Burning Shakespeare

"Part Connie Willis time-travel, part Douglas Adams whimsy, part Julie Schumacher academic satire, with a refreshing touch of Key & Peele, Burning Shakespeare is also a clear-eyed assessment of what we love -- and hate -- about Shakespeare." -- Sujata Iyengar, author of Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color and Race in Early Modern England and Shakespeare's Medical Language Or, "Funnier than Timon of Athens, sadder than As You Like It, Burning Shakespeare fantasizes a world in which all of Shakespeare's plays come perilously close to joining the library of the lost." Paul Menzer, Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, Mary Baldwin University "If in some parallel universe Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman had collaborated with A.C. Bradley, they might imaginably have come up with a novel both as funny and as intellectually exciting as A.J. Hartley's Burning Shakespeare. But I doubt it." Professor Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-Upon-Avon Shakespeare's works are being wiped from history - and only a group of ill-assorted dead people can save them! This whimsical romp from now to Shakespeare's day, via Hell, wears its learning lightly, but is as illuminating as funny. Highly recommended! Tiffany Stern Fellow of the British Academy, General Editor, Arden Shakespeare: 4 "Beelzebub, Belial, Shakespeare, and the academy: what could go wrong? Burning Shakespeare does just what novels featuring Shakespeare fail to do, taking readers on a wild, witty, sometimes even poignant ride, leaving us with the faint scent of brimstone, too." W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University "I have met many who didn't like Shakespeare but never someone who hated his work enough to destroy all trace of it. AJ Hartley's novel about someone who loathed Shakespeare that much is smart, funny and action-packed. It's also far more enjoyable than most people seem to suppose Shakespeare's plays are." Peter Holland, Chair, International Shakespeare Association How would the world look without the influence of Shakespeare pervading so many aspects of life and culture and belief? In a race against time, with the fate of lives and souls hanging in the balance, the forces of good and evil battle to save or destroy Shakespeare's works. Which side works to which end? That is the question, isn't it? Would we be better off without Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and the others, or would the safety valve that theatrical expression provides back up into an explosion of apocalyptic proportions? Follow the cast of this tale--from university student to petty thief to talk show host--as they travel through time and space in Burning Shakespeare.

"Part Connie Willis time-travel, part Douglas Adams whimsy, part Julie Schumacher academic satire, with a refreshing touch of Key & Peele, Burning Shakespeare is also a clear-eyed assessment of what we love -- and hate -- about Shakespeare." -- Sujata Iyengar, author of Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color and Race in Early Modern England and Shakespeare's Medical Language Or, "Funnier than Timon of Athens, sadder than As You Like It, Burning Shakespeare fantasizes a world in which all of Shakespeare's plays come perilously close to joining the library of the lost." Paul Menzer, Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, Mary Baldwin University "If in some parallel universe Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman had collaborated with A.C. Bradley, they might imaginably have come up with a novel both as funny and as intellectually exciting as A.J. Hartley's Burning Shakespeare. But I doubt it." Professor Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-Upon-Avon Shakespeare's works are being wiped from history - and only a group of ill-assorted dead people can save them! This whimsical romp from now to Shakespeare's day, via Hell, wears its learning lightly, but is as illuminating as funny. Highly recommended! Tiffany Stern Fellow of the British Academy, General Editor, Arden Shakespeare: 4 "Beelzebub, Belial, Shakespeare, and the academy: what could go wrong? Burning Shakespeare does just what novels featuring Shakespeare fail to do, taking readers on a wild, witty, sometimes even poignant ride, leaving us with the faint scent of brimstone, too." W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University "I have met many who didn't like Shakespeare but never someone who hated his work enough to destroy all trace of it. AJ Hartley's novel about someone who loathed Shakespeare that much is smart, funny and action-packed. It's also far more enjoyable than most people seem to suppose Shakespeare's plays are." Peter Holland, Chair, International Shakespeare Association How would the world look without the influence of Shakespeare pervading so many aspects of life and culture and belief? In a race against time, with the fate of lives and souls hanging in the balance, the forces of good and evil battle to save or destroy Shakespeare's works. Which side works to which end? That is the question, isn't it? Would we be better off without Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and the others, or would the safety valve that theatrical expression provides back up into an explosion of apocalyptic proportions? Follow the cast of this tale--from university student to petty thief to talk show host--as they travel through time and space in Burning Shakespeare.

Dramas and Sonnets of William Shakespeare Vol. 1 is helpful to every learner of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) who, doubtless, saw himself as merely another professional man of the theatre who moved almost casually from play-acting to playwriting. And indeed he was very much a man of his time, a man of the Elizabethan theatre, who learnt to exploit brilliantly the stagecraft, the acting, and the pub¬lic taste of his day. It happens very rarely in the history of literature that a craftsman who has acquired perfect control of his medium, masterly ease in handling the techniques and conventions of his day, is also a universal genius of the highest order, combining with his technical proficiency a unique ability to render experience in poetic language and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of hu¬man psychology. Man of the theatre, poet and expert in the human passions, Shakespeare has appealed equally to those who admire the art with which he renders a story in terms of the acted drama or the insight with which he presents states of mind and complex¬ities of attitude or the unsurpassed brilliance he shows in giving conviction and a new dimension to the utterances of his characters through the poetic speech he puts in their mouths. It is a remark¬able combination of qualities. Yet he was no poetic genius descending on the theatre from above, but a working dramatist who found himself in catering for the public theatre of his day. Unquestionably the greatest poetic dramatist of Europe, he was also Marlowe’s successor, the heir to a tradition of playwriting, which we saw developing in the preceding chapter. His contemporaries saw him as one dramatist among others—a good one, and a popular one, but no transcendent genius who left all others far behind—and to the end of his active life he showed no reluctance to collaborate with other playwrights.

Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.

Shakespeare on the Ecological Surface uses the concept of the ‘surface’ to examine the relationship between contemporary performance and ecocriticism. Each section looks, in turn, at the 'surfaces' of slick, smoke, sky, steam, soil, slime, snail, silk, skin and stage to build connections between ecocriticism, activism, critical theory, Shakespeare and performance. While the word ‘surface’ was never used in Shakespeare’s works, Liz Oakley-Brown shows how thinking about Shakespearean surfaces helps readers explore the politics of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. She also draws surprising parallels with our current political and ecological concerns. The book explores how Shakespeare uses ecological surfaces to help understand other types of surfaces in his plays and poems: characters’ public-facing selves; contact zones between characters and the natural world; surfaces upon which words are written; and physical surfaces upon which plays are staged. This book will be an illuminating read for anyone studying Shakespeare, early modern culture, ecocriticism, performance and activism.