Explores Shakespeare's plays in their most immediate context: the hundreds of plays known to original audiences, but lost to us.

Gregory Doran's account of his quest to re-discover Cardenio, the lost play written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. A thrilling act of literary detection that takes him from the Bodleian Library in Oxford, via Cervantes' Spain to the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. Fully illustrated throughout, Shakespeare's Lost Play tells a fascinating story, which, like the play itself, will engross Shakespeare buffs and theatregoers alike. Doran's much-praised production of Cardenio for the Royal Shakespeare Company marked the culmination of years spent searching for a famously 'lost' play co-authored by William Shakespeare. In this book, Doran takes us with him on his quest to unearth every extant clue and then into the rehearsal room as he pieces together a play unseen since its first performance in 1613. The result, as the Guardian attested, is 'an extraordinary and theatrically powerful piece, one that should both please audiences and keep academic scholars in work for years'.

Long sought by scholars as the Holy Grail of world literature, and masquerading under the censor's makeshift title, "The second maiden's tragedy," this lost play was discovered by Charles Hamilton, a forensic document examiner and literary historian.

Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn’t have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Condell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They’ll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.

“A book for anyone who loves Shakespeare . . . One of the most scandalous and potentially revolutionary theories about the authorship of these immortal works.” —Mark Rylance, First Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre It is perhaps the greatest story never told: the truth behind the most enduring works of literature in the English language, perhaps in any language. Who was William Shakespeare? Critically acclaimed historian Charles Beauclerk has spent more than two decades researching the authorship question, and if the plays were discovered today, he argues, we would see them for what they are—shocking political works written by a court insider, someone with the monarch’s indulgence, shielded from repression in an unstable time of armada and reformation. But the author’s identity was quickly swept under the rug after his death. The official history—of an uneducated merchant writing in near obscurity, and of a virginal queen married to her country—dominated for centuries. Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom delves deep into the conflicts and personalities of Elizabethan England, as well as the plays themselves, to tell the true story of the “Soul of the Age.” “Beauclerk’s learned, deep scholarship, compelling research, engaging style and convincing interpretation won me completely. He has made me view the whole Elizabethan world afresh. The plays glow with new life, exciting and real, infused with the soul of a man too long denied his inheritance.” —Sir Derek Jacobi

Set in the heat and dust of Andalusia in seventeenth-century Spain, Cardenio is the story of a friendship betrayed, with all the elements of a thriller: disguise, dishonour and deceit. A woman is seduced, a bride is forced to the altar, and a man runs mad among the mountains of the Sierra Morena. The history of the play is every bit as thrilling, and this text is the result of a masterful act of literary archaeology by the Royal Shakespeare Company's Chief Associate Director Gregory Doran, to re-imagine a previously lost play by Shakespeare. Based on an episode in Cervantes' Don Quixote, the play known as Cardenio by Shakespeare and John Fletcher was performed at court in 1612. A copy of their collaboration has never been found; however, it is claimed that Double Falshood by Lewis Theobald is an eighteenth-century adaptation of it. Since Theobald's play misses out some crucial scenes in the plot, Doran has turned to the Cervantes original to supply the missing episodes, using the original English translation by Thomas Shelton (1612) that Fletcher and Shakespeare must themselves have read. Cardenio re-opened the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's fiftieth birthday season in 2011.

Discovered in a treasure-filled parking lot in Leicester, England (next to a pile of bones that didn't look that important), an ancient manuscript proves to be the long-lost first play written by none other than seventeen-year-old William Shakespeare from Stratford. We are totally not completely making this up. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S LONG LOST FIRST PLAY (abridged) is the literary holy grail: an actual manuscript in Shakespeare's own hand showing all his most famous characters and familiar speeches in a brand-new story. But because it's one hundred hours long and contains multiple unwieldy storylines, it was decided, as a public service, to abridge it down to a brief and palatable ninety-minute performance for this lost masterpiece. "Something wickedly funny this way comes!" The New York Times "A breathlessly irreverent, pun-filled romp!" The Washington Post "A top-notch comic deconstruction of Shakespeare!" The Stage--U K

Shakespearean Metadrama was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In a new approach to Shakespeare criticism, the author interprets five of Shakespeare's early plays as metadramas, dramas that are not only about the various moral, social, political, and other thematic issues with which critics have so long been concerned but also about the plays themselves. Professor Calderwood demonstrates that in these five plays Shakespeare writes about his dramatic art -- its nature, its media of language and theater, its generic forms and conventions, its relationship to truth and the social order. In an introductory chapter the author explains his theory of metadrama, placing it in a general critical context as well as in the specific framework of Shakespeare's plays. He distinguishes between the meaning of metadrama and the similar terms "metaplay" and "metatheare." He points out that the dominant metadramatic aspect of the five plays under study is the interplay of language and action in drama. A separate chapter is devoted to the interpretation of each of the plays. Professor Calderwood is aware that in presenting his critical theory and interpretations he may be met with skepticism by other scholars and critics. He anticipates such a situation in the introduction: "To the critic trying on introductory styles for a book on Shakespearean metadrama," he writes, "the plight of Falstaff at the Boar's Head Tavern comes all to readily to mind. 'What trick," he must ask himself, 'what device, what starting-hole, canst thou now find out to hide thee from this open and apparent shame?'"

Adaptation of newly-discovered letters that may have been written by William Shakespeare and have never before been published. He writes of his journey from country youth to celebrated London playwright and some astonishing events along the way, including an attempt to travel to the Americas to seek his fortune and a love affair with a remarkable woman of Jewish descent.