Seeing Shakespeare’s Style offers new ways for readers to perceive Shakespeare and, by extension, literary texts generally. Organized as a series of studies of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, poetry, and prose, it looks at the inner functioning of language and form in works from all phases of this writer’s career. Because the very concept of literary style has dropped out of so many of our conversations about writing, we need new ways to understand how words, phrases, speeches, and...

Extreme violence scarred the early modern period. Contemporary commentators grappled to find language to categorize the massacres, genocides, assassinations, enslavements, sacks, rapes, riots and regicides that characterized the period. Some used 'outrages', others 'cruelties', but, significantly, the term 'atrocity' that we use today gained the most currency.Atrocity and Early Modern Drama intervenes in the broad field of violence and early modern drama by placing acts of...

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 dramatic beginnings to reveal the crucial cultural functions performed by the prologue in Elizabethan England. While its most basic task is to seize the attention of a noisy audience, the prologue's more significant threshold position is used t...

Money, magic and the theatre were powerful forces in early modern England. Money was acquiring an independent, efficacious agency, as the growth of usury allowed financial signs to reproduce without human intervention. Magic was coming to seem Satanic, as the manipulation of magical signs to performative purposes was criminalized in the great 'witch craze.' And the commercial, public theatre was emerging – to great controversy – as the perfect medium to display, analyse and evaluate the ne...

Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked, marginalized as footnotes or generalized into stereotypes. Materializing the East in Early Modern English Dramafocuses on the multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical space to represent the concept of the East in drama.This volume re-examines the (mis)repr...

Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy is quoted more often than any other passage in Shakespeare. It is arguably the most famous speech in the Western world - though few of us can remember much about it. This book carefully unpacks the individual words, phrases and sentences of Hamlet's soliloquy in order to reveal how and why it has achieved its remarkable hold on our culture. Hamlet's speech asks us to ask some of the most serious questions there are regarding knowledge and existence. ...

To interrupt, both on stage and off, is to wrest power. From the Ghost's appearance in Hamlet to Celia's frightful speech in Volpone, interruptions are an overlooked linguistic and dramatic form that delineates the balance of power within a scene. This book analyses interruptions as a specific form in dramatic literature, arguing that these everyday occurrences, when transformed into aesthetic phenomena, reveal illuminating connections: between characters, between actor a...

Staging Britain's Past is the first study of the early modern performance of Britain's pre-Roman history. The mythic history of the founding of Britain by the Trojan exile Brute and the subsequent reign of his descendants was performed through texts such as Norton and Sackville's Gorboduc, Shakespeare's King Lear and Cymbeline, as well as civic pageants, court masques and royal entries such as Elizabeth I's 1578 entry to Norwich. Gilchrist argues for the...

The impetus for this Approaches to Teaching volume on The Taming of the Shrew grew from the editors' desire to discover why a play notorious for its controversial exploration of conflicts between men and women and the challenges of marriage is enduringly popular in the classroom, in the performing arts, and in scholarship. The result is a volume that offers practical advice to teachers on editions and teaching resources in part 1, "Materials," while illuminating how the play's subtle and c...