Shakespeare Aphra Behn And The Canon

A clear introduction to the idea of the canon, exploring the process by which certain works, and not others, receive high cultural status. The work of Shakespeare and Aphra Behn is used to illustrate and challenge this process.

A clear introduction to the idea of the canon, exploring the process by which certain works, and not others, receive high cultural status. The work of Shakespeare and Aphra Behn is used to illustrate and challenge this process.

This annotated bibliography constitutes a thoroughly revised and more easily readable study of Behn's publications, of those edited or translated by her, of publications that included her works, and of writings ascribed to her, along with an annotated bibliography of over 1600 works about her from 1671 to 2001, with an unannotated update covering 2002. The augmented primary bibliography describes all known editions and issues of her works to 1702, and adds a catalogue of editions to 2002, including on-line sources. The secondary bibliography adds close to 1000 items published since 1984 to the original 600 of the first edition along with about 175 more from 1671 to 1984, with attention to materials not in English. New appendices include a list of dedicatees, actors, recent productions (with reviews), and provenances. This volume will be invaluable for book dealers, collectors and librarians, as well as students and scholars of Aphra Behn and of Restoration literature.

This volume, published annually, contains essays by critics and cultural historians, as well as reviews of the many books and essays dealing with the cultural history of medieval and early modern England as expressed by and realised in its drama.

This book introduces students to drama from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the early 18th Century. Susan Owen offers representative coverage of new forms of drama in this period, and of ways in which old forms are altered. Her study covers heroic drama, comedy, tragedy, tragi-comedy, and Shakespeare adaptations, by focusing on specific 'dramatic highlights' and giving close reading of particular plays.

Aphra Behn is significant as an early example of a successful professional woman writer. This analysis of her influence on literature argues the need for a feminist revision of the writer who had literary sons as well as daughters.

Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre studies the representation of gender in four of the most important plays by the leading professional women playwrights of the late Stuart period. Behn's The Rover (1677) and The Luckey Chance (1686) and Centlivre's The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) are first placed in their original theatrical and cultural contexts and then studied through subsequent productions and adaptations extending from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. The detailed analysis of these plays is framed by a discussion of the cultural position of the playwrights and the kind of comedy they wrote. The survival of these plays in the repertoire offers an unusual opportunity to examine the theatrical 'double life' of works by early women playwrights. The lengthy production histories of these comedies placed them in dialogue with radically different ideas of appropriate and permissible behavior for both women and men. The resulting productions, alterations, and adaptations included both feminist reinterpretations and recuperations of the plays' challenges to dominant meanings of gender. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of dramatic literature, theatre, and women's studies.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of the previous year's textual and critical studies and of major British performances. The books are illustrated with a variety of Shakespearean images and production photographs. The current editor of Survey is Peter Holland. The first eighteen volumes were edited by Allardyce Nicoll, numbers 19-33 by Kenneth Muir and numbers 34-52 by Stanley Wells. The virtues of accessible scholarship and a keen interest in performance, from Shakespeare's time to our own, have characterised the journal from the start. For the first time, numbers 1-50 are being reissued in paperback, available separately and as a set.