Introduces Shakespeare's plays, sonnets, and narrative poems, and discusses major themes, characters, and dramatic techniques

Here Art Thou, True Shakespeare! This accessible new guide to Shakespeare's major plays focuses on the essence of the spoken word and the benefits of watching the plays in performance - on the stage or screen - whenever possible. You'll find tips about plot, theme, famous passages and soliloquies, and how to hear the music within the Bard's verse and wordplay. Remember - Shakespearean theatre is a social art form, and in its earliest days, it was highly commercial. This book brings you closer to the heady world of freelance playwriting and the London playhouses of the 1590s. As a playwright and sharer in the Globe theatre, Shakespeare was at the forefront of Western show business. This book highlights Shakespeare's career, his dramatic influences, and what 16th-century playgoers in London would have experienced inside the theatre. In The Complete Idiot's Guide to Shakespeare's Plays, cultural and historical contexts for the major plays are explored, offering perspectives of the director and actor, in addition to that of the scholar and close reader. In particular, the book takes you behind the scenes with Shakespearean directors, who offer commentary about key challenges presented by the plays, famous roles, and a host of other production concerns. Professional actors also discuss how they've tackled lead roles in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, among others.You'll find: - Twenty (20) major plays explored in depth, explaining literary terms, and Elizabethan English, with attention to language and verse - A look at how the plays have been staged, from the earliest playhouses to contemporary auditoriums - Appendices spotlighting Shakespeare's likely collaborations, a glossary, suggested further reading, and tips about acclaimed film and audio versions. Perfect for English and drama students, general readers, theatergoers, and actors.

Despite the reshifting of values that has affected every aspect of life in the 21st century, William Shakespeare still stands as the greatest writer the English language has ever produced. Even so, many people have never read him. If you have never read “the Bard”—or if you’ve tried and given up in frustration—you need Shakespeare For Beginners. Author Brandon Toropov opens with the observation that Shakespeare’s genius is not in his (or England’s) history, it’s in his words, most notably, his plays—in his brilliant stories, unforgettable characters, and the impossible beauty of his language. So, Shakespeare For Beginners skips the historical foreplay and goes straight to Shakespeare’s plays. The book offers clear, concise descriptions and plot summaries of each play; it lists key phrases and important themes, explains the main ideas behind each work and features excerpt of important passages (with explanatory notes on tough words.) And it is the only ‘entry level’ book available outside Great Britain that covers all of Shakespeare’s plays.

The essential guide to looking at literature with your own two eyes. What students know about Shakespeare, Orwell, Dickens, and Twain is primarily what their instructors tell them. Here's a book that teaches the students how to move on to the next level-evaluate and read critically on their own, trust their own opinions, develop original ideas, analyze characters, and find a deeper appreciation for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and more. * Ideal companion for college students and accessible for the casual reader as well * Covers fiction, poetry, narrative nonfiction, biographies and memoirs, essays and editorials, and newspapers, magazines, and journals * Features examples from published writing * Includes a reading list and a glossary of literary terms

This book is devoted to the description of typical trends in development, formation and the present state of English Author Lexicography, the roots of which go back to concordances to the Bible and glossaries of the complete works of Chaucer (xvi c.). Part I, “Linguistic Dictionaries to English Writers,” presents lexicographic analysis of old and new concordances, indices, glossaries and lexicons of famous English writers with special reference to Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and Dickens. It presents a modern scene of author glossaries for unfamiliar words, terms and other groups of writers’ vocabulary (e.g. Shakespeare’s insults and his erotic language). The reader is offered a detailed review of author concordances, glossaries and lexicons on the Internet, along with criticism of printed dictionaries. Part II, “Encyclopedic Reference Works to English Writers,” deals with English author encyclopedic reference books, i.e. encyclopedias, guides and companions; dictionaries of characters and place names; quotations and proverbs, and Internet encyclopedic resources. The book also provides a comprehensive list of references on author lexicography and an Index of Dictionaries to the English Writers (xvi–xxi cc.), including 300 titles of linguistic and encyclopedic dictionaries, which is a reliable user guide in the world of English author lexicography.

Shakespeare's sexuality has always been an ambiguous concept, despite the pleasant fictions of Shakespeare in Love. Now Michael Keevak examines such sources as anecdotes, imitations, forgeries, spurious works and portraits to show that this ambiguity has a long and twisted history.

Shakespeare, as well as the reading, translating, teaching, criticizing, performing, and adapting of Shakespeare, does not exist outside culture. Culture in its many varieties not only informs the Shakespearean corpus, productions, and scholarship, but is also reciprocally shaped by them. Culture never remains stable, but constantly evolves, travels, procreates, blends, and mutates; no less incessantly, the understanding and rewriting of Shakespeare fluctuates. The relations between Shakespeare and culture thus comprise a dynamic flux which calls for examination and reexamination. It is this rich and even labyrinthine network of meanings—intercultural, intertextual, and intergeneric—that this volume intends to explicate. The essays collected here, most of them first presented at the Fourth Conference of the National Taiwan University Shakespeare Forum held in Taipei in 2009, cover a wide range of topics—religion, philosophy, history, aesthetics, as well as politics—and thereby illustrate how fruitfully complex the topic of cultural interchange can be.

The Shakespeare Book of Lists catalogs Shakespeare's life, his times, his use of language and choice of words, the best and most insulting lines from his plays and poems, the actors who have performed his plays, the theaters where they have been performed, and the videos, films, and spin-offs we have all grown to love. The book contains every imaginable topic relating to Shakespeare, including: --Facts and myths about Shakespeare's life. --The top 10 songs from the plays. --Female Hamlets. --How to watch a Shakespearean film. --Some words first used by Shakespeare. --The most insulting lines found in his plays. --The bawdy plays.