First published in 1990, this title explores the nature of the interaction between Shakespeare and American culture. Shakespeare stands at the center of an elaborate institutional reality, closely tied to both cultural and ideological production. His plays, Michael Bristol asserts, help to constitute a primary affirmative theme of much American culture criticism, specifically the celebration of individuality and the values of expressive autonomy. This reissue will be of particular value to Literature students and researchers with an interest in Shakespeare, as well as those interested in American cultural history more generally.

In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. First published in 1992, this book details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. Valerie Traub argues that desire and anxiety together constitute the erotic in Shakespearean drama – circulating throughout the dramatic texts, traversing ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sites, eliciting and expressing heterosexual and homoerotic fantasies, embodiments, and fears. This is the first book to present a non-normalizing account of the unconscious and the institutional prerogatives that comprise the erotics of Shakespearean drama. Employing feminist, psychoanalytic, and new historical methods, and using each to interrogate the other, the book synthesises the psychic and the social, the individual and the institutional.

This fascinating title, first published in 1922, presents a detailed overview of the life and works of Shakespeare. Alden first considers Shakespeare’s Elizabethan context, alongside exploring the Classical and Italian foundations, political theories, concepts and theatrical trends that influenced his works. Next, a comprehensive biography provides insight into Shakespeare’s probable education, relationships and contemporaries. The final sections are devoted to the genres into which Shakespeare’s works have been categorised, with full analyses of and backgrounds to the poems, histories, comedies and tragedies. An important study, this title will be of particular value to students in need of a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare’s life and works, as well as the more general inquisitive reader.

First published in 1989, this title explores the relationship between theater and power in the English Renaissance. Shakespeare’s Henry V, Richard II, and Macbeth are examined alongside a range of cultural materials, including philosophical and historical accounts of sovereignty, royal portraiture and representations of treason and punishment. Renaissance theater was far more than a vehicle for the expression of a political content: it played a constitutive role in forming the distinctive theory of sovereignty and the distinctive political subjectivity of the era. By reading Shakespeare’s plays in conjunction with other, ideologically charged forms of representation, the book continues new-historicist efforts to uncover the complex relations between literary texts and cultural contexts. Providing an interesting and detailed analysis, this reissue will be of value to students of Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, and those concerned with exploring the intersection between cultural analysis, post-structuralism, and psychoanalytic interpretation.

Shakespeare Left and Right brings together critics, strikingly different in their politics and methodologies, who are acutely aware of the importance of politics on literary practice and theory. Should, for example, feminist criticism be subjected to a critique by voices it construes as hostile to its political agenda? Is it possible to present a critique of feminist criticism without implicitly impeding its politics? And, in the light of recent political events should the Right pronounce the demise of Marxism as a social science and interpretive tool? The essays in Shakespeare Left and Right, first published in 1991, present a tug of war about ideology, acted out over the body of Shakespeare. Part One focuses on the challenge thrown down by Richard Levin's widely discussed "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy". Part Two considers these issues in relation to critical practice and the reading of specific plays. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics interested in Shakespeare studies.

Shakespeare and Asia brings together innovative scholars from Asia or with Asian connections to explore these matters of East-West and global contexts then and now. The collection ranges from interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays and his relations with other authors like Marlowe and Dickens through Shakespeare and history and ecology to studies of film, opera or scholarship in Japan, Russia, India, Pakistan, Singapore, Taiwan and mainland China. The adaptations of Kozintsev and Kurosawa; Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays; different Shakespearean dramas and how they are interpreted, adapted and represented for the local Pakistani audience; the Peking-opera adaptation of Hamlet ; Féng Xiǎogāng’s The Banquet as an adaptation of Hamlet; the ideology of the film, Shakespeare Wallah. Asian adaptations of Hamlet will be at the heart of this volume. Hamlet is also analyzed in light of Oedipus and the Sphinx. Shakespeare is also considered as a historicist and in terms of what influence he has on Chinese writers and historical television. Lear is Here and Cleopatra and Her Fools, two adapted Shakespearean plays on the contemporary Taiwanese stage, are also discussed. This collection also examines in Shakespeare the patriarchal prerogative and notion of violence; carnival and space in the comedies; the exotic and strange; and ecology. The book is rich, ranging and innovative and will contribute to Shakespeare studies, Shakespeare and media and film, Shakespeare and Asia and global Shakespeare.

Renaissance ideas of honour had a profound influence on the English people who formed Shakespeare’s audiences. In When Honour’s at the Stake, first published in 1973, Norman Council describes the increasing importance of these ideas to the themes and structure of a number of Shakespeare’s major plays. The validity of the most widely approved code of honour was being challenged on a variety of fronts, yet both personal standards of behaviour and public affairs were habitually understood in terms of honour. A series of tragedies are given their basic form by dramatizing the pernicious effects of man’s disobedience to the various demands of honour; in Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear honour is among the principal motives of tragedy. In this way, the modern reader’s comprehension of the plays can be greatly enhanced by reference to Elizabethan honour codes.

This book, first published in 1985, explores the consciousness and the experience of Shakespeare’s audience. First describing the stage’s physical impact, Ralph Berry then goes on to explore the social or tribal consciousness of the audience in certain plays. The title finishes by examining the masque – the salient form of the Jacobean theatre. This title will be of interest to students of literature and theatre studies.