David Lucking sees Shakespeare’s plays as negotiating tensions between a number of alternative, and sometimes mutually antagonistic perspectives. Some of these perspectives are associated with particular languages, cultures and texts, while others involve philosophical issues such as the nature of personal ontology and distinctions between reality and dream, being and nothingness. In elaborating his insights Lucking draws extensive comparisons with Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and between Sophocles’ Theban plays and King Lear, and he also pays close attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra. Re-assessing a wide range of earlier commentary, his nine essays confirm the lasting value of apposite contextualization in tandem with detailed close reading.

Larry S. Champion examines Shakespeare's English history plays and describes the structural devices through which Shakespeare controls the audience's angle of vision and its response to the pattern of historical events. Champion observes the experimentation between stage worlds and the significance of a dramatic technique unique to the history play—one that combines the detachment of a documentary necessary for a broad intellectual view of history and the simultaneous engagement between character and spectator. Champion sees a conscious bifurcation occurring in Shakespeare's dramaturgy after Richard II. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare continues to focus on the psychological analysis and internalized protagonist which lead to his major tragic achievements. In King John and Henry IV, the playwright develops a middle ground between the polarities of Henry VI, in which the flat, onedimensional characters essentially serve the purposes of the narrative, and the tragedies, in which the spectator's consuming interest is in the developing centralfigure whose critical moments they share. Champion sees Henry V as the culmination of Shakespeare's e fforts in the English history play.

The Shakespeare Authorship question - the question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays and who the man we know as Shakespeare was - is a subject which fascinates millions of people the world over and can be seen as a major cultural phenomenon. However, much discussion of the question exists on the very margins of academia, deemed by most Shakespearean academics as unimportant or, indeed, of interest only to conspiracy theorists. Yet, many academics find the Authorship question interesting and worthy of analysis in theoretical and philosophical terms. This collection brings together leading literary and cultural critics to explore the Authorship question as a social, cultural and even theological phenomenon and consider it in all its rich diversity and significance.

Describes the geography, plants and animals, history, economy, language, religions, culture, and people of the People's Republic of China, home of one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations.

Shakespearean Temporalities addresses a critical neglect in Early Modern Performance and Shakespeare Studies, revising widely prevailing and long-standing assumptions about the performance and reception of history on the early modern stage. Demonstrating that theatre, at the turn of the seventeenth century, thrived on an intense fascination with perceived tensions between (medieval) past and (early modern) present, this volume uncovers a dimension of historical drama that has been largely neglected due to a strong focus on nationhood and a predilection for ‘topical’ readings. It moreover reassesses genre conventions by venturing beyond the threshold of the supposed "death of the history play," in 1603. Closely analysing a broad range of Shakespeare’s historical drama, it explores the dramatic techniques that allow the theatre to perform historical distance. An experience of historical contingency through an immersion in a world ontologically related yet temporally removed is thus revealed as a major appeal of historical drama and a striking aspect of Shakespeare’s history plays. With a focus on performance, the experience of playgoers, and the dynamics that resulted from the collective production of dramatic historiography by competing companies, the book offers the first analysis of what can be referred to as Shakespeare’s dramaturgy of historical temporality.

"In Shakespeare's Language, Keith Johnson offers an overview of the rich and dynamic history of the reception and study of Shakespeare's language from his death right up to the present. The historical approach provides a comprehensive overview, plotting the attitudes towards Shakespeare's language, as well as a history of its study. This approach reveals how different cultural, literary and linguistic climates have moulded these attitudes and reflects changing linguistic climates. Shakespeare's Language is therefore not only an essential guide to the language of Shakespeare, but offers crucial insights to broader approaches to language as a whole"--

Shakespeare was an astute observer of contemporary life, culture, and politics. The emerging practice of territory as a political concept and technology did not elude his attention. In Shakespearean Territories, Stuart Elden reveals just how much Shakespeare’s unique historical position and political understanding can teach us about territory. Shakespeare dramatized a world of technological advances in measuring, navigation, cartography, and surveying, and his plays open up important ways of thinking about strategy, economy, the law, and colonialism, providing critical insight into a significant juncture in history. Shakespeare’s plays explore many territorial themes: from the division of the kingdom in King Lear, to the relations among Denmark, Norway, and Poland in Hamlet, to questions of disputed land and the politics of banishment in Richard II. Elden traces how Shakespeare developed a nuanced understanding of the complicated concept and practice of territory and, more broadly, the political-geographical relations between people, power, and place. A meticulously researched study of over a dozen classic plays, Shakespearean Territories will provide new insights for geographers, political theorists, and Shakespearean scholars alike.

Shakespeare and Religion examines the topic of religion in Shakespearean drama from two points of view: the historical, and that of postmodern philosophy and theology.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.

This essay collection develops new perspectives on constructions of old age in literary, legal, scientific and periodical cultures of the nineteenth century. Rigorously interdisciplinary, the book places leading researchers of old age in nineteenth-century literature in dialogue with experts from the fields of cultural, legal and social history. It revisits the origins of many modern debates about aging in the nineteenth century – a period that saw the emergence of cultural and scientific frameworks for the understanding of old age that continue to be influential today. The contributors provide fresh readings of canonical texts by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and others. The volume builds momentum in the burgeoning field of aging studies. It argues that the study of old age in the nineteenth century has entered a new and distinctly interdisciplinary phase that is characterized by a set of research interests that are currently shared across a range of disciplines and that explore conceptions of old age in the nineteenth century by privileging, respectively, questions of agency, of place, of gender and sexuality, and of narrative and aesthetic form.