R.S. White

This lively and informative guide to Shakespeare's popular comedy equips you with the critical skills to analyse its language, structure and themes and to expand and enrich your own response to the play. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a perfect play for exploring Shakespeare's diverse uses of language to reveal character and themes, from formal iambics and rhyming couplets of courtiers and lovers, and 'warbling' notes' and nursery rhythms of fairies, to stocky prose by the artisan players including Bottom's comic malapropisms. An introduction considers when and how the play was written, and addresses the language with which Shakespeare created A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal. It then moves to a detailed examination and analysis of the play, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies; an account of the play's performance history and its critical reception completes the volume. Each chapter offers a 'Writing matters' section, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Language and Writing

Dr White examines the ways in which Shakespeare uses formal conventions from romance throughout his writing career, especially in giving formal completion to a play without forfeiting the 'open-ended' sense of life's complexity. In his romantic comedies these conventions are modified to imply that the cosy womb of marriage is not the end of lovers' lives; in the 'problem' comedies they are used to challenge the artifice of the comic ending; in some tragedies they are used to provide an ideal of fulfilment which has been destroyed by the tragic events - and in the last plays or 'romances' they are used to invoke the full sense of life's continuing comprehensiveness.

Shakespeare and the Romance Ending

Let Wonder Seem Familiar

In this book White "traces the influence of both the comedies and tragedies [of Shakespeare] on Keats's work." Choice

Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare

As one of the world's greatest love stories Romeo and Juliet continues to excite new theatre-goers, readers and film-goers. Its depiction of tragic lovers strikes a chord in each generation of young people, and seems to speak in their own idiom. As such, it reflects, and allows us to analyse, changing attitudes to sex in a violent world. This collection of contemporary essays raises topical debates about the nature of love conventions, as well as offering new insights into Shakespeare's text.

Romeo and Juliet

Paul Megna

Bríd Phillips

This volume bears potent testimony, not only to the dense complexity of Hamlet’s emotional dynamics, but also to the enduring fascination that audiences, adaptors, and academics have with what may well be Shakespeare’s moodiest play. Its chapters explore emotion in Hamlet, as well as the myriad emotions surrounding Hamlet’s debts to the medieval past, its relationship to the cultural milieu in which it was produced, its celebrated performance history, and its profound impact beyond the early modern era. Its component chapters are not unified by a single methodological approach. Some deal with a single emotion in Hamlet, while others analyse the emotional trajectory of a single character, and still others focus on a given emotional expression (e.g., sighing or crying). Some bring modern methodologies for studying emotion to bear on Hamlet, others explore how Hamlet anticipates modern discourses on emotion, and still others ask how Hamlet itself can complicate and contribute to our current understanding of emotion.

Hamlet and Emotions

Macbeth is often read in a singular fashion: either as a cautionary morality tale warning against ambition, or as a psychological study of evil. In Ambivalent Macbeth, renowned Shakespeare scholar R. S. White argues that these differing readings result from a profoundly ambivalent play, and that this quality is a clue to its greatness. White explores how radical ambivalence permeates the atmosphere, imagery, themes and characterisation of ‘the Scottish play’. He considers Shakespeare’s historical context and source material, and examines key cinematic, theatrical and other adaptations of the play. Throughout, he argues that an open-minded acceptance of ambivalence can inspire a multitude of readings, and that this complexity helps to explain the play’s intriguing longevity.

R.S. White

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