This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.

In 1700, Shakespeare was viewed as one of the leading Renaissance playwrights, but not as supreme. By 1800, he was not only widely performed and read but celebrated as a universal genius and a national literary hero. What happened during the intervening years is the subject of this fascinating volume, which brings together Renaissance and eighteenth-century scholars who examine how Shakespeare gradually penetrated, and came to dominate, the culture and intellectual life of people in the English-speaking world. The contributors approach Shakespeare from a wide range of perspectives, to illuminate the way contemporary philosophy, science and medicine, textual practice, theatre studies, and literature both informed and were influenced by eighteenth-century interpretations of his works. Among the topics are Falstaff and eighteenth-century ideas of the sublime, David Garrick's 1756 adaptation of The Winter's Tale and its relationship to medical theories of femininity, the textual practices of George Steevens, Shakespeare's importance in furthering the careers of actors on the eighteenth-century stage, and the influence of Shakespeare on writers as diverse as Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, and Ann Radcliff. Together, the essays paint a vivid picture of the relationship between eighteenth-century Shakespeare and ideas about shared nationhood, knowledge, morality, history, and the self.

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 considers the impact and influence of Shakespeare on writing of the eighteenth century, and also how eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholarship influenced how we read Shakespeare today. The most influential English actor of the eighteenth century, David Garrick, could hail Shakespeare as 'the god of our idolatry', yet perform an adaptation of King Lear with a happy ending, add a dying speech to Macbeth, and remove the puns from Romeo and Juliet. Garrick's friend Samuel Johnson thought of Shakespeare as 'above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature'. Voltaire thought he was a sublime genius without taste. The Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, meanwhile, could be found arguing with Johnson's biographer James Boswell over whether Shakespeare or Milton was the greater poet. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century traces the course of a many-faceted metamorphosis. Drawing on fresh research as well as the most recent scholarship in the field, it argues that the story of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century has become a significant 'subplot' in later scholarship, made up of great debates about how to read Shakespeare and how to rank him among the great English writers, how to perform his plays and how to edit the texts of those plays. This book surveys the critical and creative responses of actors and audiences, literary critics and textual editors, painters and philosophes to Shakespeare's works, while also suggesting how the Shakespeare of the theatre influenced the Shakespeare of the study, and how other, less straightforward interactions combined to bring about this sea-change in English cultural life. It speaks of the crucial role of Shakespeare in eighteenth-century culture, and the importance of that culture's absorption of Shakespeare for subsequent generations. This is a book about what the eighteenth century did to Shakespeare - and vice versa.

Explores the significant presence of Shakespeare in major novels of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.

Comparatively little is known about Shakespeare's first audiences. This study argues that the Elizabethan audience is an essential part of Shakespeare as a site of cultural meaning, and that the way criticism thinks of early modern theatregoers is directly related to the way it thinks of, and uses, the Bard himself.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of the previous year's textual and critical studies and of major British performances. The books are illustrated with a variety of Shakespearean images and production photographs. The current editor of Survey is Peter Holland. The first eighteen volumes were edited by Allardyce Nicoll, numbers 19-33 by Kenneth Muir and numbers 34-52 by Stanley Wells. The virtues of accessible scholarship and a keen interest in performance, from Shakespeare's time to our own, have characterised the journal from the start. Now backnumbers are gradually being reissued in paperback.

"This compendium reflects the latest international research into the many and various uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, the contributors' lines of enquiry extending from the Bard's own time to the present day. The coverage is global in its scope, and includes studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the more familiar Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the UK and USA. The range of genres surveyed by the book's team of distinguished authors embraces music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches: some investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed analyses of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the volume provides a wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music without parallel in the history of the global arts"--

Shakespeare is both the world's most quoted author and a frequent quoter himself. This volume unites these creative practices.

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.

A critical history of Shakespeare painting in its richest period - 1720-1820.