Shakespeare Studies

This labour of love by 60 Shakespeare specialists covers all aspects of Shakespearean studies with one volume on his era, one on critical analysis of his work and one on his influence on 20th-century actors, writers, directors and musicians.

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare is the most comprehensive reference work available on Shakespeare's life, times, works, and his 400-year global legacy. In addition to the authoritative A-Z entries, it includes nearly 100 illustrations, a chronology, a guide to further reading, a thematic contents list, and special feature entries on each of Shakespeare's works.

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Examines each of Shakespeare's plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis.

This Companion to Shakespeare is an indispensable book for students and teachers of Shakespeare, indeed for anyone with an interest in his plays.

Though he wrote 400 years ago, Shakespeare is still very much alive today. This vast encyclopedia attests to that fact through hundreds of entries chronicling the presence of the Bard in contemporary popular culture, including radio, film, television, and other media to which his works have been adapted. Each section begins with an overview essay, followed by entries on individual plays, including stage histories and biographies of actors and directors. Students will find this a handy reference for comparing Shakespeare's plays to modern adaptations of them, while general readers will treasure it as a guide to Shakespeare's enduring legacy.

Writers will save hours of valuable research time and bring a richness and historical accuracy to their work as they reference the slice-of-life facts depicted for each of these major time periods. Each book contains descriptions of the period's food and clothes; customs and slang; occupations; common religious and political practices; and other historical details.

The only historical dictionary that focuses on sixteenth-century England, this reference work offers nearly 300 articles on the age of the English Tudors. The England of Shakespeare, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I is one of the most popular periods of British history. Ronald H. Fritze and his associate editors have identified the political, military, religious, social, and economic issues that were crucial to the era, and have compiled articles, a chronology and suggestions for further reading on each topic. Sixty Tudor England specialists contributed to the nearly 300 entries, each of which includes an appendix with a chronology and a selected bibliography for further reading. The primary focus is on England, but a number of articles on Scottish and Irish history have been included when they relate to England.

A ready reference for general readers, undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, and scholars, this volume contains 320 entries by 80 experts, covering a broad range of topics, plus a lengthy chronology and extensive bibliography. The entries are based on current scholarship and are followed by pertinent references. Among the items included are biographies of kings and queens, ministers, opposition leaders, ecclesiastics, and literary figures; entries on the army, navy, courts, and other institutions; local government and officials; important court cases and documents, such as the Great Contract, Petition of Right, and Bill of Rights; and controversial examples of the Royal prerogative, such as the dispensing and suspending of powers. The volume also covers the Civil Wars, Glorious Revolution, and other rebellions; the Dutch, French, and Spanish Wars; and diplomatic events. Anglicanism, Puritanism, and other religious topics are included as well as political groups, such as the Cavaliers and Roundheads, and radicals like the Diggers and Fifth Monarchists. Social and economic topics include agriculture, mercantilism, poor laws, population, and taxation. The dictionary also covers cultural topics, conceptual topics such as divine right, and topics on women. Although the book focuses on England, it also includes entries on Ireland, Scotland, and Wales and topics relating to those areas.

The individuals and events of the Elizabethan era continue to be popular topics for contemporary literature and film, and Elizabethan drama, poetry, and music are studied and enjoyed everywhere by students, scholars, and the general public. The Historical Dictionary of the Elizabethan World provides its users with clear definitions and descriptions of people, events, institutions, ideas, and terminology relating in some significant way to the Elizabethan period. The first dictionary of history to focus exclusively on the reign of Elizabeth I, this volume is also the first to take abroad trans-Atlantic approach to the period by including relevant individuals and terms from Irish, Scottish, Welsh, American, and Western European history.

'The History of Shakespeare in America,' writes James Shapiro in his introduction to this groundbreaking anthology. 'is also the history of America itself.' From our beginnings as a nation, Shakespeare has been a central, inescapable part of our literary heritage, a figure so widely revered that, as Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, there was 'hardly a pioneer's hut' without a volume or tow. Shakespeare in Americareveals how, for over two centuries, the plays have been a prism through which crucial American issues - revolution, slavery, war, social justice - were refracted, debated, and understood. Shapiro traces the rich and surprising story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own through a wide range of genres - poetry, fiction, essays, plays, memoirs, songs, speeches, letters, movie reviews, and comedy routines - and a remarkable roster of American writers- from Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James to James Agee, John Berryman, Pauline Kael, Isaac Asimov, Adrienne Rich, and Jane Smiley. The anthology also tracks the multitude of ways in which American theater and film have been indelibly marked by Shakespeare- actors from Charlotte Cushman and Edwin Booth to John Barrymore, Paul Robeson, and Marlon Brando reinterpret Shakespeare for each new era; the legendary productions of New York's Yiddish theater are evoked in Cynthia Ozick's story 'Actors'; in the Depression years, Orson Welles revolutionizes Shakespearean performance with is landmark productions of Macbethand Julius Caesar; the creators of Kiss Me, Kateand West Side Storywrite Shakespeare into the history of the classic American musical theater; and Joseph Papp, renewing a once-flourishing popular taste for the plays, establishes a New York tradition with Shakespeare in the Park.

The Tudor and Stuart eras have been described as England's golden age, in large part because of the flowering of its literary and dramatic culture. Ironically, repressive government controls over freedom of expression existed side-by-side with some of the greatest literary accomplishments of the age, and many of the same issues we wrestle with today were being hotly debated in Renaissance England. Each provides basic factual information, including the name of the author, the publication date, the date of censorship, the type of work, and the offending issue; a discussion of the work's historical context; a synopsis of the contents; an examination of how the work was censored; and a brief bibliography. Although there is a wealth of information on censorship in the twentieth century, this is one of the few reference books to address censorship during the Renaissance.

This Dictionary, the first of its kind, defines and explains over 900 terms found in the stage directions of English professional plays from the 1580s to the early 1640s. The terms are drawn primarily from surviving printed and manuscript sources, and from the plays performed on the London stage, by both minor and major dramatists. The authors draw on a database of over 22,000 stage directions drawn from around 500 such plays. Each entry offers a definition, gives examples of how the term is used, cites additional instances, and gives cross-references to other relevant entries. Terms defined range from the obvious and common to the obscure and rare, including actions, places, objects, sounds and descriptions. The authors have also provided a user's guide and an introduction which describes the scope and rationale of the volume. This will be an indispensable work of reference for scholars, historians, directors and actors.

Vince introduces readers to the sources of information available to the theatre historian, and to some of the methods that have been used in the interpretation of that evidence. He provides an analytical survey of the principal written and artifactual evidence for the history of the Renaissance theatres of Italy, Spain, England, and France. The book includes a discussion of the various types of evidence available to the theatre historian, with special reference to those sources that have proved to be of central importance, and an evaluative sketch of some of the most significant scholarship. Wherever possible, the reader is directed to original documents and sources that reproduce primary evidence. Each chapter concludes with a reference bibliography.

Shakespeare's Theatre consolidates the author's forty years of experience in studying and staging Shakespeare's plays. Under an alphabetical list of relevant terms, names and concepts, the book reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins. Coverage includes the practices of Elizabethan actors and script writers: methods of characterization; gesture, blocking and choreography, including music, dance and fighting; actors' rhetorical interaction with audiences; and use of costumes, stage props, and make-up. The author makes use of scripts and scholarship about original stagings of Shakespeare and suggests how those productions related to modern staging. Much of this material has developed as a result of the recent increased interest in the significance of performance for interpreting Shakespeare, including the recovery of the archaeological evidence about the original Rose and Globe Theaters. The book contains current bibliographies for each topic and consolidates these in an overall bibliography for Shakespeare and his theaters.