This study grows out of the intersection of two realms of scholarly investigation - the emerging public sphere in early modern England and the history of the book. Shakespeare's Reading Audiences examines the ways in which different communities - humanist, legal, religious and political - would have interpreted Shakespeare's plays and poems, whether printed or performed. Cyndia Susan Clegg begins by analysing elite reading clusters associated with the Court, the universities, and the Inns of Court and how their interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Henry V arose from their reading of Italian humanists. She concludes by examining how widely held public knowledge about English history both affected Richard II's reception and how such knowledge was appropriated by the State. She also considers The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Othello from the point of view of audience members conversant in popular English legal writing and Macbeth from the perspective of popular English Calv
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 a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet,
This work applies the systems theory of character to the analysis of the psychological and dramatic consistency of the main characters fromHamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. The theory considers
This wide-ranging study traces the forces that drove the production and interpretation of visual images of Shakespeare's plays. Covering a rich chronological terrain, from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the midpoint of the nineteenth, Stuart Sillars offers a multidisciplinary, nuanced approach to reading Shakespeare in relation to image, history, text, book history, print culture and performance. The volume begins by relating the production imagery of Shakespeare's plays to other visual forms and their social frames, before discussing the design and operation of illustrated editions and the 'performance readings' they offer, and analysing the practical and theoretical foundations of easel paintings. Close readings of The Comedy of Errors, King Lear, the Roman plays, The Merchant of Venice and Othello provide detailed insight into how the plays have been represented visually, and are accompanied by numerous illustrations and a beautiful colour plate section.
Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.
In this distinctive study, Nicholas Luke explores the abiding power of Shakespeare's tragedies by suggesting an innovative new model of his character creation. Rather than treating characters as presupposed beings, Luke shows how they arrive as something more than functional dramatis personae - how they come to life as 'subjects' - through Shakespeare's orchestration of transformational dramatic events. Moving beyond dominant critical modes, Luke combines compelling close readings of Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear with an accessible analysis of thinkers such as Badiou, Žižek, Bergson, Whitehead and Latour, and the 'adventist' Christian tradition flowing from Saint Paul through Luther to Kierkegard. Representing a significant intervention into the way we encounter Shakespeare's tragic figures, the book argues for a subjectivity which is not singular or abiding, but perilous and leaping.
Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)Shakespeare’s four greatest tragedies were written in a remarkably short period of time, between 1598 and 1606. Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear are each so si
This book gives a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Besides providing readings of plays such as Hamlet, Othello, Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus, it also places Shakespeare emphatically within his own theatrical context, and focuses on the relationship between the demanding repertory system of the time and the conventions and content of the plays. Lopez argues that the limitations of the relatively bare stage and non-naturalistic mode of early modern theatre would have made the potential for failure very great, and he proposes that understanding this potential for failure is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on stage. The book offers perspectives on familiar conventions such as the pun, the aside and the expository speech; and it works toward a definition of early modern theatrical genres based on the relationship between these well-known conve
Contents: Verdi: Ritorna vincitor! (Aida) * O cieli azzurri (Aida) * Saper vorreste (Un Ballo in Maschera) * Canzone del Salice (The Willow Song) (Othello) * Ave Maria (Othello) * Caro nome (Rigoletto
This unique collection of imaginative illustrations entices colorists of all ages to apply their skills to well-known vignettes from Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Julius Caesa
What does it mean to perform Shakespeare's Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies in the modern theatre? This book brings together the reflections of a number of major classical actors on how these works can most powerfully be realized for today's audiences. Concentrating on the 'great' tragedies - Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear - the actors offer unique insights into some of the most demanding and rewarding roles in world drama, by showing what it is like to play them on stage. Ten perceptive and articulate performers reflect on their experiences of ten major roles: the Ghost, Gertrude and Hamlet; Iago, Emilia and Othello; Lady Macbeth and Macbeth; Lear's Fool, and King Lear. Together, these essays provide a peculiarly intimate set of trade secrets about what techniques, ideas and memories actors may use when approaching tragic roles in Shakespeare's most challenging plays.
England in the early reign of James I: an unsteady nation adapts to its new king; Shakespeare labors over the tragedies of Othello and Macbeth; bearbaiting is a popular diversion . . . and Guy Fawkes
Shakespeare's tragic characters have often been seen as forerunners of modern personhood. It has been assumed that Shakespeare was able to invent such lifelike figures in part because of his freedom from the restrictions of classical form. Curtis Perry instead argues that characters such as Hamlet and King Lear have seemed modern to us in part because they are so robustly connected to the tradition of Senecan tragedy. Resituating Shakespearean tragedy in this way - as backward looking as well as forward looking - makes it possible to recover a crucial political dimension. Shakespeare saw Seneca as a representative voice from post-republican Rome: in plays such as Coriolanus and Othello he uses Senecan modes of characterization to explore questions of identity in relation to failures of republican community. This study has important implications for the way we understand character, community, and alterity in early modern drama.
This strong and timely collection provides fresh insights into how Shakespeare's plays and poems were understood to affect bodies, minds and emotions. Contemporary criticism has had surprisingly little to say about the early modern period's investment in imagining literature's impact on feeling. Shakespearean Sensations brings together scholarship from a range of well-known and new voices to address this fundamental gap. The book includes a comprehensive introduction by Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard and comprises three sections focusing on sensations aroused in the plays; sensations evoked in the playhouse; and sensations found in the imaginative space of the poems. With dedicated essays on Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Twelfth Night, the collection explores how seriously early modern writers took their relationship with their audiences and reveals new connections between early modern literary texts and the emotional and physiological experiences of theatregoers.
This volume, first published in 2000, draws together thirteen important essays on the concept of race in Shakespeare's drama. The authors, who themselves reflect racial and geographical diversity, explore issues of ethnography, politics, religion, identity, nationalism, and the distribution of power in Shakespeare's plays. The authors write from a variety of perspectives, drawing on Elizabethan and Jacobean historical studies and critical theory. They attend to performances of the plays in different ages and places, as well as to the text. An introductory essay sets the context for the ensuing chapters, which reflect shifts in scholarship over the last forty years. Most are reprinted from volumes of Shakespeare Survey. They tackle the ethnic implications of Shakespearean drama in South Africa, the Caribbean, Germany and the Arab world as well as England. A broad range of plays and poems is included, while particular essays focus on Othello, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest.
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.
In Narrating the Crusades, Lee Manion examines crusading's narrative-generating power as it is reflected in English literature from c.1300 to 1604. By synthesizing key features of crusade discourse into one paradigm, this book identifies and analyzes the kinds of stories crusading produced in England, uncovering new evidence for literary and historical research as well as genre studies. Surveying medieval romances including Richard Cœur de Lion, Sir Isumbras, Octavian, and The Sowdone of Babylone alongside historical practices, chronicles, and treatises, this study shows how different forms of crusading literature address cultural concerns about collective and private action. These insights extend to early modern writing, including Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and Shakespeare's Othello, providing a richer understanding of how crusading's narrative shaped the beginning of the modern era. This first full-length examination of English crusading literature will be an ess
