How original was Shakespeare and how was Shakespeare original? This lucid, innovative book sets about answering these questions by putting them in historical context and investigating how the dramatist worked with his sources: plays, poems, chronicles and prose romances. Shakespeare's Originality unlocks its topic with rewarding precision and flair, showing through a series of case studies that range across the output—from the mature comedies to the great tragedies, from Richard III to The Tempest—what can be learned about the artistry of the plays by thinking about these sources (including newly identified ones) after several decades of neglect. Discussion is enriched by such matters as Elizabethan ruffs and feathers, actors' footwork, chronicle history, modern theatre productions, debts to classical tragedy, scepticism, magic and science, the agricultural revolution, and ecological catastrophe. This is authoritative, lively work by one of the world's leading Shakespearians, accessible to the general reader as well as indispensable for students.

This compact, engaging book puts Shakespeare's originality in historical context and looks at how he worked with his sources: the plays, poems, chronicles and romances on which his own plays are based.

This title was first published in 2002: An intensive study of Shakespeare's most ambitious and complex achievement in the historical mode. The book offers an account of the play's critical history from 1700 until the 1980s, deals with the aspects of Tudor history relevant to an understanding, and offers close readings of the text structured around what the author believes to be the play's three dominant concepts: time; truth; and grace. In an attempt to correct what he sees as a certain falsification of critical history, the author aligns his account of the play's reception with one of its major preoccupations - the inescapable and informing presence of the past.

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 their own day, the works in this collection of now all-but-forgotten plays, composed between 1710 and 1820, enjoyed much critical and commercial success. For example, Nicholas Rowe's "The Tragedy of Jane Shore" (1714) was the most popular new play of the eighteenth century, and the sixth most performed tragedy, following "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "Romeo and Juliet,"" Othello" and "King Lear." Even William Shirley's forgotten play, "Edward the Black Prince" (1750), "was well received with great applause" and had a stage history spanning three decades. This collection includes the performance text to the 1796 Ireland play, "Vortigern." The plays are all reset and, where possible, modernized from original manuscripts, with listed variants, and parallel passages traced to Shakespearean canonical texts. The set includes a new introduction by the editor, and raises important questions about the nature of artistic property and authenticity, a key area of Shakespearean research today.

Rome was tantamount to its ruins, a dismembered body, to the eyes of those – Italians and foreigners – who visited the city in the years prior to or encompassing the lengthy span of the Renaissance. Drawing on the double movement of archaeological exploration and creative reconstruction entailed in the humanist endeavour to ‘resurrect’ the past, ‘ruins’ are seen as taking precedence over ‘myth’, in Shakespeare’s Rome. They are assigned the role of a heuristic model, and discovered in all their epistemic relevance in Shakespeare’s dramatic vision of history and his negotiation of modernity. This is the first book of its kind to address Shakespeare’s relationship with Rome’s authoritative myth, archaeologically, by taking as a point of departure a chronological reversal, namely the vision of the ‘eternal’ city as a ruinous scenario and hence the ways in which such a layered, ‘silent’, and aporetic scenario allows for an archaeo-anatomical approach to Shakespeare’s Roman works.

This volume gives Asia’s Shakespeares the critical, theoretical, and political space they demand, offering rich, alternative ways of thinking about Asia, Shakespeare, and Asian Shakespeare based on Asian experiences and histories. Challenging and supplementing the dominant critical and theoretical structures that determine Shakespeare studies today, close analysis of Shakespeare’s Asian journeys, critical encounters, cultural geographies, and the political complexions of these negotiations reveal perspectives different to the European. Exploring what Shakespeare has done to Asia along with what Asia has done with Shakespeare, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare helps articulate Asianess, unfolding Asia’s past, reflecting Asia’s present, and projecting Asia’s future. This is achieved by forgoing the myth of the Bard’s universality, bypassing the authenticity test, avoiding merely descriptive or even ethnographic accounts, and using caution when applying Western theoretical frameworks. Many of the productions studied in this volume are brought to critical attention for the first time, offering new methodologies and approaches across disciplines including history, philosophy, sociology, geopolitics, religion, postcolonial studies, psychology, translation theory, film studies, and others. The volume explores a range of examples, from exquisite productions infused with ancient aesthetic traditions to popular teen manga and television drama, from state-dictated appropriations to radical political commentaries in areas including Japan, India, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, China, and the Philippines. This book goes beyond a showcasing of Asian adaptations in various languages, styles, and theatre traditions, and beyond introductory essays intended to help an unknowing audience appreciate Asian performances, developing a more inflected interpretative dialogue with other areas of Shakespeare studies.