Let Wonder Seem Familiar

Dr White examines the ways in which Shakespeare uses formal conventions from romance throughout his writing career, especially in giving formal completion to a play without forfeiting the 'open-ended' sense of life's complexity. In his romantic comedies these conventions are modified to imply that the cosy womb of marriage is not the end of lovers' lives; in the 'problem' comedies they are used to challenge the artifice of the comic ending; in some tragedies they are used to provide an ideal of fulfilment which has been destroyed by the tragic events - and in the last plays or 'romances' they are used to invoke the full sense of life's continuing comprehensiveness.

In the first part of this book, Adam Max Cohen embraces the many meanings of wonder in order to challenge the generic divides between comedy, tragedy, history, and romance and suggests that Shakespeare's primary goal in crafting each of his playworlds was the evocation of one or more varieties of wonder.

This book frames the undeniably copious 21st-century performances of stupidity that occur within social media as echoes of rhetorical experiments conducted by humanist writers of the Renaissance. Any historical overview of humanism will associate it with copia—abundance of expression—and the rhetorical practices essential to managing it. This book argues that stupidity was and is a synonym for copia, making the humanism of which copia is a central element an inherently stupid philosophy. A transhistorical exploration of stupidity demonstrates that not only is excess still the surest way to eloquence, but it is also just the kind of spammy, speculative undertaking to generate a more generous and inventive comprehension of human and nonhuman relationships. In chapters exploring the rhetorics of memes, attack ads, public shaming blogs, clickbait and gifs, Stupid Humanism outlines the possibilities for a humanism less invested in the normative logics that enshrine knowledge, eloquence and linear development as the chief indicators of an active, articulated selfhood and more supportive of a program for queer knowledge, trivial pursuits, anti-social ethics and the curious relationships that form around and in response to abundance of expression.

This engaging book demonstrates Shakespeare’s abiding interest in the theatrical potential of the Christian resurrection from the dead. In fourteen of Shakespeare’s plays, characters who have been lost, sometimes for years, suddenly reappear seemingly returning from the dead. In the classical recognition scene, such moments are explained away in naturalistic terms a character was lost at sea but survived, or abducted and escaped, and so on. Shakespeare never invalidates such explanations, but in his manipulation of classical conventions he parallels these moments with the recognition scenes from the Gospels, repeatedly evoking Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Benson’s close study of the plays, as well as the classical and biblical sources that Shakespeare fuses into his recognition scenes, clearly elucidates the ways in which the playwright explored his abiding interest in the human desire to transcend death and to live reunited and reconciled with others. In his manipulation of resurrection imagery, Shakespeare conflates the material with the immaterial, the religious with the secular, and the sacred with the profane.

Arden Performance Editions are ideal for anyone engaging with a Shakespeare play in performance. With clear facing-page notes giving definitions of words, easily accessible information about key textual variants, lineation, metrical ambiguities and pronunciation, each edition has been developed to open the play's possibilities and meanings to actors and students. Designed to be used and to be useful, each edition has plenty of space for personal annotations and the well-spaced text is easy to read and to navigate.