I have found occasion in several instances, to differ with some of the well known Shakespearean scholars; but it must always be remembered that I speak from the viewpoint of the actor, for whom, and for whom alone the plays were written. I have not entered the literary dissecting room, nor invaded the realm of psychology. The line of demarcation between humor and imbecility, folly and insanity, I leave to the professional alienist. I have taken the characters as they appear in the plays and as I conceive the author intended them, with due reference to their relation to the other characters. - Preface.

“Hilarious, always inventive, this is a book for all, especially uptight English teachers, bardolaters, and ministerial students.” —Dallas Morning News Fool—the bawdy and outrageous New York Times bestseller from the unstoppable Christopher Moore—is a hilarious new take on William Shakespeare’s King Lear…as seen through the eyes of the foolish liege’s clownish jester, Pocket. A rousing tale of “gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity,” Fool joins Moore’s own Lamb, Fluke, The Stupidest Angel, and You Suck! as modern masterworks of satiric wit and sublimely twisted genius, prompting Carl Hiassen to declare Christopher Moore “a very sick man, in the very best sense of the word.”

Nominated for the Carnegie Medal 2011 Shakespeare in Love meets Twelfth Night - A gripping and evocative historical novel by bestselling Celia Rees

This book gives close attention to the poetry and plotting of six Shakespeare plays, three tragedies (Coriolanus, Richard III, and King Lear) and three comedies (Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice), paying particular attention to biblical imagery and theological themes of the plays.

This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare’s drama. The discourse of folly’s wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. Like Erasmus, More, and Montaigne before him, Shakespeare employs folly as a mode of understanding that does not arrogantly insist upon the veracity of its own claims – a fool’s truth, after all, is spoken by a fool. Yet, as this study demonstrates, Shakespearean folly is not the sole preserve of professional jesters and garrulous clowns, for it is also apparent on a thematic, conceptual, and formal level in virtually all of his plays. Examining canonical histories, comedies, and tragedies, this study is the first to either contextualize Shakespearean folly within European humanist thought, or to argue that Shakespeare’s philosophy of folly is part of a subterranean strand of Western philosophy, which itself reflects upon the folly of the wise. This strand runs from the philosopher-fool Socrates through to Montaigne and on to Nietzsche, but finds its most sustained expression in the Critical Theory of the mid to late twentieth-century, when the self-destructive potential latent in rationality became an historical reality. This book makes a substantial contribution to the fields of Shakespeare, Renaissance humanism, Critical Theory, and Literature and Philosophy. It illustrates, moreover, how rediscovering the philosophical potential of folly may enable us to resist the growing dominance of instrumental thought in the cultural sphere.

The first cremation the homeless people held in Golden Gate Park was for a dog; their second pyre held a much larger body. To find the one responsible for these deaths, Kate Martinelli sets out on a quest for Brother Erasmus -- an enigmatic creature who has befriended the homeless and speaks only in quotations.

Focusing on the clown Will Kemp, this book shows how Shakespeare and other dramatists wrote specific roles as vehicles for him.