Discusses: The Comedy of errors, The Taming of the shrew, Love's labour's lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, As you like it, Twelfth Night, All's Well that ends well, Measure for measure.

"This updated edition should be welcomed by anyone interested in Shakespeare. Particularly useful are its pithy introductions and bibliographies on various critical approaches". -- David Bevington, editor of Complete Works of Shakespeare. "A handy, compact map to the changing and contested field of Shakespeare studies". -- Bruce R. Smith, author of Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

This book partakes of a long tradition of dream interpretation, but, at the same time, is unique in its cross-cultural and interdisciplinary methods and in its mix of theoretical and analytical approaches. It includes a great chronological and geographical range, from ancient Sumeria to eighteenth-century China; medieval Hispanic dream poetry to Italian Renaissance dream theory; Shakespeare to Nerval; and from Dostoevsky, through Emily Brontë, to Henry James. Rupprecht also incorporates various critical orientations including archetypal, comparative, feminist, historicist, linguistic, postmodern, psychoanalytic, religious, reader response, and self-psychology.

Shakespeare's Comedies features all the scholarship and pedagogy of David Bevington's The Complete Works of Shakespeare in a genre-specific, paperback volume. Pulled from Bevington's popular and authoritative hardcover The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5e, Shakespeare's Comedies and three other genre volumes--Shakespeare's Tragedies, Shakespeare's Histories, and Shakespeare's Romances and Poems--are available on their own or packaged in customized bundles (at a discount) for use in specialized courses. Shakespeare's Comedies provides the same balanced editorial approach and proven apparatus that combine to make Bevington's Complete Works the most accessible collection available. A prestigious editorial board provides state-of-the-art scholarship and interpretative balance on each play. In-depth historical coverage helps students understand the cultural context behind each play, without dictating their reading of it. Extensive notes and glosses give students the support they need to understand Elizabethan language and idiomatic expressions. series, the Longman Cultural Editions, and the Longman-Penguin Program for discounted Penguin-Putnam titles packaged with Longman texts.

This fascinating edition examines the comedies of playwright William Shakespeare through the lens of sexuality. Essays explore topics such as the ambiguity of Shakespeare's sonnets, Renaissance attitudes toward sexuality, themes of misogyny in Taming of the Shrew, and sexual anxiety in Much Ado About Nothing. Modern perspectives on sexuality and courtship are also presented, covering subjects such as social media and dating, modern mythology about the differences between genders, and a decline in American romantic comedies.

Since about 1960, when five-act division in Shakespeare's plays was strongly disputed, most critics have focused on individual scenes rather than holistic form. This book argues for Shakespeare's use of five acts, arranged in three cycles to form a 2-1-2 pattern. It also examines the role of multiple plots and centers of consciousness, especially in the festive comedies and romances. Additionally, it traces Shakespeare's gradual mastery of the art of epiphany, compares it to Spenser's complementary focus on transcendent reality, and traces in Macbeth the dark mode of Shakespeare's dramaturgical pattern.

In this companion volume to Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen, Victor Kiernan sets out to rescue Shakespearean studies from the increasingly solipsistic terrain of literary criticism, focusing on historical location as a means to understanding his work.