This book will constitute an original intervention into longstanding but insistently relevant debates around the significance of notions of ‘performativity’ to the critical analysis of early modern drama. In particular, the book aims to: show how the investigation of performativity can enable readings of Shakespeare and Jonson that challenge the dominant methodological frameworks within which those plays have come to be read; demonstrate that the thought of performativity does not come to rest in the simplicity of method or instrumentality, and that it resists its own claim that language and action might be understood as unproblematically instrumental; demonstrate that this self-resistance occurs or takes place as a moment in the process of articulating the claims of the performative, and that this process is itself in an important sense dramatic.

The first comprehensive history of libels in Elizabethan England, this interdisciplinary study traces the crime across law, literature, and culture, focusing especially on the theater. Ranging from Shakespeare to provincial pageantry, it provides a fresh account of early modern drama and the viral media ecosystem springing up around it.

Shakespeare's Binding Language is an innovative, substantial but highly readable study exploring the significance in Shakespeare's plays of oaths, vows, contracts, pledges and the other verbal and performative acts by which characters commit themselves to the truth of things past, present, and to come.

Explores the drama of proximity and co-presence in Shakespeare's playsKey FeaturesBrings together the rare pairing of philosophical ethics and performance studies in Shakespeare's playsEngages with the thought of philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Cavell, and Emmanuel LevinasThis book celebrates the theatrical excitement and philosophical meanings of human interaction in Shakespeare. On stage and in life, the face is always window and mirror, representation and presence. It examines the emotional and ethical surplus that appears between faces in the activity and performance of human encounter on stage. By transitioning from face as noun to verb - to face, outface, interface, efface, deface, sur-face - chapters reveal how Shakespeare's plays discover conflict, betrayal and deception as well as love, trust and forgiveness between faces and the bodies that bear them.

Literature and Culture Handbooks are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. Written in clear language by leading academics, they provide an indispensable introduction to key topics, including: • Introduction to authors, texts, historical and cultural contexts • Guides to key critics, concepts and topics • An overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research • Case studies in reading literary and critical texts • Annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. The Shakespeare Handbook is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare and early modern literature.

Drawing together scholars with a wide range of expertise across the early modern period, this volume explores the rich field of early modern comedy in all its variety. It argues that early modern comedy was shaped by a series of cultural transformations that included the emergence of the entertainment industry, the rise of the professional comedian, extended commentaries on the nature of comedy and laughter, and the development of printed jestbooks. It was the prime site from which to satirize a rapidly-changing world and explore the formation of new social relations around questions of gender, authority, identity, and commerce, amongst others. Yet even as it reacted to the novel and the new, comedy also served as a receptacle for the celebration of older social rituals such as May games and seasonal festivities. The result was a complex and contested mix of texts, performances, and concepts providing a deep tradition that abides to this day. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to early modern comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

This collection highlights exciting new areas of research related to Ben Jonson, including book history, social history and cultural geography.