Temporality Genre And Experience In The Age Of Shakespeare

1. Illuminating -- 2. Synthesizing -- 3. Misaligning -- 4. Proliferating -- 5. Pleating

Focusing on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, these original essays by leading scholars explore how theatrical, aesthetic, and linguistic forms engage early modern experiences of temporality. Encompassing comedy, tragedy, history, and romance, some contributions consider how different models of pastness, presentness, sequentiality, memory, and historical meaning underwrite particular representational practices. Others, conversely, investigate how aesthetic forms afforded diverse ways for early-modern people to understand or experience time - and how this can impact us today.

An original study of the ways in which temporal concepts and gendered identities intersect in early modern theatre and culture.

The first book to systematically combine the two vibrant yet hitherto unconnected fields of memory and affect in Shakespeare's England.

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays—plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars—in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.

The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface provides a ground-breaking investigation into media-specific spaces where Shakespeare is experienced. While such operations may be largely invisible to the average reader or viewer, the interface properties of books, screens, and stages profoundly mediate our cognitive engagement with Shakespeare. This volume considers contemporary debates and questions including how mobile devices mediate the experience of Shakespeare; the impact of rapidly evolving virtual reality technologies and the interface architectures which condition Shakespearean plays; and how design elements of hypertext, menus, and screen navigation operate within internet Shakespeare spaces. Charting new frontiers, this diverse collection delivers fresh insight into human–computer interaction and user-experience theory, cognitive ecology, and critical approaches such as historical phenomenology. This volume also highlights the application of media and interface design theory to questions related to the medium of the play and its crucial interface with the body and mind.

This new volume in the Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition series increases our knowledge of how Antony and Cleopatra has been received and understood by critics, editors and general readers. The volume provides, in separate sections, both critical opinions about the play across the centuries and an evaluation of their positions within and their impact on the reception of the play. The chronological arrangement of the text-excerpts engages the readers in a direct and unbiased dialogue, and the introduction offers a critical evaluation from a current stance, including modern theories and methods. This volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the play and of the traditions of Shakespearean criticism surrounding it as they have developed from century to century.

Shakespeare / Space explores new approaches to the enactment of 'space' in and through Shakespeare's plays, as well as to the material, cognitive and virtual spaces in which they are enacted. With contributions from 14 leading and emergent experts in their fields, the collection forges innovative connections between spatial studies and cultural geography, cognitive studies, memory studies, phenomenology and the history of the emotions, gender and race studies, rhetoric and language, translation studies, theatre history and performance studies. Each chapter offers methodological reflections on intersections such as space/mobility, space/emotion, space/supernatural, space/language, space/race and space/digital, whose critical purchase is demonstrated in close readings of plays like King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, Othello and Shakespeare's history plays. They testify to the importance of space for our understanding of Shakespeare's creative and theatrical practice, and at the same time enlarge our understanding of space as a critical concept in the humanities. It will prove useful to students, scholars, teachers and theatre practitioners of Shakespeare and early modern studies.