This innovative collection explores uses of Shakespeare in a wide variety of 21st century contexts, including business manuals, non-literary scholarship, database aggregation, social media, gaming, and creative criticism. Essays in this volume demonstrate that users’ critical and creative uses of the dramatist’s works position contemporary issues of race, power, identity, and authority in new networks that redefine Shakespeare and reconceptualize the ways in which he is processed in both scholarly and popular culture. While The Shakespeare User contributes to the burgeoning corpus of critical works on digital and Internet Shakespeares, this volume looks beyond the study of Shakespeare artifacts to the system of use and users that constitute the Shakespeare network. This reticular understanding of Shakespeare use expands scholarly forays into non-academic practices, digital discourse communities, and creative critical works manifest via YouTube, Twitter, blogs, databases, websites, and popular fiction.

Shakespeare for the Modern Reader provides a sound scholarly introduction to the man and his work in a user-friendly and accessible way.

Local/ Global Shakespeare and Advertising examines the local/ global and rhizomatic phenomenon of Shakespeare as advertised and Shakespeare as advertising. Starting from the importance and the awareness of advertising practices in the early modern period, the volume follows the evolution of the use of Shakespeare as a promotional catalyst up to the twenty-first century. The volume considers the pervasiveness of Shakespeare’s marketability in Anglophone and non-Anglophone cultures and its special engagement with creative and commercial industries. With its inter-and transdisciplinary perspective and its international scope, this book brings new insights into Shakespeare’s selling power, Shakespeare as the object of advertising and Shakespeare as part of the advertising vehicle, in relation to a range of crucial cultural, ideological and political issues.

Shakespeare's Books contains nearly 200 entries covering the full range of literature Shakespeare was acquainted with, including classical, historical, religious and contemporary works. The dictionary covers works whose importance to Shakespeare has emerged more clearly in recent years due to new research, as well as explaining current thinking on long-recognized sources such as Plutarch, Ovid, Holinshed, Ariosto and Montaigne. Entries for all major sources include surveys of the writer's place in Shakespeare's time, detailed discussion of their relation to his work, and full bibliography. These are enhanced by sample passages from early modern England writers, together with reproductions of pages from the original texts. Now available in paperback with a new preface bringing the book up to date, this is an invaluable reference tool.