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Illuminating Shakespeare's complex experimentation with the dramatic genre of history, these twelve essays bring such time-honored critical methods as source study and concentration on genre, imagery and language, theme, and character together with more current techniques based on historiography, the new historicism, feminism, pragmatics, performance history, and perspectivism.
This comprehensive guide to The Comedy of Errors brings together the most significant and authoritative insights on this early Shakepearean comedy. The texts, presented chronologically, represent the best writings on the play - from a 1594 review of a performance at Gray's Inn to contemporary feminist and new historicist interpretations. Important textual analyses by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Bernard Shaw, and Harry Levin, among others, are included with five previously unpublished essays by leading Shakespeare experts.
These essays by leading scholars of early modern attribution, editing, theater, and versification (including Andrew Gurr, Gary Taylor, and Brian Vickers) focus on questions of authorship, authority, and ownership in Marlowe, Peele, Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and others. Some essays take MacDonald P. Jackson's pioneering work in these fields a stage further, by looking at the critical consequences; others develop new methods, principles, or theoretical positions in determining authorship; still others use new data to extend or challenge Jackson's findings. the University of Auckland.
William Shakespeare and 21st-Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership examines problems, challenges, and crises in our contemporary world through the lens of William Shakespeare’s plays, one of the best-known, most admired, and often controversial authors of the last half-millennium.
This study considers the figure of the bastard in the context of analogies of the family and the state in early modern England. The trope of illegitimacy, more than being simply a narrative or character-driven issue, is a vital component in the evolving construction and representation of British national identity in prose and drama of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Through close reading of a range of plays and prose texts, the book offers readers new insight into the semiotics of bastardy and concepts of national identity in early modern England, and reflects on contemporary issues of citizenship and identity. The author examines play texts of the period including Bale's King Johan, Peele's The Troublesome Reign of John, and Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and King Lear in the context of a selection of legal, religious, and polemical texts. In so doing, she illuminates the extent to which the figure of the bastard and, more generally the trope of illegitimacy, existed as a distinct discourse within the wider discursive framework of family and nation.
This volume, published annually, contains essays by critics and cultural historians, as well as reviews of the many books and essays dealing with the cultural history of medieval and early modern England as expressed by and realised in its drama.
Proposes that Troilus was intended for live performance (by Chaucer himself?) and discusses the use of useless (to readers) words and phrases, the different moods of presentation for each book, and the implications for contemporary studies of the work.
This modern-spelling critical edition of a famous and controversial theatrical document from the Elizabethan age shows that Sir Thomas More is the best extant example of the genre of biographical history. Following a radical re-examination of the manuscript, this edition relates step by step to the process by which the play acquired its final form, accounting in the collation and in the rejected or alternative passages at the end of the text for each single word or mark found in the manuscript. Particular attention is devoted to the use of sources not previously identified, most of which are reproduced in the appendices.