'Shakespeare in Art' looks at the huge variety of painters who made Shakespeare's extremes of passion, his evocations of nature, his spirit world and his eternally familiar characters the subjects of their own work. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Western culture.

Othello remains one of Shakespeare's most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlight’s the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has. In twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in Othello the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him. The first play in the Seeing Shakespeare Series, Othello is illustrated by English contemporary artist Chris Ofili. Future titles in the series include A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Marcel Dzama and The Merchant of Venice with images by Jordan Wolfson.

The contribution of the present work is to present in organized detail essentially complete the general theory of composition current during the Renaissance (as contrasted with special theories for particular forms of composition) and the illustration of Shakespeare’s use of it. It is organized as follows: Part One: Introduction I. The General Theory of Composition and of Reading in Shakespeare’s England 1. The Concept of Art in Renaissance England 2. Training in the Arts in Renaissance England 3. The English Works on Logic and Rhetoric 4. The Tradition 5. Invention and Disposition Part Two. Shakespeare’s Use of the Theory II. Shakespeare’s Use of the Schemes of Grammar, Vices of Language, and Figures of Repetition 1. The Schemes of Grammar 2. The Vices of Language 3. The Figures of Repetition III. Logos: The Topics of Invention 1. Inartificial Arguments or Testimony 2. Definition 3. Division: Genus and Species, Whole and Parts 4. Subject and Adjuncts 5. Contraries and Contradictories 6. Similarity and Dissimilarity 7. Comparison: Greater, Equal, Less 8. Cause and Effect, Antecedent and Consequent 9. Notation and Conjugates IV. Logos: Argumentation 1. Syllogistic Reasoning 2. Fallacious Reasoning 3. Disputation V. Pathos and Ethos 1. Pathos 2. Ethos Part Three. The General Theory of Composition and Reading as Defined and Illustrated by Tudor Logicians and Rhetoricians VI. Schemes of Grammar, Vices of Language, and Figures of Repetition 1. The Schemes of Grammar 2. Vices of Language VII. Logos: The Topics of Invention 1. Inartificial Arguments or Testimony 2. Definition 3. Division: Genus and Species, Whole and Parts 4. Subject and Adjuncts 5. Contraries and Contradictories 6. Similarity and Dissimilarity 7. Comparison: Greater, Equal, Less 8. Cause and Effect, Antecedent and Consequent 9. Notation and Conjugates 10. Genesis or Composition 11. Analysis or Reading VIII. Logos: Argumentation 1. Syllogistic Reasoning 2. Fallacious Reasoning 3. Disputation IX. Pathos and Ethos 1. Pathos 2. Ethos

Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume’s tripartite structure considers instead the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting’s cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

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.

This is a wide-ranging, poetic analysis of the great English poetic line, iambic pentameter, as used by Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and particularly by Shakespeare. George T. Wright offers a detailed survey of Shakespeare's brilliantly varied metrical keyboard and shows how it augments the expressiveness of his characters' stage language.

'Russ McDonald... offers an initiation into Shakespeares English.... Like a good musician leading us beyond merely humming the tunes, he helps us hear Shakespearean unclarity, revealing just how expression in late Shakespeare sometimes transcends ordinary verbal meaning.... particularly recommendable.' -Ruth Morse, Times Literary Supplement 'Oxford University Press offer a mix of engagingly written introductions to a variety of Topics intended largely for undergraduates. Each author has clearly been reading and listening to the most recent scholarship, but they wear their learning lightly.' -Ruth Morse, Times Literary SupplementOxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. For the modern reader or playgoer, English as Shakespeare used it - especially in verse drama - can seem alien. Shakespeare and the Arts of Language offers practical help with linguistic and poetic obstacles. Written in a lucid, nontechnical style, the book defines Shakespeare's artistic tools, including imagery, rhetoric, and wordplay, and illustrates their effects. Throughout, the reader is encouraged to find delight in the physical properties of the words: their colour, weight, and texture, the appeal of verbal patterns, and the irresistible affective power of intensified language.