Examines how Shakespeare dramatizes the strategies people use to deal with death's inevitability, discusses the nature of Shakespearean tragedy, and also looks at the theme of immortality.

"This book is about dying, not about death. We are always dying a big, always giving things up, always having things taken away. Is there a person alive who isn't really curious about what dying is for them? Is there a person alive who wouldn't like to go to their dying full of excitement, without fear and without morbidity? This books tells you how." -- Front cover.

Uses the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology and psychiatry to explain what makes people act the way they do.

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? This authoritative collection of essays brings fresh perspectives to bear on an intriguing cultural phenomenon.

This book is an anthology of critical essays written about English literature during the Renaissance (or the 'early-modern' period). It focuses on Shakespeare's poetry and plays, including the 'Sonnets', 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', 'The Rape of Lucrece', 'King Lear', 'Othello', 'Measure for Measure', and 'Timon of Athens'. Also examined are the publication of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, William Cartwright's play 'The Royal Slave', and James Halliwell-Phillips, one of the central figures in the Shakespearean textual tradition.

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.

Religious issues and discourse are key to an understanding of Shakespeare's plays and poems. This dictionary discusses over 1000 words and names in Shakespeare's works that have a religious connotation. Its unique word-by-word approach allows equal consideration of the full nuance of each of these words, from 'abbess' to 'zeal'. It also gradually reveals the persistence, the variety, and the sophistication of Shakespeare's religious usage. Frequent attention is given to the prominence of Reformation controversy in these words, and to Shakespeare's often ingenious and playful metaphoric usage of them. Theological commonplaces assume a major place in the dictionary, as do overt references to biblical figures, biblical stories and biblical place-names; biblical allusions; church figures and saints.

Presents a collection of critical essays about the works of Cormac McCarthy.

This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.

When Victor Cahn's Shakespeare the Playwright was issued in 1991, it was highly recommended for any general public library and for academic collections at all undergraduate levels (Choice) and viewed as a useful guide for the general reader, as well as high school and undergraduate students Library Journal. Now Professor Cahn has revised his introduction to make the context of Shakespeare's plays more meaningful to the beginning researcher and to show how the plays have been performed from the 16th century onward. In addition, the bibliographies for each of the 37 plays have been updated to include the best new research. These updates and revisions will enhance the use of this guide for the general reader, student, and researcher, from high school onward. Since their first production four centuries ago, the plays of William Shakespeare have been the most widely produced, popularly acclaimed, and critically examined works in the world's literature. In this unique book, Victor L. Cahn, an acclaimed teacher of drama, guides the reader scene by scene through each of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, re-creating the freshness and theatrical effect of performance. Cahn has based his approach on the assumption that the fundamental appeal of Shakespeare's plays lies in the characters, and with clarity and subtlety he focuses on how the implications of the characters' actions and the nuances of their language contribute to the plays' impact. The introduction briefly traces Shakespeare's life and career, and explains some of the social and artistic circumstances that influenced his work. The plays are grouped by genre: Tragedies, Histories, Comedies, and Romances. This structure allows Cahn to explore Shalespeare's development in all four dramatic forms, as well as to suggest relationships between characters, themes, and images throughout the works. In addition, Cahn discusses the plays as reflective of Shakespeare's age, particularly the Renaissance concern with the tension between individual rights and social responsibility. The text is free from extensive scholarly apparatus, but valuable suggestions for further reading follow the analysis of each play, and a selected bibliography concludes the volume. The comprehensiveness of the book, as well as the accessibility and quality of its interpretations, make it a valuable resource for courses in Shakespeare, drama, and British literature, and a worthy addition to high school, college, university, and public library reference collections.