Presenting a background study of honor, the author compares ancient concepts with the sympathetic restatements of them that appeared during the Renaissance. He places Shakespeare's plays in the context of these Renaissance ideas, pointing up the sharp conflict between Christian morality and the revived pagan humanism. He demonstrates by pertinent evidence from the plays that Shakespeare favored humanist values over Christian values. Originally published in 1960. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Renaissance ideas of honour had a profound influence on the English people who formed Shakespeare’s audiences. In When Honour’s at the Stake, first published in 1973, Norman Council describes the increasing importance of these ideas to the themes and structure of a number of Shakespeare’s major plays. The validity of the most widely approved code of honour was being challenged on a variety of fronts, yet both personal standards of behaviour and public affairs were habitually understood in terms of honour. A series of tragedies are given their basic form by dramatizing the pernicious effects of man’s disobedience to the various demands of honour; in Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear honour is among the principal motives of tragedy. In this way, the modern reader’s comprehension of the plays can be greatly enhanced by reference to Elizabethan honour codes.

Although other Shakespeare plays offer higher body counts, more gore, and more plentiful scenes of heartbreak, Othello packs an unusually powerful affective punch, stunning us with its depiction of the swiftness and thoroughness with which love can be converted to hatred, and forcing us to confront our complicity with social and political institutions that can put all of us—but especially the most vulnerable among us—at risk. This edition features a variety of interleaved materials—from maps and manuscripts to illustrations and extended discussions of myth and politics—that provide a context for the social and cultural allusions in the play. Appendices offer excerpts from Shakespeare’s key sources and historical materials on marriage, jealousy, and the treatment of people of African descent in Renaissance England. A collaboration between Broadview Press and the Internet Shakespeare Editions project at the University of Victoria, the editions developed for this series have been comprehensively annotated and draw on the authoritative texts newly edited for the ISE. This innovative series allows readers to access extensive and reliable online resources linked to the print edition.

This book is an anthology of critical essays written about English literature during the Renaissance (or the 'early-modern' period). It focuses on Shakespeare's poetry and plays, including the 'Sonnets', 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', 'The Rape of Lucrece', 'King Lear', 'Othello', 'Measure for Measure', and 'Timon of Athens'. Also examined are the publication of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, William Cartwright's play 'The Royal Slave', and James Halliwell-Phillips, one of the central figures in the Shakespearean textual tradition.

In these essays, John O'Meara re-assesses both the tragic limitations and inherent promise of Romantic tradition in the interpretation of Shakespeare. The philosophical theory of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, is brought forward as consummating that tradition. Building on concepts which Anthroposophy supplies O'Meara proceeds to a fresh reading of Shakespeare's work. A wide range of plays is covered from Richard II to The Tempest, with special focus on Othello and King Lear. The endings of these plays, O'Meara sees as pivotal to Shakespeare's evolution into a final phase prophetic of the Romantic experience to come which Steiner fulfils.