Literary studies: plays and playwrights Books

Shakespeare’s Philosophy Illustrated – Quaternary Teaching Aids features a series of charts and diagrams in colour throughout its 192 pages. It is organised into four distinct Parts as teaching aids for a Quaternary level of understanding...

In this book, Stone effects a return to gender, after many years of neglect by Twenty-First-Century critics, via a methodology of close reading that foregrounds moments of sexual decentering and disequilibrium within the text and in the interstices of...

This remarkable volume challenges scholars and students to look beyond a dominant European and North American 'metropolitan bank' of Shakespeare knowledge. As well as revealing the potential for a new understanding of Shakespeare's plays, Martin Orkin...

This eye-opening study draws attention to the largely neglected form of the early modern prologue. Reading the prologue in performed as well as printed contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann take us beyond concepts of stability and autonomy in...

The link between psychoanalysis as a mode of interpretation and Shakespeare's works is well known. But rather than merely putting Shakespeare on the couch, Philip Armstrong focuses on the complex and fascinatingly fruitful mutual relationship between...

It is widely acknowledged that the hit franchise Game of Thrones is based on the Wars of the Roses, a bloody fifteenth-century civil war between feuding English families. In this book, Jeffrey R. Wilson shows how that connection was mediated by...

Iconic Spaces looks at Samuel Beckett's mature theatrical work as a displaced theology of the icon. Sandra Wynands rejects conventional existentialist or nihilist interpretations of Beckett's work, arguing instead that beneath the text, in the depths of...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as...

This book is focused in the works of William Shakespeare. However, it is not a history book. It is a book of games inspired in his figure.

In this timely new study, Todd A. Borlik reveals the surprisingly rich potential for the emergent "green" criticism to yield fresh insights into early modern English literature. Deftly avoiding the anachronistic casting of sixteenth- and...

Ibsen's plays rank among those most frequently performed world-wide, rivaled only by Brecht, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and the Greek tragedies. By the time Ibsen died in 1906, his plays had already conquered the theaters of the Western world. Inviting...

That Shakespeare thematized time thoroughly, almost obsessively, in his plays is well established: time is, among other things, a 'devourer' (Love's Labour's Lost), one who can untie knots (Twelfth Night), or, perhaps most famously, simply 'out of joint'...

First published in English in 1961, this reissue relates the problems of form and style to the development of dramatic speech in pre-Shakespearean tragedy. The work offers positive standards by which to assess the development of pre-Shakespearean drama...

First published in 1987. This study removes some of the critical puzzles that Shakespeare's comedies of love have posed in the past. The author shows that what distinguishes the comedies is not their similarity but their variety - the way in which each...

First published in 1985.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'. ...

Readings of Shakespeare were both influenced by and influential in the rise of Gothic forms in literature and culture from the late eighteenth century onwards. Shakespeare's plays are full of ghosts, suspense, fear-inducing moments and cultural anxieties...

'Kidnie's study presents original, sophisticated, and profoundly intelligent answers to important questions.' - Lukas Erne, University of Geneva'This is a fine and productive book, one that will surely draw significant attention and commentary well...

When critical theory met literary studies in the 1970s and '80s, some of the most radical and exciting theoretical work centred on the quasi-sacred figure of Shakespeare. In Alternative Shakespeares, John Drakakis brought...

One of the most intense and painful of our human passions, shame is typically seen in contemporary culture as a disability or a disease to be cured. Shakespeare's ultimately positive portrayal of the emotion challenges this view. Drawing on...

Argument was the basis of Renaissance education; both rhetoric and dialectic permeated early modern humanist culture, including drama. This study approaches Shakespeare's history plays by analyzing the use of argument in the plays and examining the...

In the 1890s, when Henry James tried to achieve fame and financial security by turning to the theater, he was unceremoniously booed off the stage. Since the 1940s and '50s his fiction has nevertheless been consistently interpreted by composers and film...

This dictionary examines previously unnoted puns on the erotic attitudes and practices of the heterosexual and homosexual, the sexual deviant, and the impotent. It includes scatological puns in their usually bawdy contexts and ethnic puns, as sexually...

Eating and drinking—vital to all human beings—were of central importance to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Culinary Shakespeare, the first collection devoted solely to the study of food and drink in Shakespeare’s plays, reframes...

This groundbreaking text examines how artists on stage consciously perform age and aging. From Shakespeare to Beckett, dialogue and stage directions reveal varying understandings of age. Staging Age explores how performers respond to audience...

This volume deconstructs the underlying assumptions behind youth-culture Shakespeare and then analyzes specific "texts," from 10 Things I Hate about You to The Bomb-itty of Errors, from The Sandman to Reviving Ophelia. The authors explore the...

Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality is a powerful reassessment of cultural materialism as a way of understanding textuality, history and culture, by one of the founding figures of this critical movement. Alan Sinfield examines cultural materialism both as...

Forgiving the Gift challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges, negotiations, and circulations. Lawrence reads plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as informed by an early modern belief in the possibility and even...

Spectral Shakespeares is an illuminating exploration of recent, experimental adaptations of Shakespeare on film, TV, and the web. Drawing on adaptation studies and media theory as well as Jacques Derrida's work, this book argues that these adaptations...

This ground-breaking collection of essays focuses on how theatre, dance, and other forms of performance are helping to transform our ecological values. Leading scholars and practitioners explore the ways that familiar and new works of theatre and dance...

In 1601, at the height of his career, Shakespeare wrote a 67-line untitled elegy-now frequently known as "The Phoenix and Turtle"-for inclusion, along with verse by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman, in a collection called Diverse Poetical...

The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries continue to inspire fresh interpretations in every genre and medium. Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance offers new perspectives on the ways in...

Early modern drama is steeped in biblical language, imagery and stories. This collection examines the pervasive presence of scripture on the early modern stage. Exploring plays by writers such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, and Webster, the...

This original and scholarly work uses three detailed case studies of plays - Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear and Cymbeline - to cast light on the ways in which early modern writers used metaphor to explore how identities emerge from the...

"A thorough and insightful analysis of Shakespeare's play. A must-read for professionals and students alike." - Explore Authors MagazineProfessional theatre director and educator, Stephen Byk uses methods specifically designed and developed by theatre...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as...