Shakespeare Texts And Contexts

This volume focuses on both the texts of Shakespeare's plays, and the many contexts in which they have been produced, from their first performances to contemporary reproductions. This book introduces nine of Shakespeare's major plays and focuses on the critical practices of close reading, historical contextualisation, and a lively question-and-answer teaching style. There is also detailed attention to Shakespeare on stage, on film, and in the new communications technologies and to new theoretical approaches to Shakespeare's plays.

Includes a scene-by-scene synopsis, production history of the play, an overview of Shakespeare's career and more.

This volume highlights new aspects of several of Shakespeare’s plays, such as the role of women and the lower classes in the Roman tragedies, holding up a mirror to the powers that be. It also emphasizes the role of the early Shakespeare teachers at the first Indian College of Western Education. Even as it offers new perspectives on famous tragedies like Hamlet, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra, the book also includes chapters on topics like Shakespeare’s celebrated tree and Cleopatra’s enigmatic personality. As such, it will serve to be highly rewarding for Shakespeare specialists and enormously stimulating for students.

Seventeen critics are represented in this collection of essays designed to illustrate the vitality and range of traditional and new approaches to Shakespeare studies.

The text of Macbeth is reproduced and, in addition, five sections of primary documents and illustrations are included to give students first hand knowledge of the historical and cultural context to the work. The primary documents are arranged thematically and include illustrations and facsimiles of period documents; excerpts from King James's writings on politics, witchcraft, and religion; contemporary writings on the nature of kingship and tyrannicide; Puritan and Catholic tracts; conduct book literature; and contemporary witchcraft pamphlets.

This work offers an analysis of constitutional law, examining Shakespeare's plays as legal texts. Professor Ward uses the plays as a starting point to investigate the development of constitutional ideas such as sovereignty, commonwealth, conscience and moral law, and the art of government. In the developing area of law and literature, this book examines how Shakespeare's work offers a rich source of textual material on legal subjects.

Revisionist Shakespeare appropriates revisionist history in order to both criticize traditional transitional interpretations of Shakespearean drama and to offer a new methodology for understanding representations of social conflict in Shakespeare's play and in Early Modern English culture. Rather than argue that Shakespearean drama allegorizes historical transitions and ideological polarization, Revisionist Shakespeare argues that Shakespeare's plays explore the nature of internally contradictory Early Modern institutions and belief-systems that are only indirectly related to competing political and class ideologies. Such institutions and belief-systems include Elizabethan strategies for the management of vagrancy, the nature of Jacobean statecraft, objective and subjective theories of economic value, Protestant ethical theory, and Augustinian notions of sinful habituation. The book looks at five of Shakespeare's plays: The Tempest , Coriolanus , The Merchant of Venice , King Lear , and Hamlet .