The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's most controversial plays, whose elements resonate even more profoundly in the current climate of rising racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, queerphobia and right-wing nationalism. This collection of essays offers a 'freeze frame' that showcases a range of current debates and ideas surrounding the play. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to your needs. Essays offer new perspectives that provide an up-to-date understanding of what's exciting and challenging about the play. Key themes and topics include: · Race and religion · Gender and sexuality · Philosophy · Animal studies · Adaptations and performance history

Othello has a long history of provoking profound emotion in its audiences and readers. This 'freeze frame' volume showcases current debates and ideas about the play's provocative effects. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to the needs of students, teachers, and researchers. Key issues and themes include: - Gender, Love, and Desire - Race, Ethnicity, and Difference - Social Relations, Status, and Ambition - Tragedy, Comedy, and Parody - Language, Expression, and Characterization All the essays offer new perspectives and combine to give readers an up-to-date understanding of what's exciting and challenging about Othello. The approach based on an individual play, unlike that of topic-based series, reflects how Shakespeare is most commonly studied and taught.

The last decade has witnessed a spate of high-profile presentations of The Merchant of Venice: the 2004 Michael Radford film, 2010’s New York City “Shakespeare in the Park” production, as well as the play’s Tony Award-nominated 2010-11 Broadway run. Likewise, new scholarly works such as Kenneth Gross’s Shylock is Shakespeare (2006) and Janet Adelman’s Blood Relations (2008) have offered poignant insights into this play. Why has this drama garnered so much attention of late? What else can we learn from this contentious comedy? How else can we read the drama’s characters? Where do studies of The Merchant of Venice go from here? This collection offers readers sundry answers to these questions by showcasing a sampling of ways this culturally arresting play can be read and interpreted. The strength of this monograph lies in the disparate approaches its contributors offer – from a feminist view of Portia and Nerissa’s friendship to psychoanalytic readings of allegories between the play and Shakespeare’s Pericles to a reading of a Manga comic book version of The Merchant of Venice. Each essay is supported by a strong basis in traditional close reading practices. Our collection of scholars then buttresses such work with the theoretical or pedagogical frameworks that reflect their area of expertise. This collection offers readers different critical lenses through which to approach the primary text. Although Shakespeare scholars and graduate students will no doubt appreciate and employ the work of this collection, the primary audience of this anthology is undergraduate students and the professors who work with them. Many budding scholars have had the experience of checking out a monograph from the library and then finding it was a waste of time because the author spends three hundred pages discussing a perspective of which they have no interest. With this collection, students will not only see how multi-faceted interpretations of the play can be but they also are more likely to find essays that appeal to their own research interests.

Complements Barron's Shakespeare Made Easy texts or can be used alone. Sets the stage for student comprehension with background material on each play. Builds appreciation for Shakespear's works with thought-provoking reviews.

This collection brings together emerging and established scholars to explore fresh approaches to Shakespeare's best-known play. Hamlet has often served as a testing ground for innovative readings and new approaches. Its unique textual history – surviving as it does in three substantially different early versions – means that it offers an especially complex and intriguing case-study for histories of early modern publishing and the relationship between page and stage. Similarly, its long history of stage and screen revival, creative appropriation and critical commentary offer rich materials for various forms of scholarship. The essays in Hamlet: The State of Play explore the play from a variety of different angles, drawing on contemporary approaches to gender, sexuality, race, the history of emotions, memory, visual and material cultures, performativity, theories and histories of place, and textual studies. They offer fresh approaches to literary and cultural analysis, offer accessible introductions to some current ways of exploring the relationship between the three early texts, and present analysis of some important recent responses to Hamlet on screen and stage, together with a set of approaches to the study of adaptation.

Shakespeare's and Peele's Titus Andronicus has had a theatrical and a critical revival in the last fifteen years; the critical revival was perhaps prompted by Jonathan Bate's Arden edition of the play and its revision of the traditional critical account that it is an immature work and overly sensationalistic with its emphasis on non-essential violence. Recent debates and approaches have drawn closer attention to the play's classicism; re-defined its genre (for example the revised edition of the New Dramatic Sources will re-classify the play as one of Shakespeare's Roman plays); re-considered the nature of violent spectacle, family relations and kinship, political alliance, race and miscegenation. This study will explore how the revitalized critical responses to early modern and contemporary performance histories has had a significant impact upon the wider reception of this play.

Tracing the development of narrative verse in London's literary circles during the 1590s, this volume puts Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece into conversation with poems by a wide variety of contemporary writers, including Thomas Lodge, Francis Beaumont, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Campion and Edmund Spenser. Chapters investigate the complexities of this literary conversation and contribute for the current, vigorous reassessment of humanism's intended consequences by drawing attention to the highly diverse forms of early modern classicism as well as the complex connection between Latin pedagogy and vernacular poetic invention. Key themes and topics include: -Epyllia, masculinity and sexuality -Classicism and commerce -Genre and mimesis -Rhetoric and aesthetics

The Taming of the Shrew has puzzled, entertained and angered audiences, and it has been reinvented many times throughout its controversial history. Offering a focused overview of key emerging ideas and discourses surrounding Shakespeare's problematic comedy, the volume reveals and debates how contemporary readings and adaptions of the play have sought to reconsider and resolve the play's contentious portrayal of gender, power and identity. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to the needs of students, teachers and researchers. Key themes and issues include: · Gender and Power · History and Early Modern Contexts · Performance and Politics · Adaptation and Afterlife All the essays offer new perspectives and combine to give readers an up-to-date understanding of what's exciting and challenging about The Taming of the Shrew.