Where Are We Now In Shakespearean Studies

This title was first published in 2002. This second volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues the work of assessing the present state of Shakespeare studies in the new millennium. Comprising 20 essays by distinguished scholars from North America, the UK and Australia, it is divided into sections on criticism and theory; text, textuality and technology; Renaissance ideas and conventions; and Shakespeare and the city. The essays address issues that are fundamental to our interpretive encounter with Shakespeare, including those of gender and sexuality, the staging of plays, and historical research on matters such as the monarchy, language, religion, and the law.

This title was first published in 2002. This second volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues the work of assessing the present state of Shakespeare studies in the new millennium. Comprising 20 essays by distinguished scholars from North America, the UK and Australia, it is divided into sections on criticism and theory; text, textuality and technology; Renaissance ideas and conventions; and Shakespeare and the city. The essays address issues that are fundamental to our interpretive encounter with Shakespeare, including those of gender and sexuality, the staging of plays, and historical research on matters such as the monarchy, language, religion, and the law.

With this volume, The Shakespearean International Yearbook inaugurates a new feature-a special section, which in this issue is 'shakespeare in the Age of Cognitive Science.' The guest editor for the section is Mark Turner, Institute Professor, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Interim Chair, Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, USA. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and new developments in contemporary Shakespeare research. Representing truly international perspectives on Shakespeare studies, in this issue contributors come from not only the US and the UK but also Japan, Denmark, Canada, and Australia. They appraise or reappraise current thinking about such diverse matters as scepticism, ethnicity, performance, theatrical and textual practices, and translations or adaptations. Essays on the plays and poems tend to focus on 'where we are now', and what has changed, is changing, or ought to change.

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

This second edition of Erne's groundbreaking study includes a new preface that reviews the controversy the book has triggered.

The Romantics invented Shakespeare studies, and in losing contact with our origins, we have not been able to develop an adequate alternative foundation on which to build our work. This book asserts that among Shakespeareans at present, the level of conviction required to sustain a healthy critical practice is problematically if not dangerously low, and the qualities which the Romantics valued in an engagement with Shakespeare are either ignored these days or fundamentally misunderstood.

William Shakespeare lived at a remarkable time—a period we now recognize as the first phase of the Scientific Revolution. New ideas were transforming Western thought, the medieval was giving way to the modern, and the work of a few key figures hinted at the brave new world to come: the methodical and rational Galileo, the skeptical Montaigne, and—as Falk convincingly argues—Shakespeare, who observed human nature just as intently as the astronomers who studied the night sky. In The Science of Shakespeare, we meet a colorful cast of Renaissance thinkers, including Thomas Digges, who published the first English account of the "new astronomy" and lived in the same neighborhood as Shakespeare; Thomas Harriot—"England's Galileo"—who aimed a telescope at the night sky months ahead of his Italian counterpart; and Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose observatory-castle stood within sight of Elsinore, chosen by Shakespeare as the setting for Hamlet—and whose family crest happened to include the names "Rosencrans" and "Guildensteren." And then there's Galileo himself: As Falk shows, his telescopic observations may have influenced one of Shakespeare's final works. Dan Falk's The Science of Shakespeare explores the connections between the famous playwright and the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution—and how, together, they changed the world forever.