This is a comprehensive critical guide to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. This new edition has been comprehensively revised in light of the latest scholarly and critical research and with a fully updated bibliography. It includes a full account of Chaucer's imaginative deployment of his sources, and an extended survey of this narrative poem's innovative combination of a range of generic identities. The chapters explain how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem's symme...

The Arden Shakespeare is the established edition of Shakespeare's work. Justly celebrated for its authoritative scholarship and invaluable commentary, Arden editions guide you to a richer understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare's plays. This edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream provides a clear and authoritative text, detailed notes and commentary on the same page as the text and a full introduction discussing the critical and historical background to the play. The editor br...

The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer is an extensively revised version of the first edition, which has become a classic in the field. This new volume responds to the success of the first edition and to recent debates in Chaucer Studies. Important material has been updated, and new contributions have been commissioned to take into account recent trends in literary theory as well as in studies of Chaucer's works. New chapters cover the literary inheritance traceable in his works to French and ...

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry contains thirty-eight original essays written by leading Shakespeareans around the world. Collectively, these essays seek to return readers to a revivified understanding of Shakespeare's verbal artistry in both the poems and the drama. The volume understands poetry to be not just a formal category designating a particular literary genre but to be inclusive of the dramatic verse as well, and of Shakespeare's influence as a poet on later g...

This book reads tragedy as a genre in which the protagonist is estranged from the world around him, and, displaced in time, space, and language, comes to inhabit a milieu which is no longer shared by other characters. This alienation from others also entails a decomposition of the integrity of the individual, which is often seen in tragedy's uncertainty about the protagonists' autonomy: do they act, or do the gods act through them? Where are the boundaries of the self, and the boundaries o...

How original was Shakespeare and how was Shakespeare original? This lucid, innovative book sets about answering these questions by putting them in historical context and investigating how the dramatist worked with his sources: plays, poems, chronicles and prose romances. Shakespeare's Originality unlocks its topic with rewarding precision and flair, showing through a series of case studies that range across the output—from the mature comedies to the great tragedies, from Richa...

This tragi-comedy is one of the plays we know Shakespeare worked with a collaborator on -- John Fletcher -- and is based on Chaucer's Knight's Tale. This revised edition includes a new introductory essay bringing the edition up-to-date in terms of both the play's performance and critical history, and in particular with current thinking about the nature of Shakespeare's collaboration with other playwrights. As scholars have begun to discover more about this aspect of his career, in...

Shakespeare's Books contains nearly 200 entries covering the full range of literature Shakespeare was acquainted with, including classical, historical, religious and contemporary works. The dictionary covers works whose importance to Shakespeare has emerged more clearly in recent years due to new research, as well as explaining current thinking on long-recognized sources such as Plutarch, Ovid, Holinshed, Ariosto and Montaigne. Entries for all major sources include surveys of the ...

Although best known for his plays, William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was also a poet who achieved extraordinary depth and variety in only a few key works. This edition of his poetry provides detailed notes, commentary and appendices resulting in an academically thorough and equally accessible edition to Shakespeare’s poetry.The editors present his non-dramatic poems in the chronological order of their print publication: the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape...

In "Historical Manual of English Prosody," George Saintsbury meticulously charts the evolution of English verse forms, employing a clear and accessible style that balances scholarly rigor with a pedagogical approach. The text delves into the rhythmic and metric structures that underlie English poetry, tracing their development from Old English through to the Victorian era. Saintsbury's adept use of examples, alongside his systematic exposition of poetic rules, positions this work as a valu...

Of interest to interdisciplinary historians as well as those in various other fields, this book presents the first publication of 14 poems ranging from 12 to 3,000 lines. The poems are printed in the chronological order of their composition, from Elizabethan to Augustan times, but nine of them are verse translations of works from earlier periods in the development of alchemy. Each has a textual and historical introduction and explanatory note by the Editor. Renaissance alchemy is acknowled...

This is the first collection of critical essays devoted exclusively to Shakespeare's first published work, his long narrative poem Venus and Adonis which established his reputation as the literary darling of London and the heir of Ovid. Particularly important is the book's coverage of the little-known presence of Venus and Adonis on stage.A s