Literary studies: plays and playwrights

‘Enlightening, moving’ SIR IAN MCKELLENFrom the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives. ‘The web of our...

Macbeth is often read in a singular fashion: either as a cautionarymorality tale warning against ambition, or as a psychological studyof evil. In Ambivalent Macbeth, renowned Shakespeare scholar R.S.White argues that these differing readings result from...

An “extraordinarily brilliant” and “pleasurably naughty” (André Aciman) investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy…and who the Bard might really be...

Elisa Gabbert's L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert...

The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio offers the first comprehensive biography of the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. In November 1623, the book arrived in the bookshop of the London publisher Edward Blount at the Black Bear. Long in...

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he is highlighting the late sixteenth-century belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In Romeo and Juliet,...

Within Shakespeare's lifetime there was already some curiosity about what the writer of such brilliant poems, sonnets and plays looked like. Yet like so much else about him, Shakespeare's appearance is mysterious.Why is it so difficult to find images of...

Was Shakespeare a snob? Poor Naked Wretches challenges the idea that our greatest writer despised working people, and shows that he portrayed them with as much insight, compassion and purpose as the rich and powerful. Moreover, they play an important...

Immerse yourself in Shakespeare's magical world, filled with supernatural encounters with faeries, ghosts and witches. Frolic with royalty, wander through forests, and experience love layered with enchantment. The Bard's use of these fantastical...

This groundbreaking work of scholarship explores convergences between performance and science through an investigation of new technologies that drive computer-mediated, interactive art. Wide-ranging and richly illustrated essays uncover shifts that have...

Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett's work across the world following the author's death in 1989, Beckett's afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts...

Shakespeare's London 1613 offers for the first time a comprehensive 'biography' of this crucial year in English history. The book examines political and cultural life in London, including the Jacobean court and the city, which together witnessed an...

This book deals with Shakespeare's role in contemporary culture. It looks in detail at the way that Shakespeare's plays inform modern ideas of cultural value and the work required to make Shakespeare part of modern culture. It is unique in using social...

This ground-breaking book provides an abundance of fresh insights into Shakespeare's life in relation to his lost family home, New Place. The findings of a major archaeological excavation encourage us to think again about what New Place meant to...

Philip Massinger's tragedy The Roman Actor, was first performed in 1626, as King James I's reign came to an end and his son Charles I acceded to the throne. Three years later, when the play was published, relations between the king and many in parliament...

This collection of essays is part of a new phase in Shakespeare studies. The traditional view of Shakespeare is that he was a man of the theatre who showed no interest in the printing of his plays, producing works that are only fully realised in...

Lunney explores Marlowe's engagement with the traditions of the popular stage in the 1580s and early 1590s and offers a new approach to his major plays in terms of staging and audience response, as well as providing a new account of English drama in...

This volume celebrates the life and work of Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's greatest modern poet and dramatist. The contributors are a stimulating blend of academics, poets and theatre professionals, all responding in a variety of ways to the creative...

The Henry VI plays are Shakespeare's earliest, most theatrically exciting plays and in their day, they were among his most popular works. In a story which stretches over thirty years, Shakespeare dramatises the fall of the House of Lancaster and creates...

In Renaissance Drama, the bastard is an extraordinarily powerful and disruptive figure. We have only to think of Caliban or of Edmund to realise the challenge presented by the illegitimate child.Drawing on a wide rage of play texts, Alison Findlay shows...

The heart of this book is its fully annotated, critical editions of the surviving work of Richard Edwards, one of the most influential poets and dramatists writing in England before Shakespeare. Ros King's extensive introduction, identifying the holes in...

Beginning Shakespeare introduces students to the study of Shakespeare, and grounds their understanding of his work in theoretical discourses. After an introductory survey of the dominant approaches of the past, seven chapters examine the major current...

Through a study of ten modern stage and screen productions of 'King Lear', this book examines the way performance and interpretation are bound together, and shows how different performances have illuminated the contradictions in this play. The updated...

Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, "Othello", with its issues of racism, jealousy and sexual stereotyping seems most immediate to contemporary audiences. This work traces Othello's acting tradition as it has affected the roles of Othello, Desdemona and Iago...

Completed only two months before the author's execution in Granada at the age of thirty-eight, La casa de Bernarda Alba marks the completion of Lorca's 'trilogia de la tierra espanola' and is commonly held to be his greatest play. The theme of vitality...

An international collection of the traditional tales that inspired some of Shakespeare's greatest playsShakespeare knew a good story when he heard one, and he wasn't afraid to borrow from what he heard or read, especially traditional folktales. The...