration of white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s.

This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out...

What is the role of disgust or revulsion in early modern English literature? How did early modern English subjects experience revulsion and how did writers represent it in poetry, plays, and prose? What does it mean when literature instructs, delights,...

Why do Shakespeare and the English Bible seem to have an inherent relationship with each other? How have these two monumental traditions in the history of the book functioned as mutually reinforcing sources of cultural authority? How do material books...

Looking at European drama through an ecological lens, this book chronicles nature and the environment as primary topics in major plays from ancient to recent times. Cless focuses on the few, yet well-known plays in which nature is at stake in the action...

This volume explores Shakespeare's interest in pity, an emotion that serves as an important catalyst for action within the plays, even as it generates one of the audience's most common responses to tragic drama in the theater.

This book argues that Shakespeare and various cultures of celebrity have enjoyed a ceaselessly adaptive, symbiotic relationship since the final decade of the sixteenth century, through which each entity has contributed to the vitality and adaptability of...

Winner of two Obie Awards, a New York Drama Critics Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, David Mamet is widely considered to be one of the most prolific and powerful voices in contemporary American theater. A seminal figure whose reputation as an innovative...

A surprisingly large number of women writers, directors, and performers have created works that talk back to Shakespeare, or to most earlier and more traditional interpretations of his plays, in the late 20th century. For example, Jane Smiley's A...

Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares is a savvy look at the wide range of adaptations, spin-offs, and citations of Shakespeare's plays in 1990s popular culture. What does it say about our culture when Shakespearean references turn up in television episodes of The...

Ibsen's Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy argues that in his late plays, Ibsen struggled with and finally repudiated the Aristotelian ideas of reality and change that held sway over the earlier part of his career, and more generally over nineteenth...

"A raunchy memoir revealing a visceral connection to the Bard."--Kirkus Reviews

This edition first published in 1960.This book discusses the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration in the plays of Edward III, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles and the lost Cardenio. It includes chapters on the dramatic value of the plays irrespective of...