Why do we continue to experience many of Shakespeare's dramatic characters as real people with personal histories, individual personalities, and psychological depth? What is it that makes Falstaff seem to jump off the page, and what gives Hamlet his complexity? Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance examines how the extraordinary lifelikeness of some of Shakespeare's most enigmatic and self-conscious characters is produced through language. Using theories drawn from linguistic pragmatics, this book claims that our impression of characters as real people is an effect arising from characters' pragmatic use of language in combination with the historical and textual meanings that Shakespeare conveys to his audience by dramatic and meta-dramatic means. Challenging the notion of interiority attributed to Shakespeare's characters by many contemporary critics, theatre professionals, and audiences, the book demonstrates that dramatic characters possess anteriority which gives us the impression that they exist outside of- and prior to- the play-texts as real people. Jelena Marelj's study examines five linguistically self-conscious characters drawn from the genres of history, tragedy and comedy, which continue to be subjects of extensive critical debate: Falstaff, Cleopatra, Henry V, Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet. She shows that by inferring Shakespeare's intentions through his characters' verbal exchanges and the discourses of the play, the audience becomes emotionally involved with or repulsed by characters and it is this emotional response that makes these characters strikingly memorable and intimately human. Shakespearean Character will equip readers for further work on the genealogy of Shakespearean character, including minor characters, stock characters, and allegorical characters.

A masterful, highly engaging analysis of how Shakespeare’s plays intersected with the politics and culture of Elizabethan England With an ageing, childless monarch, lingering divisions due to the Reformation, and the threat of foreign enemies, Shakespeare’s England was fraught with unparalleled anxiety and complicated problems. In this monumental work, Peter Lake reveals, more than any previous critic, the extent to which Shakespeare’s plays speak to the depth and sophistication of Elizabethan political culture and the Elizabethan imagination. Lake reveals the complex ways in which Shakespeare’s major plays engaged with the events of his day, particularly regarding the uncertain royal succession, theological and doctrinal debates, and virtue and virtù in politics. Through his plays, Lake demonstrates, Shakespeare was boldly in conversation with his audience about a range of contemporary issues. This remarkable literary and historical analysis pulls the curtain back on what Shakespeare was really telling his audience and what his plays tell us today about the times in which they were written.

While considering Shakespeare's earliest attempts at tragedy in Richard III and Titus Andronicus, this volume covers the major tragic period, giving special attention to Othello.

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy presents fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The opening section explores ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of 'Shakespearean' tragedy, and addresses questions of genre by examining the playwright's inheritance from the classical and medieval past. The second section is devoted to current textual issues, while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, as well as with twentieth and twenty-first century re-workings of Shakespearean tragedy. The book's final section expands readers' awareness of Shakespeare's global reach, tracing histories of criticism and performance across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, India, and East Asia.

How did we first come to believe in a correspondence between writers' lives and their works? When did the person of the author—both as context and target of textual interpretation—come to matter so much to the way we read? This book traces the development of author centrism back to the scholarship of early Renaissance humanists. Working against allegoresis and other traditions of non-historicizing textual reception, they discovered the power of engaging ancient works through the speculative reconstruction of writers' personalities and artistic motives. To trace the multi-lingual and eventually cross-cultural rise of reading for the author, this book presents four case studies of resolutely experimental texts by and about writers of high ambition in their respective generations: Lorenzo Valla on the forger of the Donation of Constantine, Erasmus on Saint Jerome, the poet George Gascoigne on himself, and Fulke Greville on Sir Philip Sidney. An opening methodological chapter and exhortative conclusion frame these four studies with accounts of the central lexicon—character, intention, ethos, persona—and the range of genre evidence that contemporaries used to discern and articulate authorial character and purpose. Constellated throughout with examples from the works of major contemporaries including John Aubrey, John Hayward, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare, this volume resurrects a vibrant culture of biographism continuous with modern popular practice and yet radically more nuanced in its strategic reliance on the explanatory power of probabilism and historical conjecture—the discursive middle ground now obscured from view by the post-Enlightenment binaries of truth and fiction, history and story, fact and fable.

Engendering a Nation adopts a sophisticated feminist analysis to examine the place of gender in contesting representations of nationhood in early modern England. Plays featured include: * King John * Henry VI, Part I * Henry VI, Part II * Henry, Part III * Richard III * Richard II * Henry V. It will be a must for students and scholars interested in the cultural and social implications of Shakespeare today.

Shakespeare's plays were written some four hundred years ago, and while his characters are enduring, they are also alien. In grappling with the text of his plays, the modern actor must bring Shakespeare's Renaissance characters to life for a modern audience. And while it is difficult enough for twentieth-century spectators to make sense of the plays, it is also hard for modern actors to understand the Elizabethan world that created the personalities so vividly sketched in Shakespeare's texts. This reference is a convenient and practical guide for actors faced with the task of playing Shakespeare's characters. The volume begins with an overview of Elizabethan theatrical conventions, including the training of actors. It then looks at the dramatic tradition of personification, which Shakespeare's world inherited from the medieval stage. Later chapters give special attention to how language reveals character and to the social and cultural contexts of the Renaissance. Throughout, the emphasis is on how to translate Shakespeare's text into action on the stage. While the volume contains much useful information, that information is presented to meet the special needs of theater professionals.

This volume reflects changing critical perceptions of Shakespeare's works from Renaissance to modern times and celebrates the power of Shakespearean tragedy. The selection of critical reaction covers both the general concept of Shakespearean tragedy and its expression in the major plays, illustrating the main directions of critical approaches to Shakespearean tragedy and enabling the reader to develop an informed response to Shakespeare's dramatic works. An introductory chapter traces the development of the concept of tragedy from classical times, and its dramatic expression in the time of Shakespeare. Each of Shakespeare's great tragedies - Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello - is considered in turn, and a final chapter summarizes contemporary critical approaches so that the reader can link the best of the critical past with the present critical scene.

A.C. Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become "real" at all' writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as he might have wondered about people in novels or in life, Bradley is one of the most liberating in the line of distinguished Shakespeare critics. His acute yet undogmatic and almost conversational critical method has—despite fluctuations in fashion—remained enduringly popular and influential. For, as John Bayley observes, these lectures give us a true and exhilarating sense of 'the tragedies joining up with life, with all our lives; leading us into a perspective of possibilities that stretch forward and back in time, and in our total awareness of things.