Making Shakespeare

This volume offers a lively introduction to the major issues of the stage and print history of the plays, and discusses what a Shakespeare play actually is.

Making Shakespeare is a lively introduction to the major issues of the stage and print history, whilst also raising questions about what a Shakespeare play actually is. Tiffany Stern reveals how London, the theatre, the actors and the way in which the plays were written and printed all affect the 'Shakespeare' that we now read. Concentrating on the instability and fluidity of Shakespeare's texts, her book discusses what happened to a manuscript between its first composition, its performance on stage and its printing, and identifies traces of the production system in the plays we read. She argues that the versions of Shakespeare that have come down to us have inevitably been formed by the contexts from which they emerged; being shaped by, for example, the way actors received and responded to their lines, the props and music used in the theatre, or the continual revision of plays by the playhouses and printers. Allowing a fuller understanding of the texts we read and perform, Making Shakespeare is the perfect introduction to issues of stage and page. A refreshingly clear, accessible read, this book will allow even those with no expert knowledge to begin to contextualize Shakespeare's plays for themselves, in ways both old and new.

A revised and updated edition of Shakespeare's First Folio that explains the significance of the iconic publication. The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio offers the first comprehensive biography of the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. In November 1623, the book arrived in the bookshop of the London publisher Edward Blount at the Black Bear. Long in the making, Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies--as the First Folio was then known--appeared seven years after Shakespeare's death. Nearly one thousand pages in length, the collection comprised thirty-six plays, half of which had never been previously published. Yet no fanfare surrounded the initial publication of Shakespeare's First Folio--no queue of eager readers, no launch to the top of the best-seller list. Nevertheless, it is hard to overstate the importance of this literary, cultural, and commercial moment. Emma Smith tells the story of the First Folio's origins, locating it within the social and political context of Jacobean London and bringing in the latest scholarship on the seventeenth-century book trade. Generously illustrated in color with key pages from the publication and comparative works, this new edition combines the 2016 discovery of a hitherto unknown edition of the First Folio at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute with the human, artistic, economic and technical stories of the birth of this landmark publication--and the birth of Shakespeare's towering reputation.

He argues that Lear's "howl," for example, targets and rewards physical hearing, physical speaking, and their accompanying emotions as somatically connected to current or remembered sensations in mouth, throat, and lungs."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume offers a lively introduction to the major issues of the stage and print history of the plays, and discusses what a Shakespeare play actually is.

This collection of essays includes some of the most recent work of a master critic at the height of his powers. Of the fourteen essays, written from the late 1970's to the present, three have never before been published; the essays' appearance in a single volume makes available for the first time the full scope of Berger's unique approach to ethical discourses in Shakespeare's plays. The sequence of essays displays both the continuity and the revisionary development that mark his critical practice since the early work on The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, and the Elizabethan theater. When one compares Berger's earlier work from the 1960's with the writing from the 1980's and 1990's in the present collection, one sees that the difference stems primarily from the impact on the later work of his encounters with the whole range of structuralist and poststructuralist theory. Much of the excitement and vitality of Berger's current work comes from his efforts to incorporate new methodological influences into his previous system. Because he comes to poststructuralism as a mature critic whose larger interpretive framework is already in place, his response is not simply to immerse himself in the new theoretical modes and adopt them wholesale, but rather to make them his own. Among the plays discussed are The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, Macbeth, 2 Henry IV, Richard II--and, in two of the new essays, 1 Henry IV and Measure for Measure. Also new is Berger's retrospective account of his critical development in the extensive opening "Acknowledgments."

Women Making Shakespeare presents a series of 20-25 short essays that draw on a variety of resources, including interviews with directors, actors, and other performance practitioners, to explore the place (or constitutive absence) of women in the Shakespearean text and in the history of Shakespearean reception - the many ways women, working individually or in communities, have shaped and transformed the reception, performance, and teaching of Shakespeare from the 17th century to the present. The book highlights the essential role Shakespeare's texts have played in the historical development of feminism. Rather than a traditional collection of essays, Women Making Shakespeare brings together materials from diverse resources and uses diverse research methods to create something new and transformative. Among the many women's interactions with Shakespeare to be considered are acting (whether on the professional stage, in film, on lecture tours, or in staged readings), editing, teaching, academic writing, and recycling through adaptations and appropriations (film, novels, poems, plays, visual arts).

Part I examines the context for Shakespeare's history plays, including the a treatment of Elizabethan cosmology and its relevance to political order. Part 2 explores the 'Ricardian' plays, under the following headings: Mirrors of our Fickle State; Hawks and Handsaws: Modes and Genres of the Plays; This Blessed Plot: Husbandry and the Garden; Passing Brave to be a King: Richard II; This Royal Throne of Kings: Henry IV, parts 1 and 2; This Sceptred Isle: Henry V; A Trim Reckoning: Language, Poetics and Rhetoric.