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This book will come as a revelation to Shakespeare scholars everywhere. It reveals the identity of the playwright and Shakespeare’s colleague behind the mask of Jaques in As You Like It. It pinpoints the true first night of Twelfth Night and reveals why the play’s performance at the Inns of Court was a momentous occasion for shakespeare. It also the identities Quinapalus, the Vapians, Pigrogromitus and Feste, as well as the ‘Dark Lady’ of the Sonnets and the inspiration for Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. And it solves Shakespeare’s greatest riddle: the meaning of M.O.A.I. in Twelfth Night. In sum, this book reveals William Shakespeare as a far more personal writer than we have ever imagined.
A substantial rethinking of the field of Shakespeare’s ‘sources’ that re-evaluates the vocabulary initiated by Geoffrey Bullough in his monumental Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Beginning with a revaluation of Bullough, the book addresses issues such as the nature of con-text, influence versus confluence, intertextuality and the ways in which the term has been interpreted, and the manner in which Shakespeare returned to and developed earlier motifs, situations, memes and dramatic forms. This approach raises questions of how Shakespeare read, what was available to him and how this material may have circulated and filtered into the theatre; it also considers the ways in which a study of the materials available to the practising dramatist can be considered a vital part of theatrical activity, and something wholly different from what used to be regarded from the point of view of scholarly investigation as a relatively uninteresting activity.
Whether the apocalyptic storm of King Lear or the fleeting thunder imagery of Hamlet, the shipwrecks of the comedies or the thunderbolt of Pericles, there is an instance of storm in every one of William Shakespeare's plays. This is the first comprehensive study of Shakespeare's storms. Shakespeare was remarkably fond of storms, not only in the stage effects he so often calls for, but in the metaphors and similes he gives to his characters. Shakespeare's storms can be read alongside a wide range of storms written by his contemporaries. Several of these other playwrights engage with audience expectations just as Shakespeare does, and utilise them for aesthetic effect. This book argues that Shakespeare's investment in storm in Julius Caesar is a canny, financial one, for Shakespeare seriously considered the impact of the special effects of thunder and lightning when writing staged storms. King Lear speaks to ecocritical ideas about wilderness and shows that the play's representation of nature has been misunderstood. Macbeth details the way in which early modern anxieties about the supernatural allow for, or prompt, a play with discrete weather systems. The book shows that its 'lasting storm' is a performance aesthetic that bridges the divisions and allows us to think more carefully about them. The Tempest highlights the dramatic quality of its presentation of nature. Storms are an important metaphorical figure throughout Shakespeare's plays. They also show Shakespeare testing the limits of theatre and audience before those limits are established.
This book presents a biography of the poetics and politics of London in 1613, from Whitehall to Guildhall, that is, Shakespeare's London. It examines major events at court, such as the untimely death of Prince Henry and its aftermath, and the extravagant wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick of Germany and her journey to the Continent. The city flourished with scores of publications on a vast array of topics, including poetry, travel narratives, music, and, of course, plays. The book offers summaries and analyses of most of these texts, knowing that some of them may not be well-known to all readers. Many of these publications had a kind of link to the court. In order to understand the context of the year 1613, the book actually begins in October 1612 with Prince Henry's illness and death in November, which had a major impact on what happened in 1613. It proceeds more or less chronologically from this event to Princess Elizabeth's wedding and the stunning array of dramatic performances at court, and includes the journey to her new home in Germany. As part of the year's cultural nexus, the narrative reaches into the Guildhall experience to explore the riches of the books that emanated from London's printers and to examine specifically the drama performed or published in 1613. The final major focus centres on the Carr-Howard wedding at the year's end, full of cultural activities and ripe with political significance.
This entertaining and scholarly book takes as its theme the original argument that Shakespeare’s generic innovations in dramatizing love stories have found their way, through various cultural channels, into the films of Hollywood in the first half of the twentieth century and, more recently, Bollywood. It does not deal primarily with individual cinematic allusions to Shakespeare’s plays, nor ‘the Shakespeare film’ as a distinct, heritage genre, nor with ‘adaptation’ as a straightforward process, but rather the ways in which the film industry is implicitly indebted to the generic shapes of a number of Shakespearean forms based on comedy and romance dealing with love. Particular plays such as The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Romeo and Juliet all powerfully entered the genres of mainstream movies through their compelling emotional structures and underlying conceptualisations of love. Drawing on dozens of examples from films, both mainstream and less familiar, the book opens up rich, new ways of understanding the pervasive influence of Shakespeare on modern media and culture, and more generally on our conventions of romantic love. It is such connections that make Shakespeare a potent ‘brand’ and international influence in 2016, even 400 years after his death.
, the winters are better there.’ History is written in the drawing of national borders and borderlines are a visible manifestation of the politics of map-making, what Shakespeare contemptuously calls in Troilus and Cressida ‘mapp’ry’ (1.2.205), 1 a word so rare OED can offer only this example before 1840. Whether
death. He whispers the words, ‘and in that sleep what dreams may come’ into Theresa’s ear, before walking past her to make way for Bernard to approach and smash her head against the wall. 2 In contrast to Shakespeare’s melancholy prince, whom the very conscience the hosts lack makes a coward, Ford has no compunction about murdering the woman who wants to usurp his power. Fragments from Hamlet’s monologue about what dreams and ills he might find in death’s undiscovered country flicker up as a commentary on a very different scene regarding the question of life or
This bodes some strange eruption to our state ( Hamlet , 1.1.68) In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, ghosts were problematic, a concept associated with Catholic constructions of the afterlife and with folkloric traditions that Protestantism sought to displace. However, ghosts proved to be popular figures on the stage, and Shakespeare and his contemporaries were highly attuned to the theatrical power of the
, prospectively and retrospectively, blind alleys, nooks and corners, open vistas, as well as false perspectives, side-lanes and twisting paths. When Shakespeare plays host to Ovid, he is not inviting Ovid alone into his text, he is also welcoming in Ovid reading Virgil, himself reading Homer, with all the depth, freedom and delicious lightness this multi-layering engenders, as each text leaves a trace in the
8 John J. Joughin Shakespeare’s genius: Hamlet, adaptation and the work of following Adaptation: the following work and the work of following The issue of Shakespeare’s uniqueness keeps coming up . . . as cause both for acclaim and for dismay, together with a repeatedly documented cause for alarm concerning the indiscriminate appropriation of Shakespeare to underwrite, or to neutralize, cultural and political oppression. I suppose I am to be counted among those who take Shakespeare’s ‘position’ here as indeed a matter of his appropriability, as when Brecht