A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country’s foremost authorities on his life and work. Drawing on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years, Marjorie Garber offers passionate and revealing readings of the plays in chronological sequence, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen. Supremely readable and engaging, and complete with a comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare’s life and times and an extensive bibliography, this magisterial work is an ever-replenishing fount of insight on the most celebrated writer of all time.

A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country’s foremost authorities on his life and work. Drawing on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years, Marjorie Garber offers passionate and revealing readings of the plays in chronological sequence, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen. Supremely readable and engaging, and complete with a comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare’s life and times and an extensive bibliography, this magisterial work is an ever-replenishing fount of insight on the most celebrated writer of all time.

From one of the world's premier Shakespeare scholars comes a magisterial new study whose premise is "that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare." Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as "naturally" true: ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, from James Joyce's Ulysses to George W. Bush's reading list. From the persistence of difference in Othello to the matter of character in Hamlet to the untimeliness of youth in Romeo and Juliet, Garber discusses how these ideas have been re-imagined in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news, and in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law. Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a brilliant recasting of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of the protean Shakespeare.

An electrifying new study that investigates the challenges of the Bard’s inconsistencies and flaws, and focuses on revealing—not resolving—the ambiguities of the plays and their changing topicality A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no other. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of. But it doesn’t tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant. In This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith—an intellectually, theatrically, and ethically exciting writer—takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd (the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day), flirting with and skirting around the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex. Instead of offering the answers, the Shakespeare she reveals poses awkward questions, always inviting the reader to ponder ambiguities.

No writer has served as such a powerful source of inspiration for other writers as Shakespeare. No writer has attracted such widespread and varied comment. This unique anthology draws on the vast literature that plays little part in formal Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, but that shows with immediacy and passion the enormous impact Shakespeare has had on our cultural life. Novelists, poets, and playwrights are all represented. So are philosophers, historians, composers, film-makers, politicians. Shakespearean characters and motifs are shown fuelling the genius of Goethe and Dostoevsky, Aldous Huxley and Emily Dickinson, John Updike and Duke Ellington, Nabokov and Proust. Shakespeare the man fires the imagination of Kipling and Joyce, Borges and Anthony Burgess. Herman Melville writes a poem about Falstaff. D. H. Lawrence anatomizes Hamlet. R. K. Narayan describes a Shakespeare lesson in an Indian classroom. John Osborne adapts Coriolanus. Ionescu reworks Macbeth.The choice of critical responses is equally wide-ranging. Jean-Paul Sartre proves an unexpectedly expert commentator on King Lear. Alfred Dreyfus and Nelson Mandela console themselves with Shakespeare during their imprisonment. And curiosities abound - parodies, burlesques, strange echoes and eccentricities. Throughout the book we can see Shakespeare changing lives, opening up fresh horizons and reaching out to 'the great globe itself'.

Shakespeare, Our Contemporary is a provocative, original study of the major plays of Shakespeare. More than that, it is one of the few critical works to have strongly influenced theatrical productions. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz are among the many directors who have acknowledged their debt to Jan Kott, finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage conceptions. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary has been translated into nineteen languages since it appeared in 1961, and readers all over the world have similarly found their responses to Shakespeare broadened and enriched.

Shakespeare in mass media - particularly film, video, and television - is arguably the hottest, fastest growing research agenda in Shakespeare studies. Shakespeare after Mass Media provides students and scholars with the most comprehensive resource available on the market for studying the pop cultural afterlife of The Bard. From marketing to electronic Shakespeare, comics to romance novels, Star Trek to Branagh, radio and popular music to Bartlett's Quotations , the volume explores the contemporary cultural significance of Shakespeare in an unprecedently broad array of mass media contexts. With theoretical sophistication and accessible writing, it will be the ideal text for courses on Shakespeare and mass media.