Originally published in 1989, this book focuses on the handling of the relationship between the onstage world and the offstage world, between the world that Shakespeare shows us and the one he tells us about. It is developed in two parts. Initially examined is the way reports are used in Shakespeare to relate the offstage and onstage worlds, building from simple examples within individual scenes in various plays to related sequences of reports which can be evaluated as part of broader strategies effecting the structure of a whole play. In the second part the author examines the ways in which several, or all, of these strategies work in individual plays, and what combined effect the prominent employment of them has in shaping the effect of the plays. In all cases the author is concerned to indicate why Shakespeare chose to handle matters as he does rather than in other ways available in the sources or in the speculative alternative methods which can be imaginatively constructed.

Originally published in 1989, this book focuses on the handling of the relationship between the onstage world and the offstage world, between the world that Shakespeare shows us and the one he tells us about. It is developed in two parts. Initially examined is the way reports are used in Shakespeare to relate the offstage and onstage worlds, building from simple examples within individual scenes in various plays to related sequences of reports which can be evaluated as part of broader strategies effecting the structure of a whole play. In the second part the author examines the ways in which several, or all, of these strategies work in individual plays, and what combined effect the prominent employment of them has in shaping the effect of the plays. In all cases the author is concerned to indicate why Shakespeare chose to handle matters as he does rather than in other ways available in the sources or in the speculative alternative methods which can be imaginatively constructed.

Shakespeare's texts have a long and close relationship with many different types of dance, from dance forms referenced in the plays to adaptations across many genres today. With contributions from experienced and emerging scholars, this handbook provides a concise reference on dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement - a process that raises questions of authorship and authority, cross-cultural communication, semantics, embodiment, and the relationship between word and image. Motivated by growing interest in movement, materiality, and the body, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare - his life, works, and afterlife - and dance. In the handbook's first section - Shakespeare and Dance - authors consider dance within the context of early modern life and culture and investigate Shakespeare's use of dance forms within his writing. The latter half of the handbook - Shakespeare as Dance - explores the ways that choreographers have adapted Shakespeare's work. Chapters address everything from narrative ballet adaptations to dance in musicals, physical theater adaptations, and interpretations using non-Western dance forms such as Cambodian traditional dance or igal, an indigenous dance form from the southern Philippines. With a truly interdisciplinary approach, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance provides an indispensable resource for considerations of dance and corporeality on Shakespeare's stage and the early modern era.

Prompting is the thematic thread that pervades the pages of this book. Its primary connotation is that of the prompter who is urgently called into action, at moments of anxiety, when narrative begins to fail. The central dynamic issue concerns the amending imagination as a prompting resource which, through creativity and the aesthetic imperative, can be invoked in this therapeutic space when the patient - through fear, resistance or distraction - is unable to continue with his story. Psychotherapy can be regarded as a process in which the patient is enabled to do for himself what he cannot do on his own. Shakespeare - as the spokesman for all other poets and dramatists - prompts the therapist in the incessant search for those resonant rhythms and mutative metaphors which augment empathy and make for deeper communication and which also facilitates transference interpretation and resolution. The cadence of the spoken word and the different laminations of silence always call for more finely tuned attentiveness than the therapist, unprompted, can offer. The authors show how Shakespeare can prompt therapeutic engagement with "inaccessible" patients who might otherwise be out of therapeutic reach. At the same time, they demonstrate that the clinical, off-stage world of therapy can also prompt the work of the actor in his on-stage search for representational precision.

Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which-though many of them are considered of great literary worth-were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which–though many of them are considered of great literary worth–were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

The first fifty volumes of this yearbook of Shakespeare studies are being reissued in paperback.

A collection of essays about Shakespeare's comedic play As you like it, addressing its structure, themes, and subject matter.

This 14-volume set contains titles originally published between 1926 and 1992. An eclectic mix, this collection examines Shakespeare’s work from a number of different perspectives, looking at history, language, performance and more it includes references to many of his plays as well as his sonnets.

Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. READING THE UNSEEN: (OFFSTAGE) HAMLET is about the presence and significance of offstage action in Hamlet, things we hear about in words but do not see performed physically onstage--things like King Hamlet's murder "while [he] was sleeping in [his] orchard," Ophelia's death in "the glassy stream," Hamlet's visit to Ophelia's "closet ... with his doublet all unbraced," Gertrude and Claudius having sex "in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed." In a series of brilliantly original "close readings," Ratcliffe examines how it is that passages such as these make physically absent things verbally "present," how they "show" us things we do not actually see, how they bring us face to face with the "Words, words, words" that are what Hamlet is, he argues, most of all about.