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.

An introduction to Shakespeare's I Henry IV - introducing its critical and performance history, current critical landscape and new directions in research on the play.

Henry IV sits on a usurped throne, his conscience and his nobles in revolt, while his son Hal is immersed in a self-indulgent life of revelry with the notorious Sir John Falstaff. Shakespeare explores questions of kingship and honor in this masterly mingling of history, comedy, and tragedy. Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts and authoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Each play includes an Introduction as well as an overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical career; commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers; scene-by-scene analysis; key facts about the work; a chronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; and black-and-white illustrations. Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers, these modern and accessible editions from the Royal Shakespeare Company set a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century.

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition retains Giorgio Melchiori's text of Shakespeare's The Second Part of King Henry IV. Melchiori argues that the play forms an unplanned sequel to the First Part, itself a 'remake' of an old, non-Shakespearean play. In the Second Part, Shakespeare deliberately exploits Falstaff's popular appeal and the resulting rich humour adds a comic dimension to the play, rendering it a unique blend of history, morality play and comedy. Among modern editions, Melchiori's is the one most firmly based on the quarto. This second edition includes a new section by Adam Hansen on recent stage, film and critical interpretations.

A compact edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare. It combines impeccable scholarship with beautifully written editorial material and a user-friendly layout of the text. Also included is a foreword, list of contents, general introduction, essay on language, contemporary allusions to Shakespeare, glossary, consolidated bibliography and index of first lines of Sonnets.

Henry IV, Part One has been one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays since it was first produced, and was reprinted several times during the playwright’s lifetime. The play encompasses the tragic pathos of Hotspur’s death, the thrill of Hal’s battlefield valor, the intrigue of power politics, and the broad humor of tavern scenes. It has been performed as a play that celebrates England and engenders national pride, but also as a play that thumbs its nose at patriotism and notions of empire. This Broadview Edition provides a discussion of the play’s performance history, and both the introduction and footnotes encourage readers to think about the play as a performance text. The appendices gather a selection of historical sources and contemporary philosophical and political writings from England and Europe, and interleaved pages throughout the play provide illustrations and extended discussion of key phrases, plot points, and allusions. Further historical and performance materials are available on the Internet Shakespeare Editions website.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of European history and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

Matthew Woodcock provides a survey of the critical responses to this popular play, as well as the key debates and developments, from the seventeenth century to the present day. Leading the reader through material chronologically, the Guide summarises and assesses key interpretations, setting them in their intellectual and historical context.

Through an examination of six plays by Shakespeare, the author presents an innovative analysis of political developments in the last decade of Elizabethan rule and their representation in poetic drama of the period. The playhouses of London in the 1590s provided a distinctive forum for discourse and dissemination of nascent political ideas. Shakespeare exploited the unique capacity of theatre to humanise contemporary debate concerning the powers of the crown and the extent to which these were limited by law. The autonomous subject of law is represented in the plays considered here as a sentient political being whose natural rights and liberties found an analogue in the narratives of common law, as recorded in juristic texts and law reports of the early modern era. Each chapter reflects a particular aspect of constitutional development in the late-Elizabethan state. These include abuse of the royal prerogative by the crown and its agents; the emergence of a politicised middle class citizenry, empowered by the ascendancy of contract law; the limitations imposed by the courts on the lawful extent of divinely ordained kingship; the natural and rational authority of unwritten lex terrae; the poetic imagination of the judiciary and its role in shaping the constitution; and the fusion of temporal and spiritual jurisdiction in the person of the monarch. The book advances original insights into the complex and agonistic relationship between theatre, politics, and law. The plays discussed offer persuasive images both of the crown's absolutist tendencies and of alternative polities predicated upon classical and humanist principles of justice, equity, and community. 'It is now canon in progressive U.S. legal scholarship that to focus solely on the text of our Constitution is myopic. We look as well for "constitutional moments", moments when the zeitgeist is so transformed that our fundamental legal charter changes with it. In this breathtakingly erudite book, Paul Raffield argues that the late-Elizabethan period was such a "constitutional moment" in England, a moment literally "played out" for the polity by the greatest dramatist of all time. A lawyer and a thespian, Raffield handles both legal and literary sources with exquisite care. As with the works of the Old Masters, one dwells pleasurably on each detail until their cumulative force presses one backward to see the canvas in its sudden, glorious entirety. A major achievement.' Kenji Yoshino Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU School of Law