Shakespeare's Surrogates contends that adapting Renaissance drama played a key role in the development of modern drama's major aesthetic movements. Loftis posits that playwrights' reactions to Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked to create their public personas, inform their theoretical writings, and influence the development of new genres.

Burlesque has been a powerful and enduring weapon in the critique of 'legitimate' Shakespearean culture by a seemingly 'illegitimate' popular culture. This was true most of all in the nineteenth century. From Hamlet Travestie (1810) to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1891), Shakespeare burlesques were a vibrant, yet controversial form of popular performance: vibrant because of their exuberant humour; controversial because they imperilled Shakespeare's iconic status. Richard Schoch, in this study of nineteenth-century Shakespeare burlesques, explores the paradox that plays which are manifestly 'not Shakespeare' purport to be the most genuinely Shakespearean of all. Bringing together archival research, rare photographs and illustrations, close readings of burlesque scripts, and an awareness of theatrical, literary and cultural contexts, Schoch changes the way we think about Shakespeare's theatrical legacy and nineteenth-century popular culture. His lively and wide-ranging book will appeal to scholars and students of Shakespeare in performance, theatre history and Victorian studies.

Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory reconsiders, after 20 years of intense critical and creative activity, the theory and practice of adapting Shakespeare to different genres and media. Organized around clusters of key metaphors, the book explicates the principal theories informing the field of Shakespearean adaptation and surveys the growing field of case studies by Shakespeare scholars. Each chapter also looks anew at a specific Shakespeare play from the perspective of a prevailing set of theories and metaphors. Having identified the key critics responsible for developing these metaphors and for framing the discussion in this way, Iyengar moves on to analyze afresh the implications of these critical frames for adaptation studies as a whole and for particular Shakespeare plays. Focusing each chapter around a different play, the book contrasts comic, tragic, and tragicomic modes in Shakespeare's oeuvre and within the major genres of adaptation (e.g., film, stage-production, novel and digital media). Each chapter seasons its theoretical discussions with a lively sprinkling of allusions to Shakespeare - ranging from TikTok to tissue-boxes, from folios and fine arts to fan work. To conclude each chapter, the author provides a case-study of three or four significant and interesting adaptations from different genres or media. A glossary of terms compiled by Philip Gilreath and the author completes the book.

Making an important new contribution to rapidly expanding fields of study surrounding the adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation is the first book to address the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, authority, and authenticity.

Dramas and Sonnets of William Shakespeare Vol. 1 is helpful to every learner of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) who, doubtless, saw himself as merely another professional man of the theatre who moved almost casually from play-acting to playwriting. And indeed he was very much a man of his time, a man of the Elizabethan theatre, who learnt to exploit brilliantly the stagecraft, the acting, and the pub¬lic taste of his day. It happens very rarely in the history of literature that a craftsman who has acquired perfect control of his medium, masterly ease in handling the techniques and conventions of his day, is also a universal genius of the highest order, combining with his technical proficiency a unique ability to render experience in poetic language and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of hu¬man psychology. Man of the theatre, poet and expert in the human passions, Shakespeare has appealed equally to those who admire the art with which he renders a story in terms of the acted drama or the insight with which he presents states of mind and complex¬ities of attitude or the unsurpassed brilliance he shows in giving conviction and a new dimension to the utterances of his characters through the poetic speech he puts in their mouths. It is a remark¬able combination of qualities. Yet he was no poetic genius descending on the theatre from above, but a working dramatist who found himself in catering for the public theatre of his day. Unquestionably the greatest poetic dramatist of Europe, he was also Marlowe’s successor, the heir to a tradition of playwriting, which we saw developing in the preceding chapter. His contemporaries saw him as one dramatist among others—a good one, and a popular one, but no transcendent genius who left all others far behind—and to the end of his active life he showed no reluctance to collaborate with other playwrights.

This publication looks at fictional portrayals of William Shakespeare with a focus on novels, short stories, plays, occasional poems, films, television series and even comics. In terms of time span, the analysis covers the entire twentieth century and ends in the present-day. The authors included range from well-known figures (G.B. Shaw, Kipling, Joyce) to more obscure writers. The depictions of Shakespeare are varied to say the least, with even interpretations giving credence to the Oxfordian theory and feminist readings involving a Shakespearian sister of sorts. The main argument is that readings of Shakespeare almost always inform us more about the particular author writing the specific work than about the historical personage.

This book considers early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness, uncovering and historicizing the complex negotiations among physical embodiment, emotional response, and communally-sanctioned behavior in Shakespeare's literary and material world. The volume visits a series of questions about the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor, emotional competence or satisfaction, and joy or self-fulfillment. Individual essays investigate the purported disabilities of the "crook-back" King Richard III or the "corpulent" Falstaff, the conflicts between different health-care belief-systems in The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, the power of figurative language to delineate or even instigate puberty in the Sonnets or Romeo and Juliet, and the ways in which the powerful or moneyed mediate the access of the poor and injured to cure or even to care. Integrating insights from Disability Studies, Health Studies, and Happiness Studies, this book develops both a detailed literary-historical analysis and a provocative cultural argument about the emphasis we place on popular notions of fitness and contentment today.