Finally, the collected works you’ve been waiting for: visual, historical, contextualized. Based on the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the text, The Bedford Shakespeare gathers the 25 most frequently taught plays and augments them with the rich historical and contextual materials you expect from Bedford/St. Martin’s. Thoughtful, provocative analysis by eminent scholars Russ McDonald and Lena Cowen Orlin offers students concrete entry points into the plays and creates opportunities for lively classroom discussion. A lavish collection of images throughout the book features production shots, paintings, film stills, Renaissance woodcuts, maps, and more, to help students visualize what they are reading.

Providing a unique combination of well-written, up-to-date background information and intriguing selections from primary documents, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare introduces students to the topics most important to the study of Shakespeare in their full historical and cultural context. This new edition contains many new documents, particularly by women and other marginalized voices from the early modern period. There is also a new chapter on Shakespeare in performance, which introduces students to the great variety of productions of Shakespeare's works over the centuries.

'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.

In a striking full-color visual format, The Bedford Book of Genres collects compelling examples that tell stories, report information, and persuade their audiences and then invites students to unpack how they work in order to experiment with their own compositions—not only through writing, but through photography, sketching, audio recording, and other creative forms. The Guide presents a simple rhetorical framework for reading in any genre and supports students through every step of the composing process, from finding a topic and sources to choosing a genre, presenting your work, and creating an author’s statement about your composing choices. Guided Readings—in print and e-Pages—map out the rhetorical situation and conventions of common public and academic genres, while Guided Process sections follow the decisions that 5 real students made as they worked in multiple genres and media. With 16 topic clusters and a range of readings from short visual arguments to longer, more complex pieces, the Reader gives students a wealth of sources, models, and inspiration for their own compositions.

Tells the story of Shakespeare in Stratford as a family man. The book offers close readings of key documents associated with Shakespeare and develops a contextual understanding of the genres from which these documents emerge. It reconsiders clusters of evidence that have been held to prove some persistent biographical fables