Profiling Shakespeare

Profiling Shakespeare
Author: Marjorie Garber
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2008-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135891885

The title of this collection, Profiling Shakespeare, is meant strongly in its double sense. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought by biographers from his time to our own. They also show the effects, the ephemera, the clues and cues, welcome and unwelcome, out of which Shakespeare's admirers and dedicated scholars have pieced together a vision of the playwright, whether as sage, psychologist, lover, theatrical entrepreneur, or moral authority. This collection brings together classic pieces, hard-to-find chapters, and two new essays. Here, Garber has produced a book at once serious and highly readable, ranging broadly across time periods (early modern to postmodern) and touching upon both high and popular culture. Contents: Preface 1. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers 2. Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost 3. Macbeth: The Male Medusa 4. Shakespeare as Fetish 5. Character Assassination 6. Out of Joint 7. Roman Numerals 8. Second-Best Bed 9. Shakespeare's Dogs 10. Shakespeare's Laundry List 11. Shakespeare's Faces 12. MacGuffin Shakespeare 13. Fatal Cleopatra 14. What Did Shakespeare Invent? 15. Bartlett's Familiar Shakespeare

Shakespeare: Ideas in Profile

Shakespeare: Ideas in Profile
Author: Paul Edmondson
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2015-04-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1782831037

Ideas in Profile: Small Introductions to Big Topics Shakespeare is the world's greatest writer. In this lively and authoritative introduction, Paul Edmondson presents Shakespeare afresh as a dramatist and poet, and encourages us to take ownership of the works for ourselves as words to be spoken as well as discussed. We get a wide sense of what his life was like, his rich language, and astonishing cultural legacy. We catch glimpses of Shakespeare himself, how he wrote and see what his works mean to readers and theatre practitioners. Above all, we see how Shakespeare tackled the biggest themes of humanity: power, history, war and love. Shakespeare scholar Paul Edmondson guides us through the most important questions around Shakespeare and in the process reminds us just why he is so celebrated in the first place.

Shakespeare, Our Contemporary

Shakespeare, Our Contemporary
Author: Jan Kott
Publisher: Doubleday
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2015-01-21
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0804152195

Shakespeare, Our Contemporary is a provocative, original study of the major plays of Shakespeare. More than that, it is one of the few critical works to have strongly influenced theatrical productions. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz are among the many directors who have acknowledged their debt to Jan Kott, finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage conceptions. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary has been translated into nineteen languages since it appeared in 1961, and readers all over the world have similarly found their responses to Shakespeare broadened and enriched.

Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book

Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book
Author: Travis DeCook
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2011-07-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136662758

Why do Shakespeare and the English Bible seem to have an inherent relationship with each other? How have these two monumental traditions in the history of the book functioned as mutually reinforcing sources of cultural authority? How do material books and related reading practices serve as specific sites of intersection between these two textual traditions? This collection makes a significant intervention in our understanding of Shakespeare, the Bible, and the role of textual materiality in the construction of cultural authority. Departing from conventional source study, it questions the often naturalized links between the Shakespearean and biblical corpora, examining instead the historically contingent ways these links have been forged. The volume brings together leading scholars in Shakespeare, book history, and the Bible as literature, whose essays converge on the question of Scripture as source versus Scripture as process—whether that scripture is biblical or Shakespearean—and in turn explore themes such as cultural authority, pedagogy, secularism, textual scholarship, and the materiality of texts. Covering an historical span from Shakespeare’s post-Reformation era to present-day Northern Ireland, the volume uncovers how Shakespeare and the Bible’s intertwined histories illuminate the enduring tensions between materiality and transcendence in the history of the book.

Shakespeare's Insults

Shakespeare's Insults
Author: Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2016-01-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474252680

Why are certain words used as insults in Shakespeare's world and what do these words do and say? Shakespeare's plays abound with insults which are more often merely cited than thoroughly studied, quotation prevailing over exploration. The purpose of this richly detailed dictionary is to go beyond the surface of these words and to analyse why and how words become insults in Shakespeare's world. It's an invaluable resource and reference guide for anyone grappling with the complexities and rewards of Shakespeare's inventive use of language in the realm of insult and verbal sparring.

Shakespeare Survey: Volume 62, Close Encounters with Shakespeare's Text

Shakespeare Survey: Volume 62, Close Encounters with Shakespeare's Text
Author: Peter Holland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1300
Release: 2009-10-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131613900X

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies, and of the year's major British performances. The theme for volume 62 is 'Close Encounters with Shakespeare's Text'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at http://www.cambridge.org/online/shakespearesurvey. This fully-searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic, and save and bookmark their results.

The Apocryphal William Shakespeare

The Apocryphal William Shakespeare
Author: Sabrina Feldman
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2011-10
Genre: Authorship, Disputed
ISBN: 1457507218

Sabrina Feldman manages the Planetary Science Instrument Development Office at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Born and raised in Riverside, California, she attended college and graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, where she enjoyed the wonderful performances of the Berkeley Shakespeare Company, studied Shakespeare's works for a semester with Professor Stephen Booth, and received a Ph.D. in experimental physics in 1996. She has worked on many different instrument development projects for NASA, and is the former deputy director of JPL's Center for Life Detection. Her scientific training, combined with a lifelong love of literature and all things Shakespearean, gives her a unique perspective on the Shakespeare authorship mystery. Dr. Feldman lives in Pasadena, California with her husband and two children. This is her first book. If William Shakespeare wrote the Bard's works... Who wrote the Shakespeare Apocrypha? During his lifetime and for many years afterwards, William Shakespeare was credited with writing not only the Bard's canonical works, but also a series of 'apocryphal' Shakespeare plays. Stylistic threads linking these lesser works suggest they shared a common author or co-author who wrote in a coarse, breezy style, and created very funny clown scenes. He was also prone to pilfering lines from other dramatists, consistent with Robert Greene's 1592 attack on William Shakespeare as an "upstart crow." The anomalous existence of two bodies of work exhibiting distinct poetic voices printed under one man's name suggests a fascinating possibility. Could William Shakespeare have written the apocryphal plays while serving as a front man for the 'poet in purple robes, ' a hidden court poet who was much admired by a literary coterie in the 1590s? And could the 'poet in purple robes' have been the great poet and statesman Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), a previously overlooked authorship candidate who is an excellent fit to the Shakespearean glass slipper? Both of these scenarios are well supported by literary and historical records, many of which have not been previously considered in the context of the Shakespeare authorship debate.

Serial Shakespeare

Serial Shakespeare
Author: Elisabeth Bronfen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2020-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526142333

Shakespeare is everywhere in contemporary media culture. This book explores the reasons for this dissemination and reassemblage. Ranging widely over American TV drama, it discusses the use of citations in Westworld and The Wire, demonstrating how they tap into but also transform Shakespeare’s preferred themes and concerns. It then examines the presentation of female presidents in shows such as Commander in Chief and House of Cards, revealing how they are modelled on figures of female sovereignty from his plays. Finally, it analyses the specifically Shakespearean dramaturgy of Deadwood and The Americans. Ultimately, the book brings into focus the way serial TV drama appropriates Shakespeare in order to give voice to the unfinished business of the American cultural imaginary.

30 Great Myths about Shakespeare

30 Great Myths about Shakespeare
Author: Laurie Maguire
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2013-01-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0470658509

Think you know Shakespeare? Think again . . . Was a real skull used in the first performance of Hamlet? Were Shakespeare's plays Elizabethan blockbusters? How much do we really know about the playwright's life? And what of his notorious relationship with his wife? Exploring and exploding 30 popular myths about the great playwright, this illuminating new book evaluates all the evidence to show how historical material—or its absence—can be interpreted and misinterpreted, and what this reveals about our own personal investment in the stories we tell.

Shakespeare’s Mirrors

Shakespeare’s Mirrors
Author: Edward Evans
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2024-09-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 104012822X

Clear mirrors and The Geneva Bible, revolutionary innovations of the Elizabethan age, inspired Shakespeare’s drive towards a new purpose for drama. Shakespeare reversed the conventional mirror metaphor for drama, implying drama cannot reflect the substance of human nature, and developed a method of characterization, through metadrama, self-awareness and soliloquy, to project St. Paul’s idea of conscience onto the Elizabethan stage. This revolutionary method of characterization, aesthetic existence beyond performance, has long been sensed but remains frustratingly uncategorized. Shakespeare’s Mirrors charts the invention of a drama that staged the unstageable: St. Paul’s metaphysical conception of human nature glimpsed through a looking glass darkly.