BiblioVault - Books about Shakespeare

Early Performers and Performance in the Northeast of England

Diana Wyatt

Arc Humanities Press, 2021

This collection explores the evidence for a wide variety of performance traditions up to 1642 in the northeast region of England which was among those most remote from London. While noble and religious houses in the northeast often patronized visiting performers and might be aware of developments in the capital, the region also had lively performance traditions of its own, on every level of society, from the wedding revels, sporting activities, and household fools of major noble families, through civic plays and processions, to the customary annual performances of hunters and ploughmen. The book considers the political, economic, religious, and psychological impulses that affected these traditions, and its closing chapter addresses their possible relevance to the culture of the region today.

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The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature

Elizabeth Gruber

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

The Eco-Self in Early Modern English Literature tracks an important shift in early modern conceptions of selfhood, arguing that the period hosted the birth of a new subset of the human, the eco-self, which melds a deeply introspective turn with an abiding sense of humans’ embedment in the world. A confluence of cultural factors produced the relevant changes. Of paramount significance was the rapid spread of literacy in England and across Europe: reading transformed the relationship between self and world, retooled moral reasoning, and even altered human anatomy. This book pursues the salutary possibilities, including the ecological benefits, of this redesigned self by advancing fresh readings of texts by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, and Margaret Cavendish. The eco-self offers certain refinements to ecological theory by renewing appreciation for the rational, deliberative functions that distinguish humans from other species.

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Edward III

William Shakespeare

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2022

Edward III comes to life in a new version by playwright Octavio Solis.

Written after England’s victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588, Edward III follows the exploits of King Edward III and his son Edward, the Black Prince of Wales. England dominates on the battlefield as the play explores questions of kinghood and chivalry through the actions of King Edward and his son. Octavio Solis’s translation of the play provides all of the complexity and richness of the original while renewing the allusions and metaphors lost through time.

This translation of Edward III was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

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The Eloquent Shakespeare

A Pronouncing Dictionary for the Complete Dramatic Works with Notes to Untie the Modern Tongue

Gary Logan

University of Chicago Press, 2008

An actor’s deepest desire is to be understood. But when asked to pronounce such words as “chanson,” “phantasime,” or “quaestor,” many otherwise unflappable actors can be rendered speechless.

The Eloquent Shakespeare aims to untie those tongues and help anyone speak Shakespeare’s language with ease. More than 17,500 entries make it the most comprehensive pronunciation guide to Shakespeare’s words, from the common to the arcane. Each entry is written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and represents standard American pronunciations, making this dictionary perfect for North American professionals or non-native speakers of American English.

Renowned Shakespearean voice and text coach Gary Logan has spent years teaching Shakespeare’s works to some of the best actors in the world. His book includes proper names, foreign words and phrases, as well as an extensive introduction that covers everything from how to interpret the entries to scansion dynamics. Designed especially for actors, directors, stage managers, and teachers, The Eloquent Shakespeare is a one-of-a-kind resource for performing Shakespeare’s dramatic works.

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Engaging with Shakespeare

Responses of George Eliot and other Women Novelists

Marianne L. Novy

University of Iowa Press, 1998

In Engaging with Shakespeare: Responses of George Eliot and Other Women Novelists,Marianne Novy combines feminist criticism of women writers with feminist criticism of Shakespeare by examining how a number of novels by women rewrite his works and his cultural image.

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Essaying Shakespeare

Karen Newman

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Esteem Enlivened by Desire

The Couple from Homer to Shakespeare

Jean H. Hagstrum

University of Chicago Press, 1992

A magisterial book by one of our most distinguished literary historians, Esteem Enlivened by Desire illuminates (and celebrates) the ideal of lasting love from antiquity to the high Renaissance. Love that leads to marriage is a relatively recent "invention," or so critics and historians often say. But in this remarkable survey, Jean H. Hagstrum argues that long-term commitment formed of friendship and passion is one of Western culture's oldest and richest concepts.

Hagstrum looks mainly at depictions of love in art and literature, works of the imagination that reflect social reality but also often transcend it to challenge restrictive codes and open up new possibilities for human nature. Among these possibilities, the association of esteem with sexual desire is one of the most invigorating that artists and thinkers have ever addressed. Tracing this motif through many different kinds of expression—from the Homeric epics, the Oresteia, Augustine's Confessions to the stories of Ovid, the Decameron, the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare—Hagstrum also illuminates a number of related themes, including other forms of relationship, from friendship to lust; marriage for political ends; liaisons with the same sex; and the presence of passion in religious commitment.

The culmination of Hagstrum's long career, Esteem Enlivened by Desire offers generous insight into the amorous heritage of the West—and honors one of its most important, enduring, and hard-won achievements.

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The Evolution of Shakespeare’s Comedy

A Study in Dramatic Perspective

Larry S. Champion

Harvard University Press

The evolution of Shakespeare's comedy, in Larry Champion's view, is apparent in the expansion of his comic vision to include a complete reflection of human life while maintaining a comic detachment for the audience. Like the other popular dramatists of Elizabethan England, Shakespeare used the diverse comic motifs and devices which time and custom had proved effective. He went further, however, and created progressively deeper levels of characterization and plot interaction, thereby forming characters who were not merely devices subordinated to the needs of the plot.

Shakespeare's development as a comic playwright, suggests Champion, was “consistently in the direction of complexity or depth of characterization.” His earliest works, like those of his contemporaries, are essentially situation comedies: the humor arises from action rather than character. There is no significant development of the main characters; instead, they are manipulated into situations which are humorous as a result, for example, of mistaken identity or slapstick confusion. The ensuing phase of Shakespeare's comedy sets forth plots in which the emphasis is on identity rather than physical action, a revelation of character which occurs in one of two forms: either a hypocrite is exposed for what he actually is or a character who has assumed an unnatural or abnormal pose is forced to realize and admit the ridiculousness of his position. In the final comedies involving sin and sacrificial forgiveness, however, character development is concerned with a “transformation of values.”

Although each of the comedies is discussed, Champion concentrates on nine, dividing them according to the complexity of characterization. He pursues as well the playwright's efforts to achieve for the spectator the detached stance so vital to comedy. Shakespeare obtained this perspective, Champion observes, through experimentation with the use of material mirroring the main action—mockery, parody, or caricature—and through the use of a “comic pointer” who is himself involved in the action but is sufficiently independent of the other characters to provide the audience with an omniscient view.

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