Ann Thompson

Lena Cowen Orlin

Lucy Munro

Sonia Massai

This collection brings together emerging and established scholars to explore fresh approaches to Shakespeare's best-known play. Hamlet has often served as a testing ground for innovative readings and new approaches. Its unique textual history – surviving as it does in three substantially different early versions – means that it offers an especially complex and intriguing case-study for histories of early modern publishing and the relationship between page and stage. Similarly, its long history of stage and screen revival, creative appropriation and critical commentary offer rich materials for various forms of scholarship. The essays in Hamlet: The State of Play explore the play from a variety of different angles, drawing on contemporary approaches to gender, sexuality, race, the history of emotions, memory, visual and material cultures, performativity, theories and histories of place, and textual studies. They offer fresh approaches to literary and cultural analysis, offer accessible introductions to some current ways of exploring the relationship between the three early texts, and present analysis of some important recent responses to Hamlet on screen and stage, together with a set of approaches to the study of adaptation.

Hamlet: The State of Play

Jennifer Flaherty

Heather C. Easterling

List of Illustrations -- Notes on Contributors -- Series Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction Heather C. Easterling, (Gonzaga University, USA) and Jennifer Flaherty (Georgia College, USA) -- Part I. Taming Shrews: Negotiating Early Modern Gender -- 1 -- Shakespeare's New Shrew -- Erin E. Kelly (University of Victoria, Canada) -- 2 -- Home-Schooling the Girl Stomach -- David Goldstein (York University, Canada) -- 3 -- The Taming of the Shrew : Afterlives and Oeconomics -- Romola Nuttall (King's College London, UK) -- Part II. Staging Modern Shrews : The Politics of Performance -- 4 -- Sometimes Crossing a Line: The Taming of the Shrew in Chicago and Stratford-upon-Avon -- David Bevington (University of Chicago, USA) -- 5 -- The Taming of the Shrew in Soviet Russia: Ideological Dangers of Structural Instability -- Natalia Khomenko (York University, Toronto, Canada) -- 6 -- Dissident Feminism at the End of the Franco Dictatorship: The New Taming of the Shrew (1975) -- Juan F. Cerd ̀(University of Murcia, Spain) -- 7 -- The Turn of the Shrew : Cross-Gender Casting in the Twenty-First Century -- Peter Kirwan (University of Nottingham, UK) -- 8 -- 'My tongue will tell the anger of my heart': Staging and Challenging Irish Womanhood at the Globe (2016) -- Emer McHugh, (National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland) -- Part III. Reclaiming the Shrew : Contemporary Transformations -- 9 -- Telling the Anger of Her Heart : (M)aligning the Stars in Taylor and Zeffirelli Taming of the Shrew Films -- Milla Cozart Riggio ( Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA) -- 10 -- 'The Right Foundation': Remaking Marriage in a Black Adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew -- Joyce Green MacDonald (University of Kentucky, USA) -- 11 -- Taming the Internet: Katherina, Bianca, and Digital Girlhood -- Jennifer Flaherty (Georgia College, USA) -- 12 -- 'Kate of My Consolation': Mary Cowden Clarke and Anne Tyler Revisit The Taming of the Shrew -- Sheila T. Cavanagh (Emory University, USA).

The Taming of the Shrew: The State of Play

A new biography of William Shakespeare that explores his private life in Stratford-upon-Avon, his personal aspirations, his self-determination, and his relations with the members of his family and his neighbours. The Private Life of William Shakespeare tells the story of Shakespeare in Stratford as a family man. The book offers close readings of key documents associated with Shakespeare and develops a contextual understanding of the genres from which these documents emerge. It reconsiders clusters of evidence that have been held to prove some persistent biographical fables. It also shows how the histories of some of Shakespeare's neighbours illuminate aspects of his own life. Throughout, we encounter a Shakespeare who consciously and with purpose designed his life. Having witnessed the business failures of his merchant father, he determined not to follow his father's model. His early wedding freed him from craft training to pursue a literary career. His wife's work, and probably the assistance of his parents and brothers, enabled him to make the first of the property purchases that grounded his life as a gentleman. With his will, he provided for both his daughters in ways that were suitable to their circumstances; Anne Shakespeare was already protected by dower rights in the houses and lands he had acquired. His funerary monument suggests that the man of 'small Latin and less Greek' in fact had some experience of an Oxford education. Evidences are that he commissioned the monument himself.

The Private Life of William Shakespeare

Othello has a long history of provoking profound emotion in its audiences and readers. This 'freeze frame' volume showcases current debates and ideas about the play's provocative effects. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to the needs of students, teachers, and researchers. Key issues and themes include: - Gender, Love, and Desire - Race, Ethnicity, and Difference - Social Relations, Status, and Ambition - Tragedy, Comedy, and Parody - Language, Expression, and Characterization All the essays offer new perspectives and combine to give readers an up-to-date understanding of what's exciting and challenging about Othello. The approach based on an individual play, unlike that of topic-based series, reflects how Shakespeare is most commonly studied and taught.

Othello: The State of Play

Gordon McMullan

Virginia Mason Vaughan

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).

Text, Reception and Performance

Women Making Shakespeare

With its focus on gender, power, race, sexuality, and violence, Othello is an important site for new critical approaches to the study of Shakespeare's works. Both criticism and culture are represented in this collection of recent essays which provides readers with examples of feminist, new-historicist, cultural materialist, deconstructive, and post-colonial perspectives on Othello. With discussions of recent stage and screen productions, and analysis of the use of the play in such contemporary events as the O.J. Simpson murder trial, this compelling critical volume presents a wide variety of ways of understanding the continuing significance of Shakespeare's play both in his own time and in ours.

Othello

Breathes new life into Shakespeare's story by establishing fresh interpretations of his baptism; evidence pertaining to his father; his wedding; his home; his will; and his monument.

Susan North

Ian W. Archer

Tarnya Cooper

Jane Eade

Includes over 60 portraits from public and private collections.

Elizabeth I & Her People

Stanley Wells

Christa Jansohn

Shakespeare without Boundaries offers a wide-ranging collection of essays written by an international team of distinguished scholars who attempt to define, to challenge, and to erode boundaries that currently inhibit understanding of Shakespeare, and to exemplify how approaches that defy traditional bounds of study and criticism may enhance understanding and enjoyment of a dramatist who acknowledged no boundaries in art.

Lena Cowen Orlin

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