OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide 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. This book traces Shakespeare's portrayal of outsiders in some of his most famous plays. Some of Shakespeare's most memorable characters are treated as outsiders in at least part of their plays—Othello, Shylock, Malvolio, Katherine (the 'Shrew') , Edmund, Caliban, and many others. Marked as different and regarded with hostility by some in their society, many of these characters have become icons of group identity. While many critics use the term 'outsider,' this is the first book to analyse it as a relative identity and not a fixed one, a position that characters move into and out of, to show some characters affirming their places as relative insiders by the way they treat others as more outsiders than they are, and to compare characters who are outsiders not just in terms of race and religion but also in terms of gender, age, poverty, illegitimate birth, psychology, morality, and other issues. Are male characters who love other men outsiders for that reason in Shakespeare? How is the suspicion of women presented differently than suspicion of racial or religious outsiders? How do the speeches in which various outsiders stand up for the rights of their group compare? Can an outsider be admired? How and why do the plays shift sympathy for or against outsiders? How and why do they show similarities between outsiders and insiders? With chapters on Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, and women as outsiders and insiders, this book considers such questions with attention both to recent historical research on Shakespeare's time and to specifics of the language of Shakespeare's plays and how they work on stage and screen.

This book offers a comprehensive, readable and authoritative introduction to the study of Shakespeare, by means of nineteen newly commissioned essays. An international team of prominent scholars provide a broadly cultural approach to the chief literary, performative and historical aspects of Shakespeare's work. They bring the latest scholarship to bear on traditional subjects of Shakespeare study, such as biography, the transmission of the texts, the main dramatic and poetic genres, the stage in Shakespeare's time and the history of criticism and performance. In addition, authors engage with more recently defined topics: gender and sexuality, Shakespeare on film, the presence of foreigners in Shakespeare's England and his impact on other cultures. Helpful reference features include chronologies of the life and works, illustrations, detailed reading lists and a bibliographical essay.

This book offers an engaging account of the portrayal of outsiders in Shakespeare's writings. It considers characters who are outsiders for an array of reasons including their race, religion, gender, psychology, and morality, and highlights the idea of otherness as a relative rather than fixed term.

Providing a provocative and original perspective on Shakespeare, Peter Holbrook argues that Shakespeare is an author friendly to such essentially modern and unruly notions as individuality, freedom, self-realization and authenticity. These expressive values vivify Shakespeare's own writing; they also form a continuous, and a central, part of the Shakespearean tradition. Engaging with the theme of the individual will in specific plays and poems, and examining a range of libertarian-minded scholarly and literary responses to Shakespeare over time, Shakespeare's Individualism advances the proposition that one of the key reasons for reading Shakespeare today is his commitment to individual liberty - even as we recognize that freedom is not just an indispensable ideal but also, potentially, a dangerous one. Engagingly written and jargon free, this book demonstrates that Shakespeare has important things to say about fundamental issues of human existence.

Text & Presentation gathers some of the best work presented at the 2014 Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore. The subjects explored in this volume range from ancient to contemporary and encompass great cultural and intellectual diversity. The highlight of the conference was a presentation by award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. A transcript of Hwang's conversation is the lead piece, followed by twelve research papers, one review essay and ten book reviews. This volume accurately represents the diversity of the annual conference, and represents the latest research in the fields of comparative drama, performance and dramatic textual analysis.

Shakespeare's career-long fascination with the Mediterranean made the association a natural one for this first World Shakespeare Congress of the Third Millennium. The plenary lectures and selected papers in this volume represent some of the best contemporary thought and writing on Shakespeare, in the ranging plenary lectures by Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare's islands and the Muslim connection, Michael Coveney's on the late Sir John Gielgud, Robert Ellrodt's on Shakespeare's sonnets and Montaigne's essays, Stephen Orgel's on Shakespeare's own Shylock, and Marina Warner's on Shakespeare's fairy-tale uses of magic. Also included in the volume's several sections are original pagers selected from special sessions and seminars by other distinguished writers, including Jean E. Howard, Gary Taylor, and Richard Wilson. Tom Clayton is Regents' Professor of English Language and Literature and chair of the Classical Civilization Program at the University of Minnesota. Susan Brock is Head of Library and Information Resources at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and Honorary Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham. Vicente Fores is Associate Profe

Contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare's plays have brought into sharp focus the legacies of slavery, racism and colonial dispossession that still haunt the global South. Looking sideways across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to nontraditional centres of Shakespeare practice, Shakespeare in the Global South explores the solidarities generated by contemporary adaptations and their stories of displacement and survival. The book takes its lead from innovative theatre practice in Mauritius, North India, Brazil, post-apartheid South Africa and the diasporic urban spaces of the global North, to assess the lessons for cultural theory emerging from the new works. Using the 'global South' as a critical frame, Sandra Young reflects on the vocabulary scholars have found productive in grappling with the impact of the new iterations of Shakespeare's work, through terms such as 'creolization', 'indigenization', 'localization', 'Africanization' and 'diaspora'. Shakespeare's presence in the global South invites us to go beyond familiar orthodoxies and to recognize the surprising affinities felt across oceans of difference in time and space that allow Shakespeare's inventiveness to be a part of the enchanting subversions at play in contemporary theatre's global currents.

This collection explores the consequences of accentism—an under-researched issue that intersects with racism and classism—in the Shakespeare industry across languages and cultures, past and present. It adopts a transmedia and transhistorical approach to a subject that has been dominated by the study of "Original Pronunciation." Yet the OP project avoids linguistically "foreign" characters such as Othello because of the additional complications their "aberrant" speech poses to the reconstruction process. It also evades discussion of contemporary, global practices and, underpinning the enterprise, is the search for an aural "purity" that arguably never existed. By contrast, this collection attends to foreign speech patterns in both the early modern and post-modern periods, including Indian, East Asian, and South African, and explores how accents operate as "metasigns" reinforcing ethno-racial stereotypes and social hierarchies. It embraces new methodologies, which includes reorienting attention away from the visual and onto the aural dimensions of performance.

Great Shakespeareans presents a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. This major project offers an unprecedented scholarly analysis of the contribution made by the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors as well as novelists, poets, composers, and thinkers from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. An essential resource for students and scholars in Shakespeare studies.