The Tempest contains sublime poetry and catchy songs, magic and low comedy, while it tackles important contemporary concerns: education, power politics, the effects of colonization, and technology. In this guide, Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan open up new ways into one of Shakespeare's most popular, malleable and controversial plays.

The Tempest contains sublime poetry and catchy songs, magic and low comedy, while it tackles important contemporary concerns: education, power politics, the effects of colonization, and technology. In this guide, Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan open up new ways into one of Shakespeare's most popular, malleable and controversial plays.

ARDEN RENAISSANCE DRAMA GUIDES offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars provide invaluable insights into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: Essays on the play's critical and performance history A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online Regularly performed and studied, Macbeth is not only one of Shakespeare's most popular plays but also provides us with one of the literary canon's most compellingly conflicted tragic figures. This guide offers fresh new ways into the play.

The Revenger's Tragedy is one of the most vital, important, and enduring tragedies of the Jacobean era, one of the few non-Shakespearean plays of that period that is still regularly revived on stage and taught in classrooms. The play is notable for its piercing insight into human depravity, its savage humour, and its florid theatricality. This collection of new essays offers students an invaluable overview of the play's critical and performance history as well as four critical essays offering a range of new perspectives.

This volume offers an accessible and thought-provoking guide to this major Shakespearean comedy, surveying its key themes and evolving critical preoccupations. It also provides a detailed and up-to-date history of the play's rich stage and screen performance, looking closely at major contemporary performances, including Josie Rourke's film starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate, Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones at the Old Vic, and the RSC's recent rebranding of it as a sequel. Moving through to four new critical essays, the guide opens up fresh perspectives, including contemporary directors' deployment of older actors within the lead roles, the play's relationship to Love's Labour's Lost, its presence on Youtube and the ways in which tales and ruses in the play belong to a wider concern with varieties of crime. The volume finishes with a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further research.

The Tempest: Critical Essays traces the history of Shakespeare's controversial late romance from its early reception (and adaptation) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present. The volume reprints influential criticism, and it also offers eight originalessays which study The Tempest from a variety of contemporary perspectives, including cultural materialism, feminism, deconstruction, performance theory, and postcolonial studies. Unlike recent anthologies about The Tempest which reprint contemporary articles along with a few new essays, this volume contains a mixture of old and new materials pertaining to the play's use in the theater and in literary history.