The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare's World explores Shakespeare's complex art of insults and shows how the playwright set abusive words at the heart of many of his plays. It provides valuable insights on a key aspect of Shakespeare's work that has been little explored to date. Focusing on the most memorable scenes of insult, abusive characters and insulting effects in the plays, the volume shifts how readers understand and read Shakespeare's insults. Chapters analyze the spectacular rhetoric of insult in Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens; the 'skirmishes of wit' in Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream; insult and duelling codes in Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, the complex relationships between slander and insult in Much Ado about Nothing and Measure for Measure; the taming of the tongue in Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew, the trauma of insults in Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Cymbeline and insult beyond words in Henry V and King lear. Grasping insult as a specific speech act, the volume explores the issues of verbal violence and verbal shields and the importance of reception and interpretation in matters of insult. It offers a panorama of the Elizabethan politics of insult and redefines Shakespeare's drama as a theatre of insults.

From canonical movies to web series, this volume illuminates myriad forms of Romeo and Juliet on screen around the world.

In the last two decades, the field of language and literature teaching has experienced considerable growth as a result of the wide array of new methodological avenues that have arisen from different angles. This paradigm shift has paved the way for the integration of newly conceived didactic resources such as the mediation of social networks for learning language or the interdisciplinarity of culturally mediated language education. It is crucial to understand this shift in order to ensure students receive the best education possible. New Approaches to the Investigation of Language Teaching and Literature presents an overview of the ongoing methodological tools, practices, research designs, and strategies used in language and literature teaching and provides education researchers and practitioners with empirically sustained evidence of teaching strategies that may be implemented in language education. Covering key topics such as language skills, adult learners, digital literacy, and learning aids, this reference work is ideal for researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, educators, and students.

Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools – poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities – to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders. Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour – and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe.

Arden Early Modern 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 give invaluable insight 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 Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice has often been labelled a 'problem play', and throughout the ages it has been an object of both fascination and repulsion. Without neglecting the socio-political and religious issues that are at the heart of the play, this collection of critical essays invites readers to rediscover the variety of approaches that this multifaceted work calls for, exploring its gender aspects, its rich mythological background, its legal matters and the ways in which it has been adapted to the screen. Essays consider the play in relation to its sources, genre and religion, historical and socio-political context and its critical reception and performance history.

This volume offers an accessible and thought-provoking guide to this major Renaissance tragedy, surveying its key themes and evolving critical responses over the course of nearly four centuries. Providing a uniquely detailed and up-to-date account of the play's rich stage history, it demonstrates how useful Performance Studies is to our understanding of early modern drama, and looks closely at major recent productions on both sides of the Atlantic, notably the 2014 production of the 'Jacobean' indoor space, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London. In a series of critical essays, the guide offers fresh perspectives on the characters' mechanical psychology, the influence of Spanish Golden Age literature on Middelton and Rowley, and how the play has been treated on the modern stage and screen. Featuring a guide to digital resources and an annotated bibliography, this collection is a definitive guide to The Changeling.