Shakespeare: The Basics is a lively and accessible introduction to reading and studying Shakespeare. Exploring all aspects of Shakespeare’s plays, Sean McEvoy considers the language, cultural contexts and modern interpretations. This essential guide to a range of contemporary Shakespearean criticism explores and unpacks the different dramatic genres in which he wrote – comedy, history, tragedy and romance. It also provides a wealth of relevant and concise information on the historical, social and political contexts in which the plays were produced and have been understood. Extensively updated throughout, the fourth edition provides: A comprehensive account of Shakespearean tragedy for students An introduction to ecocritical, ethical and queer readings of the plays Analysis of notable recent Shakespeare films and productions Enhanced contextual material on race and empire, gender roles and the theatre in politics With fully updated further reading throughout and a wide range of case studies and examples, Shakespeare: The Basics is an indispensable introduction for college and university students of literature and theatre, but also for anyone with an interest in the world’s most influential dramatist.

Alongside Spenser, Sidney and the early Donne, Shakespeare is the major poet of the 16th century, largely because of the status of his remarkable sequence of sonnets. Professor Cousins' new book is the first comprehensive study of the Sonnets and narrative poems for over a decade. He focuses in particular on their exploration of self-knowledge, sexuality, and death, as well as on their ambiguous figuring of gender. Throughout he provides a comparative context, looking at the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries. The relation between Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse and his plays is also explored.

"This volume of essays explores reading and writing in Shakespeare and his culture. Shakespeare as a worker and writer straddled a margin between an oral, customary world and a literate world of specializing professionals in a way that no subsequent writer ever could. With the 1623 Folio edition, Shakespeare completed the transformation from an active dramatist to an author of a book, collected by his friends and now available to readers."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

First published in 1972. Shakespeare's God investigates whether a religious interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedies is possible. The study places Christianity's commentary on the human condition side by side with what tragedy reveals about it. This pattern is identified using the writings of Christian thinkers from Augustine to the present day. The pattern in the chief phenomena of literary tragedy is also traced

In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume’s organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work’s reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts’ growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare’s writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today’s Shakespearean classrooms.