A gripping, funny, joyful account of how the books you read shape your own life in surprising and profound ways. Bookworms know what scholars of literature are trained to forget: that when they devour a work of literary fiction, whatever else they may be doing, they are reading about themselves. Read Shakespeare, and you become Cleopatra, Hamlet, or Bottom. Or at the very least, you experience the plays as if you are in a small room alone with them, and they are speaking to your life, your sensibility. Drawing on fifty years as a Shakespearean, Leonard Barkan has produced a captivating book that asks us to reconsider what it means to read. Barkan violates the rule of distance he was taught and has always taught his students. He asks: Where does this brilliantly contrived fiction actually touch me? Where is Shakespeare in effect telling the story of my life? King Lear, for Barkan, raises unanswerable questions about what exactly a father does after planting the seed. Mothers from Gertrude to Lady Macbeth are reconsidered in the light of the author's experience as a son of a former flapper. The sonnets and comedies are seen through the eyes of a gay man who nevertheless weeps with joy when all the heterosexual couples are united at the end. A Midsummer Night's Dream is interpreted through the author's joyous experience of performing the role of Bottom and finding his aesthetic faith in the pantheon of antiquity. And the exquisitely poetical history play Richard II intersects with, of all things, Ru Paul's Drag Race. Full of engrossing stories, from family secrets to the world of the theater, and written with humor and genuine excitement about literary experiences worthy of our attention and our love, Reading Shakespeare Reading Me makes Shakespeare's plays come alive in new ways.

A gripping, funny, joyful account of how the books you read shape your own life in surprising and profound ways. Bookworms know what scholars of literature are trained to forget: that when they devour a work of literary fiction, whatever else they may be doing, they are reading about themselves. Read Shakespeare, and you become Cleopatra, Hamlet, or Bottom. Or at the very least, you experience the plays as if you are in a small room alone with them, and they are speaking to your life, your sensibility. Drawing on fifty years as a Shakespearean, Leonard Barkan has produced a captivating book that asks us to reconsider what it means to read. Barkan violates the rule of distance he was taught and has always taught his students. He asks: Where does this brilliantly contrived fiction actually touch me? Where is Shakespeare in effect telling the story of my life? King Lear, for Barkan, raises unanswerable questions about what exactly a father does after planting the seed. Mothers from Gertrude to Lady Macbeth are reconsidered in the light of the author’s experience as a son of a former flapper. The sonnets and comedies are seen through the eyes of a gay man who nevertheless weeps with joy when all the heterosexual couples are united at the end. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is interpreted through the author’s joyous experience of performing the role of Bottom and finding his aesthetic faith in the pantheon of antiquity. And the exquisitely poetical history play Richard II intersects with, of all things, Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Full of engrossing stories, from family secrets to the world of the theater, and written with humor and genuine excitement about literary experiences worthy of our attention and our love, Reading Shakespeare Reading Me makes Shakespeare’s plays come alive in new ways.

This volume contains a series of papers we delivered at the annual Shakespeare conference held at the Università Cattolica of Milan over three years. During this period our research interests ran on more or less parallel lines, moving from Shakespeare’s sonnets to the Bard’s influence on Keats and Shelley. If this was probably due to a similar way of interpreting the conference titles, it was just a coincidence that both of us devoted particular attention to King Lear. This play, we discovered, was particularly relevant to the work we were autonomously carrying out, Luisa Camaiora being then engaged in writing her book on Keats’s Odes, and Carlo Bajetta editing Shelley’s Peter Bell. As a consequence, we started mentioning articles, discussed recent research, and there was much swapping of books – which created more than a little confusion in our bookshelves, and much irritation in some University librarians. When we looked back at these essays, we were surprised to note that a fil rouge seemed to run through them. From the ambiguities of one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, number 116, they move on to describe the allusive structure of the sonnet-chorus of Romeo and Juliet, hence to the complexities of the initial scene of King Lear and the uses to which this play was put by Keats and Shelley; they eventually come back to Keats’s relationship with the works of the Bard, and finally to yet another sonnet, which constitutes in many ways an original re-reading of Shakespeare. ‘Shakespearean Readings’, alluding to both textual variants, critical analysis, and a writer’s understanding of a literary work, seems to be a fitting title to describe this red thread. ‘'Passage' and 'Traffic' in Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Textual Madness: King Lear’s peregrinations’ were first published in To go or not to go? Catching the moving Shakespeare (ed. L. Camaiora, Milan, I.S.U. Università Cattolica, 2004), ‘John Keats and his Presider Shakespeare’ and ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12 and Keats’s “When I have fears”’ appeared in a different form in L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, 7:1, 1999, while ‘Shelley’s Shakespearean Mockery of Wordsworth’, which was read at the Shakespeare Days conference in April 2003, both relies on and integrates some sections of the introduction to Peter Bell: the 1819 Texts which appeared in December of the same year (Mursia, Milan). Milan, June 2004 Luisa Conti Camaiora – Carlo M. Bajetta Dalla Prfazione degli Autori

What actions are justified when the fate of a nation hangs in the balance, and who can see the best path ahead? Julius Caesar has led Rome successfully in the war against Pompey and returns celebrated and beloved by the people. Yet in the senate fears intensify that his power may become supreme and threaten the welfare of the republic. A plot for his murder is hatched by Caius Cassius who persuades Marcus Brutus to support him. Though Brutus has doubts, he joins Cassius and helps organize a group of conspirators that assassinate Caesar on the Ides of March. But, what is the cost to a nation now erupting into civil war? A fascinating study of political power, the consequences of actions, the meaning of loyalty and the false motives that guide the actions of men, Julius Caesar is action packed theater at its finest.

Why do we return to Shakespeare time and again? When Robert McCrum began his recovery from a life-changing stroke, described in My Year Off, he discovered that the only words that made sense to him were snatches of Shakespeare. Unable to travel or move as he used to, McCrum found the First Folio became his ‘book of life’, an endless source of inspiration through which he could embark on ‘journeys of the mind’, and see a reflection of our own disrupted times. An acclaimed writer and journalist, McCrum has spent the last twenty-five years immersed in Shakespeare's work, on stage and on the page. During this prolonged exploration, Shakespeare’s poetry and plays, so vivid and contemporary, have become his guide and consolation. In Shakespearean he asks: why is it that we always return to Shakespeare, particularly in times of acute crisis and dislocation? What is the key to his hold on our imagination? And why do the collected works of an Elizabethan writer continue to speak to us as if they were written yesterday? Shakespearean is a rich, brilliant and superbly drawn portrait of an extraordinary artist, one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Through an enthralling narrative, ranging widely in time and space, McCrum seeks to understand Shakespeare within his historical context while also exploring the secrets of literary inspiration, and examining the nature of creativity itself. Witty and insightful, he makes a passionate and deeply personal case that Shakespeare’s words and ideas are not just enduring in their relevance – they are nothing less than the eternal key to our shared humanity.

Although the works of William Shakespeare are universally taught in high schools, many students have a similar reaction when confronted with the difficult task of reading Shakespeare for the first time. In Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults, Mary Ellen Dakin seeks to help teachers better understand not just how to teach the Bard's work, but also why. By celebrating the collaborative reading of Shakespeare's plays, Dakin explores different methods for getting students engaged--and excited--about the texts as they learn to construct meaning from Shakespeare's sixteenth-century language and connect it to their twenty-first-century lives. Filled with teacher-tested classroom activities, this book draws on often-taught plays, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The ideas and strategies presented here are designed to be used with any of the Bard's plays and are intended to help all populations of students--mainstream, minority, bilingual, advanced, at-risk.

Reading Shakespeare Historically is a passionate, provocative book by one of the most renowned and popular Renaissance scholars writing today. Charting ten years of critical development, these challenging, witty essays shed new light on Renaissance studies. It also raises intriguing questions about how the culture and history of the past illuminates the key social and political issues of today. Lisa Jardine re-reads Renaissance drama in its historical and cultural context, from laws of defamation in Othello to the competing loyalties of companionate marriage and male friendship in The Changeling. In doing so she reveals a wealth of new insights, sometimes surprising but always original and engrossing. At the same time, these essays also provide a fascinating account of the rise of feminist scholarship since the 1980s and the diversifying of `new historicist' approaches over the same period. Reading Shakespeare Historically will fascinate and provoke students of shakespeare and his historical age, and general readers with an urge to understand how the culture and history of our past illuminates the key scoial and political issues of today.