The late William Ringler, Jr. and James Ogden examine the theatrical tradition from Shakespeare's time to the nineteenth century. The history of literary criticism to Bradley and beyond is sketched in the introduction, and recent criticism is described in more detail by Richard Levin. Carol Rutter's essay on the women characters in the play is inspired partly by feminist criticism and partly by recent productions. The productions of the last thirty years are covered by theater critic Benedict Nightingale, and the major film versions by Anthony Davies and Stephen Phillips. Finally, Stuart Sillars presents a "visual history," an account of artistic responses that suggests further possibilities for both research and teaching.

Drawing wide acclaim in hardcovera brilliant guide to management based on the principles explored in Shakespeares plays. Timelessly wise and externally popular, the plays of Shakespeare are packed with essential insights into human psychology and the use and abuse of power. In Shakespeare in Charge, Norman Augustine, former Fortune 500 CEO, and Kenneth Adelman, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, show how the Bards shrewd understanding of palace politics and the strategies of warfare can just as easily be applied to the twists and turns of the corporate world.

This book offers a theoretical rationale for the emerging presentist movement in Shakespeare studies and goes on to show, in a series of close readings, that a presentist Shakespeare is not an anachronism. Relying on a Brechtian aesthetic of "naïve surrealism" as the performative model of the early modern, urban, public theater, James O’Rourke demonstrates how this Brechtian model is able to capture the full range of interplays that could take place between Shakespeare’s words, the nonillusionist performance devices of the early modern stage, and the live audiences that shared the physical space of the theatre with Shakespeare’s actors. O’Rourke argues that the limitations placed upon the critical energies of early modern drama by the influential new historicist paradigm of contained subversion is based on a poetics of the sublime, which misrepresents the performative aesthetic of the theater as a self-sufficient spectacle that compels reception in its own terms. Reimagining Shakespeare as our contemporary, O’Rourke shows how the immanent critical logic of Shakespeare’s works can enter into dialogue with our most sophisticated critiques of our cultural fictions.

The textual foundations of works of great cultural significance are often less stable than one would wish them to be. No work of Homer, Dante or Shakespeare survives in utterly reliable witnesses, be they papyri, manuscripts or printed editions. Notions of textual authority have varied considerably across the ages under the influence of different (and differently motivated) agents, such as scribes, annotators, editors, correctors, grammarians, printers and publishers, over and above the authors themselves. The need for preserving the written legacy of peoples and nations as faithfully as possible has always been counterbalanced by a duty to ensure its accessibility to successive generations at different times and in different cultural contexts. The ten chapters collected in this volume offer critical approaches to such authors and texts as Homer, the Bible, The Thousand and One Nights, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Eliot, but also Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts uniquely combining word and image, as well as Beethoven's 'Tempest' sonata (Op. 31, No. 2) as seen from the angle of music as text. Together the contributors argue that an awareness of what the 'life of texts' entails is essential for a critical understanding of the transmission of culture.

Shakespeare's women rarely reach the end of the play alive. Whether by murder or by suicide, onstage or off, female actors in Shakespeare's works often find themselves 'playing dead.' But what does it mean to 'play dead', particularly for women actors, whose bodies become scrutinized and anatomized by audiences and fellow actors who 'grossly gape on'? In what ways does playing Shakespeare's women when they are dead emblematize the difficulties of playing them while they are still alive? Ultimately, what is at stake for the female actor who embodies Shakespeare's women today, dead or alive? Situated at the intersection of the creative and the critical, Performing Shakespeare's Women: Playing Dead engages performance history, current scholarship and the practical problems facing the female actor of Shakespeare's plays when it comes to 'playing dead' on the contemporary stage and in a post-feminist world. This book explores the consequences of corpsing Shakespeare's women, considering important ethical questions that matter to practitioners, students and critics of Shakespeare today.

Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare’s original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises ‘the play’ is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink