This 2004 book offers a comprehensive overview of Orson Welles' life and career, highlighting the shape of the filmmaker's career, his astonishing precocity and his extraordinary gifts that resulted in both splendid successes and puzzling failures. Examining the key and recurring themes of Welles' long and varied career, Robert Garis provides an appreciation and interpretative commentary of his films. At the core of this book are sustained readings of Welles' masterpieces, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and critically incisive accounts of his other major films, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, Othello, Macbeth, and Chimes at Midnight.
The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. For this second edition of King Richard III, Janis Lull has added a new section to her introduction, in which she focuses on contemporary productions of the play as well as recent scholarly criticism. Lull emphasises the importance of women's roles in this popular drama but shows how the text has frequently been cut, rewritten and reshaped by directors and actors to enhance the role of Richard, often at the expense of female characters. The special relationship between King Richard III and Macbeth is also explored while the notes detail the play's language in terms that are easily accessible to contemporary readers.
Reiko Oya explores theatrical expressions of Shakespearean tragedy in Georgian London and the relations between the representative players of the time - David Garrick, John Philip Kemble and his sister Sarah Siddons, and Edmund Kean - and their close circle of friends. The book begins by analysing the tragic emotion that Garrick conveyed through his performance of King Lear, and the responses to it from such critics as Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Montagu. The second chapter examines the concept of sublimity in Kemble and Siddons' interpretations of Macbeth. The final chapter studies the disparity between the literary and the theatrical Hamlet in Kean's impersonation and William Hazlitt's response to it. With subjects ranging from Shakespearean promptbooks to paintings and the poetics of Romanticism, the book offers great insights into the exchange of ideas and inspirations among the cultural luminaries who surrounded the London stage.
When Scotland is hit by the recession, Police Constable Hamish Macbeth notices that the Highland people are forced to come up with inventive ways to lure tourists to their sleepy towns. The quaint vil
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944), who often published under the pen-name of 'Q', was one of the giants of early twentieth-century literature and literary criticism. A novelist and poet who was also a Professor of English, he helped to form the literary tastes of generations of literary students and scholars who came after him. The freshness, enthusiasm and intellectual insight of his work is still evident in his writings nearly a century on. Cambridge University Press is delighted to reissue some of his key texts in this new edition. Shakespeare's Workmanship, first published in 1918, offers detailed readings of Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Hamlet, Pericles and King Henry VIII, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, with an account of the story of Falstaff, and a general description of the features of Shakespeare's later plays.
The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. For this second edition of King Richard III, Janis Lull has added a new section to her introduction, in which she focuses on contemporary productions of the play as well as recent scholarly criticism. Lull emphasises the importance of women's roles in this popular drama but shows how the text has frequently been cut, rewritten and reshaped by directors and actors to enhance the role of Richard, often at the expense of female characters. The special relationship between King Richard III and Macbeth is also explored while the notes detail the play's language in terms that are easily accessible to contemporary readers.
In this stirring debut novel, Rebecca Reisert enters the world of Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which a young woman's search for vengeance plunges her into a legendary tale of deceit, murder, and retribut
Macbeth clutches an imaginary dagger; Hamlet holds up Yorick's skull; Lear enters with Cordelia in his arms. Do these memorable and iconic moments have anything to tell us about the definition of Shak
This book explores the revivals of Shakespeare's history plays during the Victorian period, as staged by the famous actor-manager Charles Kean. Between 1852 and 1859, Kean produced celebrated productions of Henry V, Henry VIII, King John, Macbeth and Richard II, renowned for their unprecendented attention to antiquarian detail in sets, costumes, and properties (many of which are shown in the book's illustrations). These productions provided audiences with an unparalleled opportunity to participate in the Victorian obsession with history, especially of the medieval period. Using valuable primary sources, including promptbooks, scenic designs, costume sketches and contemporary reviews, Richard Schoch places mid-Victorian attitudes towards the theatre in the context of major intellectual and political movements of the age. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre history, Shakespeare studies and Victorian culture.
In the south of Scotland, residents get their chimneys vacuum-cleaned. But in the isolated villages in the very north of Scotland, the villagers rely on the services of the itinerant sweep, Pete Ray,
Reissued with a new essay on Macbeth this famous collection of essays on Shakespeare's tragedies considers these plays as responses to the crisis of knowledge and the emergence of modern skepticism provoked by the new science of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
This is the fifth volume of essays by actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre on their interpretations of major Shakespearian roles. The twelve essays discuss fourteen roles in twelve different productions between 1999 and 2002. The productions covered include three plays not featured before in the series: The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Antony and Cleopatra. The contributors are Philip Voss, Ian Hughes, Aidan McArdle, Zoë Waites, Matilda Ziegler, Alexandra Gilbreath, Antony Sher, David Tennant, Michael Pennington, Simon Russell Beale, Richard McCabe, Frances de la Tour and the late Nigel Hawthorne. The title roles in three of the major tragedies - Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth - are covered and there is also an essay on Iago in Othello. A brief biographical note is provided for each of the contributors and an introduction places the essays in the context of the Stratford and London stages.
Dr Sanders' book grew out of uneasiness over commonly accepted ways of talking about Elizabethan literature. Phrases like 'world picture', 'received ideas' are so easily used that we bypass important questions: A picture of whose word? Ideas received by whom? and in what way? The heart of Dr Sanders' book is a critical account of seven plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare (The Massacre at Paris, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Dr Faustus, Richard II, Richard III and Macbeth). In his examination, Dr Sanders is at pains to analyse the nature of the intellectual and cultural environment in which the plays were written, to define the ways in which this environment influenced Marlowe and Shakespeare and thus to come to a full understanding of the manner in which a work of art can be simultaneously 'of an age' and 'for all time'.
"Pure bliss." Atlanta Journal & ConstitutionA Hamish Macbeth Mystery by the author of "Death of a Hussy."With a cold in his head and no place to go for Christmas, Hamish snaps up the invitation of
There's not a cloud in Constable Hamish Macbeth's sky, just plenty of warm sunshine and not quite enough of beautiful Priscilla Halburton-Smythe. But as eight hopeful members of the Checkmate Singles
Engaging debates over the nature of subjectivity in early modern England, this fascinating and original study examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conceptions of memory and forgetting, and their importance to the drama and culture of the time. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr discusses memory and forgetting as categories in terms of which a variety of behaviours - from seeking salvation to pursuing vengeance to succumbing to desire - are conceptualized. Drawing upon a range of literary and non-literary discourses, represented by treatises on the passions, sermons, anti-theatrical tracts, epic poems and more, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster stage 'self-recollection' and, more commonly, 'self-forgetting', the latter providing a powerful model for dramatic subjectivity. Focusing on works such as Macbeth, Hamlet, Dr Faustus and The Duchess of Malfi, Sullivan reveals memory and forgetting to be dynamic cultural forces central to early modern understandings of embodiment, selfhood and social
This is an unusual study of the nature of service and other types of dependency and patronage in Shakespeare's drama. By considering the close associations of service with childhood or youth, marriage and friendship, Judith Weil sheds light on social practice and dramatic action. Approached as dynamic explorations of a familiar custom, the plays are shown to demonstrate a surprising consciousness of obligations, and a fascination with how dependants actively change each other. They help us understand why early modern people may have found service both frightening and enabling. Attentive to a range of historical sources, and social and cultural issues, Weil also emphasises the linguistic ambiguities created by service relationships, and their rich potential for interpretation on the stage. The book includes close readings of dramatic sequences in twelve plays, including Hamlet, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear.
Masculinity was a political issue in early modern England. Phrases such as 'courage-masculine' or 'manly virtue' took on a special meaning and signified commitment to the ideals of militant Protestantism. Diplomacy and compromise were disparaged as 'feminine'. Shakespeare on Masculinity is an original study of the way Shakespeare's plays engage with this ideal and a subject that provoked bitter public dispute. Robin Headlam Wells argues that Shakespeare took a sceptical view of the militant-Protestant cult of heroic masculinity. Following a series of portraits of the dangerously charismatic warrior-hero, Shakespeare turned at the end of his writing career to a different kind of leader. If the heroes of the martial tragedies evoke a Herculean ideal of manhood, The Tempest portrays a ruler who, Orpheus-like, uses the arts of civilization to bring peace to a divided world. Other plays receiving close readings include Henry V, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Coriolanus.
