We celebrate Shakespeare as a creator of plays and poems, characters and ideas, words and worlds. But so too, in the four centuries since his death in 1616, have thinkers, writers, artists and performers recreated him. Readers of this book are invited to explore Shakespeare's afterlife on the stage and on the screen, in poetry, fiction, music and dance, as well as in cultural and intellectual life. A series of concise introductory essays are here combined with personal reflections by promi...

This book's underlying claim is that English Renaissance tragedy addresses live issues in the experience of readers and spectators today: it is not a genre to be studied only for aesthetic or “heritage” reasons. The book considers the way in which tragedy in general, and English Renaissance tragedy in particular, addresses ideas of freedom, understood both from an individual and a sociopolitical perspective. Tragedy since the Greeks has addressed the constraints and necessities to which hu...

Providing a provocative and original perspective on Shakespeare, Peter Holbrook argues that Shakespeare is an author friendly to such essentially modern and unruly notions as individuality, freedom, self-realization and authenticity. These expressive values vivify Shakespeare's own writing; they also form a continuous, and a central, part of the Shakespearean tradition. Engaging with the theme of the individual will in specific plays and poems, and examining a range of libertarian-minded s...

A storm at sea. A deserted island. A story of magic and redemption. The Tempest by William Shakespeare is one of Shakespeare's most imaginative and symbolic plays—blending romance, fantasy, and drama into a timeless theatrical masterpiece. The story follows Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, who uses magic to summon a powerful storm that shipwrecks his enemies on a mysterious island. Alongside his daughter Miranda, the spirit Ariel, and the rebellious Caliban, Prospero orchestrates a jo...

The present ebook comprises the complete writings of William Shakespeare. It comes with 150 original illustrations which are the engravings John Boydell commissioned for his Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. ------------ Contents: COMEDIES: The Comedy of Errors The Taming of the Shrew The Two Gentlemen of Verona Love's Labor's Lost A Midsummer Night's Dream The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor Much Ado about Nothing As You Like It Twelfth Night, or What You Will The History of Troi...

"A book ahead of its time. . . . revolutionized the ways that Shakespeareans thought of comedy in relation to its social setting—especially festive comedy." —James Shapiro, Columbia UniversityIn this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barbe...

Renaissance ideas of honour had a profound influence on the English people who formed Shakespeare’s audiences. In When Honour’s at the Stake, first published in 1973, Norman Council describes the increasing importance of these ideas to the themes and structure of a number of Shakespeare’s major plays.The validity of the most widely approved code of honour was being challenged on a variety of fronts, yet both personal standards of behaviour and public affairs were habituall...

Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and...

"So engrossing, clearheaded, and lucid that its arrival is not just welcome but cause for celebration." —Dan Cryer, NewsdayStephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life; full of drama and pageantry, and a...

The Merchant of Venice is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. Although classified as a comedy in the First Folio, and while it shares certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is perhaps more remembered for its dramatic scenes, and is best known for the character of Shylock. The title character is the merchant Antonio, not the Jewish moneylender Shylock, who is the play's most prominent and more famous villain. Thou...

Shakespeare and World Cinema radically re-imagines the field of Shakespeare on film, drawing on a wealth of examples from Africa, the Arctic, Brazil, China, France, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Tibet, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. Mark Thornton Burnett explores the contemporary significance of Shakespeare cinema outside the Hollywood mainstream for the first time, arguing that these adaptations are an essential part of the story of Shakespearean performance and reception. The book...

Twelfth Night by William ShakespeareTwelfth Night, or What You Will is a romantic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 16011602 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season. The play centres on the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck.Twelfth Night by William ShakespeareViola (who is disguised as Cesario) falls in love with Duke Orsino, who in turn is in love with Countess Olivia. Upon meeting Viola,...