The Taming of the Shrew Robust and bawdy, The Taming of the Shrew captivates audiences with outrageous humor as Katharina, the shrew, engages in a contest of wills–and love–with her bridegroom, Petruchio, in a comedy of unmatched theatrical brilliance, filled with visual gags and witty repartee. A Midsummer Night's Dream Fairy magic, love spells, and an enchanted wood turn the mismatched rivalries of four young lovers into a marvelous mix-up of desire and enchantment, all touched by Shakespeare’s inimitable vision of the intriguing relationship between dreams and the waking world. The Merchant of Venice This dark comedy of love and money contains one of the truly mythic figures in literature–Shylock, the Jewish moneylender. The “pound of flesh” he demands as payment of Antonio’s debt has become a universal metaphor for vengeance. Here, pathos and farce combine with moral complexity and romantic entanglements, to display the extraordinary power and range of Shakespeare at his best. Twelfth Night Set in a topsy-turvy world like a holiday revel, this comedy juxtaposes a romantic plot involving separated twins and mistaken identity with a more satiric one about the humiliation of a pompous killjoy. The hilarity is touched with melancholy, and the play ends, not with laughter, but with a clown’s plaintive song. Each Edition Includes: • Comprehensive explanatory notes • Vivid introductions and the most up-to-date scholarship • Clear, modernized spelling and punctuation, enabling contemporary readers to understand the Elizabethan English • Completely updated, detailed bibliographies and performance histories • An interpretive essay on film adaptations of the play, along with an extensive filmography

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,3, RWTH Aachen University (Institut für Anglistik), course: Hauptseminar Shakespeare's Comedies, language: English, abstract: The first question that Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice raises is "What kind of play is this? Is it a comedy, a tragedy or a problem play?" The Merchant of Venice is believed to be written between 1596 and 1598. Already from the very beginning, hardly any other play has experienced so many diverse receptions after its publication. In his essay on The Merchant of Venice, Walter Cohen comments that "no other Shakespeare comedy before All's Well That Ends Well (1602) and Measure for Measure (1604), perhaps no other Shakespeare comedy at all, has excited comparable controversy." Although the title page of the first edition of the play "The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice" (first print in 1600) suggested it to be a history play, it had initially been classified as a comedy. In 1623, Heminges and Condell placed The Merchant of Venice among the comedies in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works. However, many readers, actors, directors and playgoers still argue about the genre of the play. They have difficulties in defining The Merchant of Venice as a comedy as the following quotation shows: "Indeed, seen from any angle, The Merchant of Venice is not a very funny play, and we might gain a lot if, for the moment, we ceased to be bullied by its inclusion in the comedies." Today, The Merchant of Venice is often read and played more like a problem play or even a tragedy. The following term paper deals with the classification of the literary genre of The Merchant of Venice. Does the play belong to the category of comedies or shall it rather be identified as a tragedy or problem play? To assign the play to a specific category, it is necessary to shortly present the criteria of the genres comedy, tragedy and problem play. In chapter 3, the pl

The last decade has witnessed a spate of high-profile presentations of The Merchant of Venice: the 2004 Michael Radford film, 2010’s New York City “Shakespeare in the Park” production, as well as the play’s Tony Award-nominated 2010-11 Broadway run. Likewise, new scholarly works such as Kenneth Gross’s Shylock is Shakespeare (2006) and Janet Adelman’s Blood Relations (2008) have offered poignant insights into this play. Why has this drama garnered so much attention of late? What else can we learn from this contentious comedy? How else can we read the drama’s characters? Where do studies of The Merchant of Venice go from here? This collection offers readers sundry answers to these questions by showcasing a sampling of ways this culturally arresting play can be read and interpreted. The strength of this monograph lies in the disparate approaches its contributors offer – from a feminist view of Portia and Nerissa’s friendship to psychoanalytic readings of allegories between the play and Shakespeare’s Pericles to a reading of a Manga comic book version of The Merchant of Venice. Each essay is supported by a strong basis in traditional close reading practices. Our collection of scholars then buttresses such work with the theoretical or pedagogical frameworks that reflect their area of expertise. This collection offers readers different critical lenses through which to approach the primary text. Although Shakespeare scholars and graduate students will no doubt appreciate and employ the work of this collection, the primary audience of this anthology is undergraduate students and the professors who work with them. Many budding scholars have had the experience of checking out a monograph from the library and then finding it was a waste of time because the author spends three hundred pages discussing a perspective of which they have no interest. With this collection, students will not only see how multi-faceted interpretations of the play can be but they also are more likely to find essays that appeal to their own research interests.

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.