This book explores why crime fiction so often alludes to Shakespeare. It ranges widely over a variety of authors including classic golden age crime writers such as the four ‘queens of crime’ (Allingham, Christie, Marsh, Sayers), Nicholas Blake and Edmund Crispin, as well as more recent authors such as Reginald Hill, Kate Atkinson and Val McDermid. It also looks at the fondness for Shakespearean allusion in a number of television crime series, most notably Midsomer Murders, Inspector Morse and Lewis, and considers the special sub-genre of detective stories in which a lost Shakespeare play is found. It shows how Shakespeare facilitates discussions about what constitutes justice, what authorises the detective to track down the villain, who owns the countryside, national and social identities, and the question of how we measure cultural value.

Each chapter of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter consists of an in-depth discussion of the intersection between Potter and a canonical literary work; a discussion which aims to transform the reader’s understanding of Rowling’s literary achievement as well as to encourage wider reading and discovery of writers with who they may not be familiar.

The Bible in Shakespeare is a critical study of the links between the two great pillars of English culture, the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

Analyzes the biblical references that Shakespeare makes in his plays, surveying the different English Bibles available to Shakespeare, and pointing out which of these he referred to most often (the King James version only appeared near the end of his career). Also examines biblical references found in literary source material used by Shakespeare to determine whether he used or adapted these or added others from his own memory; and what these allusions would have meant to audiences of the time.--From publisher description.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide tofurther reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. Despite the presence of hundreds of Biblical allusions in Shakespeare, this is the first book to explore the pattern and significance of those references in relation to a selection of his greatest plays. It reveals the Bible as a rich source for Shakespeare's uses of myth, history, comedy andtragedy, his techniques of staging, and his ways of characterizing rulers, magicians and teachers in the image of the Bible's multifaceted God. This book also discloses ways in which Shakespeare's plays offer both pious and irreverent interpretations of the Scriptures comparable to those presentedby his contemporary writers, artists, philosophers and politicians. After an opening chapter comparing the Bible as a fragmented yet unified collection of 46 books with the fragmented yet unified First Folio collection of Shakespeare's 36 plays, each of the following six chapters matches a book of the Bible with a representative play: the creation myth of Genesiswith the first play in the Folio, The Tempest, the historical epic of Exodus with Henry V, the tragedy of Job with King Lear, the tragicomedy of the Gospel of Matthew with Measure for Measure, the homiletic disputation of Paul's Epistle to the Romans with The Merchant of Venice, and the apocalypticmasque of the Book of Revelation with The Tempest again. Though its subject matter and style appeal to a broad audience, this book is grounded in recent scholarship in Shakespeare and Biblical studies. Its intertextual readings are framed by descriptions of the historical circumstances of each work's composition and reception and by an emergent theory ofallusion as a principle of creation and understanding.

A comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the Hazards and the Chances. It contains as many sets of twins and mistaken identities as any Shakespeare comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.

After God, Shakespeare created most, James Joyce wrote in Ulysses. The importance of Shakespeare in Ulysses has been often discussed and documented; that this royal bard is as central and omnipresent in Finnegans Wake has been roundly agreed upon by Joyce scholars, yet no printed volume has exhaustively investigated the topic. This study arrives, therefore, as a welcome and timely look into the assertion, as on critic put it, that "Finnegans Wake is about Shakespeare." "Throughout his life," Dr. Cheng writes, "Joyce was in the habit of comparing himself to England's national poet." In the Wake, Shakespeare--his life, his plays and his characters--forms a "dense and extensive matrix of allusion." Part I of this book provides a critical and interpretative view of how Shakespearean influences and allusions illuminate the themes and meanings of the Wake; the chapters are arranged to follow general patterns of allusion and motif. Part II comprises explications of a thousand Shakespearean allusions in Finnegans Wake, recorded by page and line of the novel. Finally, Part III is a set of appendixes which list the Shakespearean allusions by play, act, scene, and line for easy reference.