Supporters filled the house to ensure a positive reception, but as the curtain went up, no one could suspect the disaster that was to ensue.

 Twenty-four of today's most prominent Shakespeare scholars discuss the best-known works in Shakespeare studies, along with some nearly forgotten classics that deserve fresh appraisal. An extensive bibliography provides a reading list of the most important works in the field. A filmography then lists the most important Shakespeare films, along with the films that influenced Shakespeare filmmakers. Interviewees include Sir Stanley Wells, Sir Jonathan Bate, Sir Brian Vickers, Ann Thompson, Virginia Mason Vaughan, George T. Wright, Lukas Erne, MacDonald P. Jackson, Peter Holland, James Shapiro, Katherine Duncan-Jones and Barbara Hodgdon.

On the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this collection opens up the social practices of commemoration to new research and analysis. An international team of leading scholars explores a broad spectrum of celebrations, showing how key events - such as the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Second Vatican Council of 1964 and the Great Exhibition of 1851 - drew on Shakespeare to express political agendas. In the USA, commemoration in 1864 counted on him to symbolise unity transcending the Civil War, while the First World War pulled the 1916 anniversary celebration into the war effort, enlisting Shakespeare as patriotic poet. The essays also consider how the dream of Shakespeare as a rural poet took shape in gardens, how cartoons challenged the poet's élite status and how statues of him mutated into advertisements for gin and Disney cartoons. Richly varied illustrations supplement these case studies of the diverse, complex and contradictory aims of memorialising Shakespeare.

Examines representations of Anne Hathaway from the eighteenth century to contemporary portrayals in theatre, biographies and novels.

Remediating Shakespeare in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries analyzes literary remediations of Shakespeare’s works, particularly those written for young readers. This book explores adaptations, revisions, and reimaginings by Lewis Theobald, the Bowdlers, the Lambs, and Mary Cowden Clarke, among others, to provide a theoretical account of the poetics and practices of remediating literary texts. Considering the interplay between the historical fascination with Shakespeare and these practices of adaptation, this book examines the endless attempt to mediate our relationship to Shakespeare. Howard Marchitello investigates the motivations behind various forms of remediation, ultimately expanding theories of literary adaptation and appropriation.

This book considers the impact of the eighteenth century on Shakespeare, and vice versa. It describes how actors, critics, painters, and Enlightenment philosophers read and responded to Shakespeare's plays and poems, and how those plays and poems changed their lives.

A "romp through the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him became an act of blasphemy--and who the Bard might really be"--