Against a recent tendency to exaggerate Shakespeare's classical learning, this study examines how the playwright used his relatively restricted knowledge to create an unusually convincing picture of Rome...
Surveying the development and varieties of blank verse in the English playhouses, this book is a natural history of iambic pentameter in English. Marina Tarlinskaja’s statistical analysis of versification focuses on Shakespeare, but places his work in the literary context of the times. Her results o..
Shakespeare and Wales offers a 'Welsh correction' to a long-standing deficiency. It brings together experts in the field from both sides of the Atlantic to establish a detailed historical context that illustrates the range and richness of Shakespeare's Welsh sources and resources, and confirms the ..
Shakespeare and Wales offers a 'Welsh correction' to a long-standing deficiency. It brings together experts in the field from both sides of the Atlantic to establish a detailed historical context that illustrates the range and richness of Shakespeare's Welsh sources and resources, and confirms the ..
Originally published in 1933 and republished in 1958, this great work is an imagining, in plain narrative, of the life of Shakespeare against the background of his times, his world of the theatre and his dramatic development through the last years of Elizabeth’s reign...
This book studies how the tirades and unrestrained villainy of Shakespeare’s art explode the decorum and safety of our sanitized lives and challenge the limits of selfhood. The literary criticism of anger and hate provides a vision of the experience of Shakespeare’s theater as an intensification of ..
These studies take stage history as a means of knowing the play. Half of the studies deal with casting, then the transformations of dramatis personae are analyzed and The Tempest is viewed through the changing relationships of the characters. Some of Shakespeare’s most original strategies for audien..
Based on extensive archival research, this study offers an entirely new perspective on popular Shakespeare reception by focusing on articles published in Victorian periodicals. Shakespeare had already reached the apex of British culture in the previous century, becoming the national poet of the midd..
Shakespeare Left and Right brings together critics, strikingly different in their politics and methodologies, who are acutely aware of the importance of politics on literary practice and theory. The essays in Shakespeare Left and Right, first published in 1991, present a tug of war about ideology, a..
This study examines the background to the well-known tales that Shakespeare used in his plays, describing their conventional use and then showing how Shakespeare deliberately subverted the motifs in order to challenge audience preconceptions...
First published in 1990, this title explores the nature of the interaction between Shakespeare and American culture. His plays, Michael Bristol asserts, help to constitute a primary affirmative theme of much American culture criticism, specifically the celebration of individuality and the values of ..