Stanley Wells

Margreta de Grazia

This book offers a comprehensive, readable and authoritative introduction to the study of Shakespeare, by means of nineteen newly commissioned essays. An international team of prominent scholars provide a broadly cultural approach to the chief literary, performative and historical aspects of Shakespeare's work. They bring the latest scholarship to bear on traditional subjects of Shakespeare study, such as biography, the transmission of the texts, the main dramatic and poetic genres, the stage in Shakespeare's time and the history of criticism and performance. In addition, authors engage with more recently defined topics: gender and sexuality, Shakespeare on film, the presence of foreigners in Shakespeare's England and his impact on other cultures. Helpful reference features include chronologies of the life and works, illustrations, detailed reading lists and a bibliographical essay.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare

"Margreta de Grazia continues to change the course of Shakespeare Studies in this book, where she focuses on four key terms: anachronism, chronology, periods, and the grand secular narrative. These "unassailable" terms, once considered the bedrock of what we "know" and how we study Shakespeare, are now under debate in our particular moment in the study of the past. Anachronism in Shakespeare's plays (e.g., how Homeric-era Trojan and Greek characters could possibly know Aristotle), once an embarrassment, is now enabling new ways of understanding the plays. Or the accepted chronological composition of the plays, however well documented they may be in performance, drifts further into the murky past as evidence of collaboration, revision, and multiple authorship continues to mount and cast doubt on how the plays relate to one another, and, ultimately how they all eventually relate to the Bard himself. How is it that it took until the nineteenth century for the plays to be performed with costumes and sets appropriate to the era in which a given play's action takes place? And why do we persist in assuming that the godlessness of King Lear's BC Albion necessarily prefigures the modern secularity to come, and not apprehend the tragedy in its own terms: as a pre-Christian drama exercising its own prerogative and worldview? In successive chapters, de Grazia slowly but steadily accumulates seemingly small historical and textual details, whose cumulative effect, as one of our readers says, will be like "a bomb thrown into one of the central rooms of the grand house of literary criticism." And while the book's archive is Shakespearean, its patient, painstaking method has lessons to teach literary scholars well beyond specialists of early modern England"--

Four Shakespearean Period Pieces

Maureen Quilligan

Peter Stallybrass

Margreta DeGrazia

This collection of original essays brings together some of the most prominent figures in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. The essays collected here bring objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, communion wafers, tools, pages, skulls - back into view. As a result, the much-vaunted early modern subject ceases to look autonomous and sovereign, but is instead caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects which he and she makes, owns, values, imagines, and represents. This book puts things back into relation with people; in the process, it elicits new critical readings, and new cultural configurations.

Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture

'Hamlet' without Hamlet sets out to counter the modern tradition of abstracting the character Hamlet from the play. For over two centuries, Hamlet has been valued as the icon of consciousness: but only by ignoring the hard fact of his dispossession. By admitting that premise, this book brings the play to life around man's relation to land, from graves to estate to empire. Key preoccupations are thereby released, including the gendered imperatives of genealogy, and man's elemental affinity to dust. As de Grazia demonstrates from the 400 years of Hamlet's afterlife, such features have disappeared into the vortex of an interiorized Hamlet, but they remain in the language of the play as well as in the earliest accounts of its production. Once reactivated, a very different Hamlet emerges, one whose thoughts and desires are thickly embedded in the worldly, and otherworldly, matters of the play: a Hamlet within Hamlet.

Margreta de Grazia

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