Do you long to be seductive? Have a desire to be seduced? Then “let lips do what hands do” and put into practice the most enticing baubles of seduction ever written. Shakespeare and the Art of Verbal Seduction contains the Bard’s best seducing lines to cajole, charm, and even proposition the object of your desire. Shakespeare is the master of persuasion. He induces the hardest of hearts to give up mind, body, and soul with a brilliant flash of words. Here they’re collected for you, his little miracles of language, arranged in ten strategies for every stage of a love affair, from first encounter to the full throes of passion. Never again let your desire flounder in bad come-ons. Learn the art of seduction from the greatest seducer of all time, and get what you want.

Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted English author of all time. Quotations appear everywhere, from the epigraphs of novels to the mottoes on coffee cups. But Shakespeare was also a frequent quoter himself - of classical and contemporary literature, of the Bible, of snatches of popular songs and proverbs. This volume brings together an international team of scholars to trace the rich history of quotation from Shakespeare's own lifetime to the present day. Exploring a wide range of media, including Romantic poetry, theatre criticism, novels by Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Ian McEwan, political oratory, propaganda, advertising, drama, film and digital technology, the chapters draw fresh connections between Shakespeare's own practices of creative reworking and the quotation of his work in new and traditional forms. Richly illustrated and featuring an Afterword by Margreta de Grazia, the collection tells a new story of the making and remaking of Shakespeare's plays and poems.

Borrowing its title from renowned scholar Alexander Leggatt's landmark 1974 study, Shakespeare's Comedies of Love is a tribute to a critic who has shaped the way the world understands Shakespeare and his comedies. To help celebrate his distinguished career as a teacher and scholar, this collection of essays presents a wide range of new work on the Bard's comedies. The contributors cover diverse areas of inquiry, including the use of the comedies as a source of women's empowerment in nineteenth-century America; civic drama in Elizabethan London; male anxiety about women in the comedies; anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice; as well as some key productions of Shakespeare's comedies. Rich in detail and broad in scope, Shakespeare's Comedies of Love is a celebration of Leggatt's distinguished career, and an enduring collection of work on the world's most famous writer.

This collection of essays brings together innovative scholarship on Shakespeare’s afterlives in tribute to Christy Desmet. Contributors explore the production and consumption of Shakespeare in acts of adaptation and appropriation across a range of performance topics, from book history to the novel to television, cinema, and digital media.

Be calm good wind, blow not a word away for this is a meticulous account of Sir Francis Bacon's lifetime, written as journal entries, and with his style: I have no more made my book, than my book has made me: 'tis a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a member of my life, and whose business is not designed for others, as that of all other books.

Shakespeare’s Verbal Art is a profoundly important study of the newly rediscovered anagrams that lie hidden below the surface of all Shakespearean texts. It explains the essential role played by these concealed figures in Classical and Renaissance poetry, demonstrating the revelatory function of anagram by reference to the close analysis of a wide range of examples. Special attention is given to Shakespeare’s use of these sub-textual devices to clarify meaning and intention. The focus is first on Shake-speares Sonnets of 1609, and secondly on Hamlet, Othello and Twelfth Night, all of which are found to be composed around the concealed anagrams that render these works self-interpreting. A new kind of language use is revealed, in terms of which pre-Enlightenment text is envisaged as existing in two distinct dimensions – the overt and the covert – both of which must be read if any particular poem or play is to be fully understood. In effect, a wholly new set of Shakespearean texts is made available to the reader, who will find Shakespeare’s Verbal Art an essential guide to the new discoveries. The book will also be indispensable in the fields of Classical and Renaissance literature, linguistics, poetics, rhetoric, and literary history, and in relation to the pre-Enlightenment text in general, and will interest both the specialist and the general reader.