Literary studies: plays and playwrights Books

First published in 1972. Shakespeare's God investigates whether a religious interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedies is possible. The study places Christianity's commentary on the human condition side by side with what tragedy reveals about it. This...

Despite the volume of work Shakespeare produced, surprisingly few of his plays directly concern money and the economic mindset. Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative examines the five plays that do address monetary issues (The Comedy of Errors, The...

This fascinating title, first published in 1922, presents a detailed overview of the life and works of Shakespeare. Alden first considers Shakespeare's Elizabethan context, alongside exploring the Classical and Italian foundations, political theories,...

First published in 1990, this title explores the nature of the interaction between Shakespeare and American culture. Shakespeare stands at the center of an elaborate institutional reality, closely tied to both cultural and ideological production. His...

Fifty Modern and Contemporary and Dramatists is a critical introduction to the work of some of the most important and influential playwrights from the 1950s to the present day. The figures chosen are among the most widely studied by students of drama,...

Elizabethan Popular Theatre surveys the Golden Age of English popular theatre: the 1590s, the age of Marlowe and the young Shakespeare. The book describes the staging practices, performance conditions and acting techniques of the period, focusing on five...

Marxist Shakespeares uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to look at Shakespeare's plays afresh. The book offers new insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeare's representations of class and gender emerged, and...

Every generation develops its own approach to tragedy, attitudes successively influenced by such classic works as A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy and the studies in interpretation by G. Wilson Knight. A comprehensive new book on the subject by an...

Shakespeare's last plays, the tragicomic Romances, are notoriously strange plays, riddled with fabulous events and incredible coincidences, magic and dream. These features have sometimes been interpreted as the carelessness of an of an aging dramatist...

In the course of some research into the musical element in English poetry, Dr Wilson read the work of the Elizabethan sonneteers chronologically and was struck by a suspicion that Shakespeare's sonnets were parodies. Later she carried out a more thorough...

What is it that makes Shakespeare's problem plays problematic? Many critics have sought for the underlying vision or message of these puzzling and disturbing dramas. Originally published in 1987, the key to Viv Thomas's new synthesis of the plays is the...

This authoritative and comprehensive collection of new essays explores the social, political, and economic pressures under which the playing companies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries operated.

The systematic practice of non-traditional or "colorblind" casting began with Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1950s. Although colorblind casting has been practiced for half a century now, it still inspires vehement controversy and...

In this book, renowned Renaissance drama critic Arthur F. Kinney argues that Shakespeare's method of composing plays through networks of meanings can be seen as a harbinger of today's information technology. Drawing upon hypertext and cognitive...

This cutting-edge collection of essays offers provocative studies of ancient history, literature, gender identifications and roles, and subsequent interpretations of the republican and imperial Roman past. The prose and poetry of Cicero and Petronius,...

In this book, McMahon considers Early Modern revenge plays from a political science perspective, paying particular attention to the construction of family and state institutions. Plays set for close study are The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Revenger's...

First published in 1927.The main argument in this book is that Shakespeare's work is of such intense vitality that it is always modern and that although historical associations may have grown up round it, considerations of the works that grew out of it,...

First published in 1972.The imagery of field sports - of hawking, hunting, shooting and fishing - and the associated imagery of warfare are a striking feature in Shakespeare's plays. The Living Image examines the nature of this imagery, considering it...

Based on extensive archival research, this study offers an entirely new perspective on popular Shakespeare reception by focusing on articles published in Victorian periodicals. Shakespeare had already reached the apex of British culture in the...

The book looks at how people, things, and new forms of knowledge created "publics" in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. The focus is on what the authors call "making publics" - the active creation of new...

First published in 1968. This re-issues the revised edition of 1979. The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose is the first detailed study of the use of prose in the plays. It begins by defining the different dramatic and emotional functions which Shakespeare...

First published in 1986.This collection of essays focuses on the ways in which our society 'processes' Shakespeare and the purposes for which this seems to be done. The case is made by examining the work of four highly influential critics: A C Bradley,...

First published in 1977. This book ascertains what sources Shakespeare used for the plots of his plays and discusses the use he made of them; and secondly illustrates how his general reading is woven into the texture of his work. Few Elizabethan...

This collection explores the consequences of accentism-an under-researched issue that intersects with racism and classism-in the Shakespeare industry across languages and cultures, past and present. It adopts a transmedia and transhistorical approach to...

Why, we might ask, are Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets regarded near universally as the greatest love sonnets in English literature or any literature? And what makes Romeo and Juliet the most famous play about star-crossed lovers? What accounts for the...

The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts - and ghost writing. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written. Ghosts take the form of...

Shakespeare, the Renaissance and Empire presents Shakespeare as both a local and global writer, investigating Shakespeare's trans-cultural writing through the interrelations and interactions of binaries including theory and practice, past and present,...

Comedy Matters traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind's darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be...

Barbeau reconstructs the system of religion that Coleridge develops in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840). Coleridge's late system links four sources of divinity-the Bible, the traditions of the church, the interior work of the Spirit, and the...

Shakespeare and Masculinity in Southern Fiction advances the idea that American, Southern, white, planter class authors have appropriated models and modes of masculinity from William Shakespeare. Keener traces the history of this appropriation and its...

The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity offers the first sustained examination of fatness in the early modern period. As Levy-Navarro notes, bodily perceptions have evolved that value the thin body as they mark and stigmatize the fat one...

This book argues that in the course of grappling with skepticism, Shakespeare and Donne revolutionize the art of memory and discover an art of doubt. Topics important to students of Renaissance literature-such as mimesis, exemplarity, pastoral and...

This exciting new title investigates the explosion of Shakespeare films during the 1990s and beyond. It reflects upon the contexts determining the production of different cinematic ventures, and it provides an innovative understanding of Shakespeare's...

Focusing on how citizens of early modern England tried to locate themselves and their nation through geography and travel writing, Monica Matei-Chesnoiu explores theatrical representations of Western European space and ethnography. Geographic discourses...

Shakespeare scholars and cultural theorists critically investigate the relationship between early modern culture and contemporary political and technological changes concerning the idea of the "human." The volume covers the tragedies King Lear and Hamlet...

What are Shakespeare's uses of the conceptual space of conflict? And what has been the role played by principles, patterns and situations of conflict in the construction of the Shakespeare myth, and in its European and then global spread? This collection...

Each with their own logic, fictional and historical worlds provide different ways to view reality. This book is about those worlds, past and present, and it concentrates on literature and history as two of the keys to culture. Underneath a dazzling...

An investigation of the many ways that Shakespeare uses the defiant voice of the shrew. Kamaralli explores how modern performance practice negotiates the possibilities for staging these characters who refuse to conform to standards of acceptable...

Long before the economist Amartya Sen proposed that more than 100 million women were missing-lost to disease or neglect, kidnapping or forced marriage, denied the economic and political security of wages or membership in a larger social order-Shakespeare...

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this lavishly illustrated book, one of the most important and influential scholars of the Renaissance stage brings together essays that have changed the way we think about the age of Shakespeare. His subjects are varied and interconnected: the...

Shakespeare continues to articulate the central problems of our intellectual inheritance. The plays of a Renaissance playwright still seem to be fundamental to our understanding and experience of modernity.Key philosophical questions concerning value,...

Shakespeare's Law is a critical overview of law and legal issues within the life, career, and works of William Shakespeare as well as those that arise from the endless array of activities that happen today in the name of Shakespeare. Mark...