Shakespeare, the Renaissance and Empire: Poetry, Philosophy and Politics is the second volume of this study and builds on the first, which concentrated on related matters, including geography and language. In both volumes, a key focus is close analysis of the text and an attention to Shakespeare’s use of signs, verbal and visual, to represent the world in poetry and prose, in dramatic and non-dramatic work as well as some of the contexts before, during and after the Renaissance. Shakespeare’s representation of character and action in poetry and theatre, his interpretation and subsequent interpretations of him are central to the book as seen through these topics: German Shakespeare, a life and no life, aesthetics and ethics, liberty and tyranny, philosophy and poetry, theory and practice, image and text. The book also explores the typology of then and now, local and global.

An anthology of Shakespeare gender criticism from 1976 to the present, reflecting the redistribution of power in Shakespeare studies and charting the recent history of feminist critical practice. Some essays are sustained readings of single plays, while others trace gender concerns across the playwright's work. Topics include the rape in Lucrece, sexual and social tragedy in Othello, containment of female erotic power in Shakespeare's plays, and same-sex love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice. For students of literature and feminist studies. Distributed by routledge, Chapman and Hall. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Unit one. The Anglo-Saxon period and the Middle Ages 449-1485 -- unit two. The English Renaissance 1485-1650 -- unit three. From puritanism to the enlightenment 1640-1780 -- unit four. The triumph of romanticism 1750-1837 -- unit five. The Victorian Age 1837-1901 -- unit six. The Modern Age 1901-1950 -- unit seven. An international literature 1950-present -- Reference section.

Did Shakespeare and his contemporaries think at all in terms of "race"? Examining the depiction of cultural, religious, and ethnic difference in Shakespeare's plays, Ania Loomba considers how seventeenth-century ideas differed from the later ideologies of "race" that emerged during colonialism, as well as from older ideas about barbarism, blackness, and religious difference. Accessible yet nuanced analysis of the plays explores how Shakespeare's ideas of race were shaped by beliefs about color, religion, nationality, class, money and gender.