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.

This informative volume explores William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream through the lens of sexuality. The book examines Shakespeare's life and influences and offers readers a series of essays for consideration on topics related to sexuality, such as the notions of the war between the sexes, taboo sexuality, and the marginalization of women's sexuality. The text also offers readers contemporary perspectives on topics related to sexuality, such as adolescent sexuality, the categorizing of people into sexual classifications, and sex education.

Shakespeare's use of sexual language, imagery and erotic themes is extensive, varied, and although this is necessarily hard to establish, probably innovative at times. This glossary provides a first-hand guide to Shakespeare's sexual language, some of which is notoriously difficult to unravel and whose roots go back into earlier literature. Compiled by Gordon Williams, author of the authoritative three volume Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, this is a comprehensive but concise reference guide to sexual language and imagery in Shakespeare. Entries are cross-referenced and include references to textual examples where possible.

Of Shakespeare's sonnets we know the crystalline meter, exquisite diction, and exhilarating surprise of the "turn" in the final couplet. By contrast, we know very little of their subjects and motives. This book does not approach the sonnets as Shakespearean autobiography but instead delineates the customs that shaped the poet's world and thus his sonnets. It argues for understanding them as brilliant, edgy expressions of the equally brilliant, edgy culture of the English Renaissance.

'...Rubinstein is far from innocent and comes to our aid with a lot of learning...and is quite right to urge that not to appreciate the sexiness of Shakespeare's language impoverishes our own understanding of him. For one thing, it was a strong element in his appeal to Elizabethans, who were much less woolly-mouthed and smooth-tongued than we are. For another, it has constituted a salty preservative for his work, among those who can appreciate it...an enlightening book.' A.L.Rowse, The Standard.

This innovative volume testifies to the current revived interest in Shakespeare's language and style and opens up new and captivating vistas of investigation. Transcending old boundaries between literary and linguistic studies, this engaging collaborative book comes up with an original array of theoretical approaches and new findings. The chapters in the collection capture a rich diversity of points of view and cover such fields as lexicography, versification, dramaturgy, rhetorical analyses, cognitive and computational corpus-based stylistic studies, offering a holistic vision of Shakespeare's uses of language. The perspective is deliberately broad, confronting ideas and visions at the intersection of various techniques of textual investigation. Such novel explorations of Shakespeare's multifarious artistry and amazing inventiveness in his use of language will cater for a broad range of readers, from undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars and researchers, to poetry and theatre lovers alike.

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare’s poems, problem comedies and late plays contains original essays on Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, "Venus and Adonis", "The Rape of Lucrece", and "The Sonnets", as well as Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

This volume presents a fresh look at the military spouses in Shakespeare’s Othello, 1 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, and Coriolanus, vital to understanding the plays themselves. By analysing the characters as military spouses, we can better understand current dynamics in modern American civilian and military culture as modern American military spouses live through the War on Terror. Shakespeare's Military Spouses and Twenty-First-Century Warfare explains what these plays have to say about the role of military families and cultural constructions of masculinity both in the texts themselves and in modern America. Concerns relevant to today’s military families – domestic violence, PTSD, infertility, the treatment of queer servicemembers, war crimes, and the growing civil-military divide – pervade Shakespeare’s works. These parallels to the contemporary lived experience are brought out through reference to memoirs written by modern-day military spouses, sociological studies of the American armed forces, and reports issued by the Department of Defence. Shakespeare’s military spouses create a discourse that recognizes the role of the military in national defence but criticizes risky or damaging behaviours and norms, promoting the idea of a martial identity that permits military defence without the dangers of toxic masculinity. Meeting at the intersection of Shakespeare Studies, trauma studies, and military studies, this focus on military spouses is a unique and unprecedented resource for academics in these fields, as well as for groups interested in Shakespeare and theatre as a way of thinking through and responding to psychiatric issues and traumatic experiences.

This book offers an exciting new perspective on Shakespeare's relation to popular culture.

Under an alphabetical list of relevant terms, names and concepts, the book reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins>