Long regarded as a problem play, Measure for Measure has provoked much critical disagreement. Staged during James I’s first Christmas at Whitehall, it was doubtlessly written to further his patronage of Shakespeare’s acting company the King’s Men. Dramatizing James’s view that justice should be tempered with mercy, its theme involved fornication, or sex without a church wedding, which was not unrelated to the dramatist’s own past. Duke Vincentio, intended as a surrogate for James, wished to see the guilty punished with the death penalty, but Shakespeare’s use of ambiguity, in permitting varied interpretations, ensured that the play, as a Christmas comedy, would have pleased King James while allowing Shakespeare’s own response to have been different from the king’s.

Since the rediscovery of Elizabethan stage conditions early this century, admiration for Measure for Measure has steadily risen. It is now a favorite with the critics and has attracted widely different styles of performance. At one extreme the play is seen as a religious allegory, at the other it has been interpreted as a comedy protesting against power and privilege. Brian Gibbons focuses on the unique tragi-comic experience of watching the play, the intensity and excitement offered by its dramatic rhythm, the reversals and surprises that shock the audience even to the end. The introduction describes the play's critical reception and stage history and how these have varied according to prevailing social, moral and religious issues, which were highly sensitive when Measure for Measure was written, and have remained so to the present day.

Performing the work of William Shakespeare can be daunting to new actors. Author Herb Parker posits that his work is played easier if actors think of the plays as happening out of outrageous situations, and remember just how non-realistic and presentational Shakespeare's plays were meant to be performed. The plays are driven by language and the spoken word, and the themes and plots are absolutely out of the ordinary and fantastic - the very definition of outrageous. With exercises, improvisations, and coaching points, Acting Shakespeare is Outrageous! helps actors use the words Shakespeare wrote as a tool to perform him, and to create exciting and moving performances.

This book is an interdisciplinary work that weaves literary interpretation, legal theory, and philosophical doctrine about sex and love into a coherent mosaic in the context of two of Shakespeare’s plays: The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. In the process, the work advances literary interpretations of the plays including character studies of some of the main protagonists. The aim is partly theoretical but mostly practical: to demonstrate what we can learn about living a robustly meaningful and significant human life by taking Shakespeare’s work seriously from contemporary philosophical and legal vantage points. Shakespeare does not reveal a tightly defined moral system that he is trying to urge upon his audience. Instead, Shakespeare challenges his audience to struggle with moral complexity as they confront conflicting elements surrounding legal and moral issues presented in his work and within the souls of his characters. His issues and their conflicts are also ours. Much of Shakespeare’s work consists of raising weighty questions inextricably connected to the human condition and inviting his audience to ponder possible answers. The philosophical lessons about living our lives meaningfully and significantly that we can derive from Shakespeare are simple yet powerful.

This fascinating edition examines the comedies of playwright William Shakespeare through the lens of sexuality. Essays explore topics such as the ambiguity of Shakespeare's sonnets, Renaissance attitudes toward sexuality, themes of misogyny in Taming of the Shrew, and sexual anxiety in Much Ado About Nothing. Modern perspectives on sexuality and courtship are also presented, covering subjects such as social media and dating, modern mythology about the differences between genders, and a decline in American romantic comedies.

Marriage and Land Law in Shakespeare and Middleton examines the dynamics of early modern marriage-making, a time-honored practice that was evolving, often surreptitiously, from patriarchal control based on money and inheritance, to a companionate union in which love and the couple’s own agency played a role. Among early modern playwrights, the marriage plays of Shakespeare and Middleton are particularly, though not uniquely, concerned with this evolution, observing the movement towards spousal choice determined by the couple themselves. Through the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, the role of the patriarch, though often compromised, remained intact: the father or guardian negotiated the financial terms. And, in a culture that was still tied to feudal practices, land law held a primary place in the bargain. This book, while following the arc of changing marriage practices, focuses on the ways in which the oldest determination of status, land, affects marital decisions. Land is not a constant topic of conversation in the twenty-one theatrical marriages scrutinized here, but it is a persistent and omnipresent truth of family and economic life. In paired discussions of marriage plays by Shakespeare and Middleton—The Taming of the Shrew/A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, All’s Well That Ends Well/A Trick To Catch the Old One, Measure for Measure/A Mad World, My Masters, The Merchant of Venice/The Roaring Girl, and Much Ado About Nothing/No Wit, No Help Like A Woman’s—this book explores the attempts, maneuvers, intrigues, ruses, and schemes that marriageable characters deploy in order to control spousal choice and secure land. Special attention is given to patriarchal figures whose poor judgment exploits inheritance law weaknesses and to the lack of legal protection and hence the vulnerability of women—and men—who engage the system in unconventional ways. Investigation into the milieu of early modern patriarchal influence in marriage-making and the laws governing inheritance practices enables a fresh reading of Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s marriage comedies.

Shakespeare's poems and plays are rich in reference to "measure, number, and weight," which were the key terms of an early modern empirical and quantitative imagination. Shakespeare's investigation of Renaissance measures of reality centers on the consequences of applying principles of measurement to the appraisal of human value. This is especially true of efforts to judge people as better or worse than, or equal to, one another. With special attention to the Sonnets, Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet, Paula Blank argues that Shakespeare, in his experiments with measurement, demonstrates the incommensurability of the aims and operations of quantification with human experience.From scales and spans to squares and levels to ratings and rules, Shakespeare's rhetoric of measurement reveals the extent to which language in the Renaissance was itself understood as a set of alternative measures for figuring human worth. In chapters that explore attempts to measure human feeling, weigh human equalities (and inequalities), regulate race relations, and deduce social and economic merit, Blank shows why Shakespeare's measures are so often exposed as "mismeasures"—equivocal, provisional, and as unreliable as the men and women they are designed to assess.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, provides a wide context in which to consider the rise of “humanity” as one of the chief modern virtues. A relative of—and also a replacement for—formerly more prominent other-regarding virtues like justice and generosity, humanity and later compassion become the true north of the modern moral compass. Contributors to this volume consider various aspects of this virtue, by comparison with what came before and with attention to its development from early to late modernity, and up to the present.

Eminent literary critic Alvin Kernan takes us back to the court performances of some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, showing how the courtly setting influenced the bard's work. Kernan argues that Shakespeare was a great dramatist whose plays commented on political and social concerns of his patrons and who adjusted his own art to pander to court needs. 30 illustrations.