Shakespeare’s adolescents examines the varied representation of adolescent characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Using early modern medical knowledge and an understanding of contemporary theatrical practices, the book unpacks complexities that surrounded the cultural and theatrical representations of ‘signs’ associated with an individual’s physical maturation. Each chapter explores the implications of different ‘signs’ of puberty, in verbal cues, facial adornments, vocal traits and body sizes, to illuminate how Shakespeare presents vibrant adolescent selves and stories. By analysing female and male puberty together in its discussion of adolescence, Shakespeare’s adolescents provides fresh insight into the age-based symmetry of early modern adolescent identities. The book uses the adolescent’s state of transformation to illuminate how the unfixed nature of adolescence was valued in early modern culture and through Shakespeare’s celebrated characters and actors.

Twelve of the Bard's most famous plays, delightfully adapted for young readers: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, As You Like It, and eight others.

The first sustained study of girls and girlhood in early modern literature and culture. Jennifer Higginbotham makes a persuasive case for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system. She challenges the widespread assumption that the category of the 'girl' played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. And she demonstrates that girl characters appeared in a variety of texts, from female infants in Shakespeare's late romances to little children in Tudor interludes to adult 'roaring girls' in city comedies. This monograph provides the first book-length study of the way the literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constructed the category of the 'girl'.

The different versions of Hamlet constitute one of the most vexing puzzles in Shakespeare studies. In this groundbreaking work, Shakespeare scholar Terri Bourus argues that this puzzle can only be solved by drawing on multiple kinds of evidence and analysis, including book and theatre history, biography, performance studies, and close readings.

Shakespearean Spaces in Australian Literary Adaptations for Children and Young Adults offers a comprehensive examination of Shakespearean adaptations written by Australian authors for children and Young Adults. The 20-year period crossing the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries came to represent a diverse and productive era of adapting Shakespeare in Australian literature. As an analysis of Australian and international marketplaces, physical and imaginative spaces and the body as a site of meaning, this book reveals how the texts are ideologically bound to and disseminate Shakespearean cultural capital in contemporary ways. Combining current research in children’s literature and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital deepens the critical awareness of the status of Australian literature while illuminating a corpus of literature underrepresented by the pre-existing concentration on adaptations from other parts of the world. Of particular interest is how these adaptations merge Shakespearean worlds with the spaces inhabited by young people, such as the classroom, the stage, the imagination and the gendered body. The readership of this book would be academics, researchers and students of children’s literature studies and Shakespeare studies, particularly those interested in Shakespearean cultural theory, transnational adaptation and literary appropriation. High school educators and pre-service teachers would also find this book valuable as they look to broaden and strengthen their use of adaptations to engage students in Shakespeare studies.

The search to find engaging and inspiring ways to introduce children and young adults to Shakespeare has resulted in a rich variety of approaches to producing and adapting Shakespeare's plays and the stories and characters at their heart. Shakespeare for Young People is the only comprehensive overview of such productions and adaptations, and engages with a wide range of genres, including both British and American examples. Abigail Rokison covers stage and screen productions, shortened versions, prose narratives and picture books (including Manga), animations and original novels. The book combines an informative guide to these interpretations of Shakespeare, discussed with critical analysis of their relative strengths. It also includes extensive interviews with directors, actors and writers involved in the projects discussed'.

A simple teaching guide to remove the fear of learning Shakespeare