Ancient Rome has always been considered a compendium of City and World. In the Renaissance, an era of epistemic fractures, when the clash between the 'new science' (Copernicus, Galileo, Vesalius, Bacon, etcetera) and the authority of ancient texts produced the very notion of modernity, the extended and expanding geography of ancient Rome becomes, for Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, a privileged arena in which to question the nature of bodies and the place they hold in a changing order of the universe. Drawing on the rich scenario provided by Shakespeare's Rome, and adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the authors of this volume address the way in which the different bodies of the earthly and heavenly spheres are re-mapped in Shakespeare's time and in early modern European culture. More precisely, they investigate the way bodies are fashioned to suit or deconstruct a culturally articulated system of analogies between earth and heaven, microcosm and macrocosm. As a whole, this collection brings to the fore a wide range of issues connected to the Renaissance re-mapping of the world and the human. It should interest not only Shakespeare scholars but all those working on the interaction between sciences and humanities.

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women ‘Roman’ and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.

Rome was tantamount to its ruins, a dismembered body, to the eyes of those – Italians and foreigners – who visited the city in the years prior to or encompassing the lengthy span of the Renaissance. Drawing on the double movement of archaeological exploration and creative reconstruction entailed in the humanist endeavour to ‘resurrect’ the past, ‘ruins’ are seen as taking precedence over ‘myth’, in Shakespeare’s Rome. They are assigned the role of a heuristic model, and discovered in all their epistemic relevance in Shakespeare’s dramatic vision of history and his negotiation of modernity. This is the first book of its kind to address Shakespeare’s relationship with Rome’s authoritative myth, archaeologically, by taking as a point of departure a chronological reversal, namely the vision of the ‘eternal’ city as a ruinous scenario and hence the ways in which such a layered, ‘silent’, and aporetic scenario allows for an archaeo-anatomical approach to Shakespeare’s Roman works.

Shakespeare’s works occupy a prismatic and complex position in world culture: they straddle both the high and the low, the national and the foreign, literature and theatre. The Second World War presents a fascinating case study of this phenomenon: most, if not all, of its combatants have laid claim to Shakespeare and have called upon his work to convey their society’s self-image. In wartime, such claims frequently brought to the fore a crisis of cultural identity and of competing ownership of this ‘universal’ author. Despite this, the role of Shakespeare during the Second World War has not yet been examined or documented in any depth. Shakespeare and the Second World War provides the first sustained international, collaborative incursion into this terrain. The essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 1939–1945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today.

This edited collection explores the image of the wound as a ‘cultural symptom’ and a literary-visual trope at the core of representations of a new concept of selfhood in Early Modern Italian and English cultures, as expressed in the two complementary poles of poetry and theatre. The semantic field of the wounded body concerns both the image of the wound as a traumatic event, which leaves a mark on someone’s body and soul (and prompts one to investigate its causes and potential solutions), and the motif of the scar, which draws attention to the fact that time has passed and urges those who look at it to engage in an introspective and analytical process. By studying and describing the transmission of this metaphoric paradigm through the literary tradition, the contributors show how the image of the bodily wound—from Petrarch’s representation of the Self to the overt crisis that affects the heroes and the poetic worlds created by Ariosto and Tasso, Spenser and Shakespeare—could respond to the emergence of Modernity as a new cultural feature.

Why do the Capulets bite their thumbs at the Montagues? Why do the Venetians spit upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine? What is it about Volumnia's act of kneeling that convinces Coriolanus not to assault the city of Rome? Shakespeare's Body Language is a ground-breaking new study of Shakespearean drama, revealing the previously unseen history of social tensions found within the performance of gestures – and how such gestures are used to shame those within the body politic of early modern England. The first full study of shaming gestures in Shakespearean drama, this book establishes how shame is often rooted in the gendered expectations of the Renaissance era. Exploring how the performance of gestures such as figging, the cuckold's horns, and even the in-action of stillness created shaming spectacles on the early modern stage and its wider society, Shakespeare's Body Language argues that gestures are embodied social metaphors which epitomise the personal as political. It reveals the tensions of everyday life as key motivators behind the actions of Shakespeare's characters, and considers how honour and its opposite, shame, are constructed in terms of gender norms. Featuring in-depth analyses of plays across Shakespeare's career, this book explores how the playwright's understanding of shame and humiliation is rooted in performance anxiety and gender politics, explaining how theatrical gestures can create dramatic tension in a way that words alone cannot. It offers both rich insights into the early modern context of Shakespeare's drama and confirms the startling relevance of his work to modern audiences.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry contains thirty-eight original essays written by leading Shakespeareans around the world. Collectively, these essays seek to return readers to a revivified understanding of Shakespeare's verbal artistry in both the poems and the drama. The volume understands poetry to be not just a formal category designating a particular literary genre but to be inclusive of the dramatic verse as well, and of Shakespeare's influence as a poet on later generations of writers in English and beyond. Focusing on a broad set of interpretive concerns, the volume tackles general matters of Shakespeare's style, earlier and later; questions of influence from classical, continental, and native sources; the importance of words, line, and rhyme to meaning; the significance of songs and ballads in the drama; the place of gender in the verse, including the relationship of Shakespeare's poetry to the visual arts; the different values attached to speaking 'Shakespeare' in the theatre; and the adaptation of Shakespearean verse (as distinct from performance) into other periods and languages. The largest section, with ten essays, is devoted to the poems themselves: the Sonnets, plus 'A Lover's Complaint', the narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'. If the volume as a whole urges a renewed involvement in the complex matter of Shakespeare's poetry, it does so, as the individual essays testify, by way of responding to critical trends and discoveries made during the last three decades.

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: - Essays on the play's critical and performance history - A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play - A selection of new essays by leading scholars - A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online Antony and Cleopatra is among Shakespeare's most enduringly popular tragedies. A theatrical piece of extraordinary political power, it also features one of his most memorable couples. Both intellectually and emotionally challenging, Antony and Cleopatra also tests the boundaries of theatrical representation. This volume offers a stimulating and accessible guide to the play that takes stock of the past and current situation of scholarship while simultaneously opening up fresh, thought-provoking critical perspectives.

Throughout his plays, Shakespeare placed an extraordinary emphasis on the power of the face to reveal or conceal moral character and emotion, repeatedly inviting the audience to attend carefully to facial features and expressions. The essays collected here disclose that an attention to the power of the face in Shakespeare’s England helps explain moments when Shakespeare’s language of the self becomes intertwined with his language of the face. As the range of these essays demonstrates, an attention to Shakespeare’s treatment of faces has implications for our understanding of the historical and cultural context in which he wrote, as well as the significance of the face for the ongoing interpretation and production of the plays. Engaging with a variety of critical strands that have emerged from the so-called turn to the body, the contributors to this volume argue that Shakespeare’s invitation to look to the face for clues to inner character is not an invitation to seek a static text beneath an external image, but rather to experience the power of the face to initiate reflection, judgment, and action. The evidence of the plays suggests that Shakespeare understood that this experience was extremely complex and mysterious. By turning attention to the face, the collection offers important new analyses of a key feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic attention to the part of the body that garnered the most commentary in early modern England. By bringing together critics interested in material culture studies with those focused on philosophies of self and other and historians and theorists of performance, Shakespeare and the Power of the Face constitutes a significant contribution to our growing understanding of attitudes towards embodiment in Shakespeare’s England.