Apr 06, 2016 · Our knowledge about playhouse practices in Shakespeare’s time is scant and frequently changing. Up until recently, it was thought that physical gestures on the early modern stage were grand and extravagant, but this has since been largely disproven.
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 56 Today, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, printed in 1623, can sell for millions of dollars. But the First Folio wasn’t always valued so highly. In this podcast episode, two experts in the First Folio and the book trade, Adam Hooks and Daniel De Simone, chart the rise of the First Folio—how and when this book became a cultural icon …
Apr 27, 2015 · Getty Images. An actress and Shakespeare expert, Packer has just published a new book - Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays. It looks at the way Shakespeare developed his ...
Authors: William Joseph Kerwin
Today, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, printed in 1623, can sell for millions of dollars. But the First Folio wasn’t always valued so highly.
MICHAEL WITMORE: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Witmore, the Folger’s director.
She says Shakespeare didn't understand women in the beginning of his career. "I think something happened, somewhere around Love's Labour's Lost and the early history plays and going into Romeo and Juliet.
She says Shakespeare didn't understand women in the beginning of his career . "I think something happened, somewhere around Love's Labour's Lost and the early history plays and going into Romeo and Juliet.
The choice is as varied as the characters themselves - and Tina Packer knows them all intimately. An actress and Shakespeare expert, Packer has just published a new book - Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays.
Mark Rylance played Olivia in Twelfth Night in 2011 at the Globe Theatre. Most female roles in Shakespeare's time would have been played by young boys. Female characters in Shakespeare are often so perceptively drawn that it can be easy to forget that they would have been played by men, or at least young boys.
This chapter has four sections: 1. Editions and Textual Matters; 2. Shakespeare in the Theatre; 3. Shakespeare on Screen; 4. Criticism. Section 1 is by Gabriel Egan; section 2 is by Peter J.
One major critical edition of Shakespeare appeared in 2009: James R. Siemon edited Richard III for the third series of the Arden Shakespeare. An abortive Arden edition of Romeo and Juliet also appeared in the form of an appendix to a monograph, but it was so poorly executed that it needs little notice.
Erica Sheen's Shakespeare and the Institution of Theatre: ‘The Best in this Kind’ (what is the point of that subtitle?) considers the emergence of the professional theatre during the Elizabethan period and its eventual arrival at a position of cultural invulnerability: by 1601, Shakespearian theatre ‘was above political accountability’ (p. 109).
In 2009 just two books focused exclusively upon screen adaptations. Both texts chart the chronological extremities of the scholarly area. Judith Buchanan's monograph, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse offers a rewardingly close study of films released between 1899 and 1922.
Postcolonialism and interculturalism continue to be useful lenses through which to consider Shakespeare and his works. The general section this year begins by looking at three books which amply demonstrate the insights to be gained from research conducted in these two areas.
Shakespeare’s canonical prominence has tended to augment the profile of the Chamberlain’s/King’s men at the cost of other acting companies. Moreover, Shakespeare’s attachment as writer-in-residence to this single troupe serves to occlude the extent to which, as Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean assert, the circumstances surrounding such companies were in flux in the early 1590s. Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays demonstrates that, in many ways, Shakespeare is the exception rather than the rule, and the stability associated with his middle and later career wholly atypical. As Manley and MacLean insist in this assiduously researched book, ‘1589–93 was marked by exceptional fluidity and volatility (as well as artistic ferment) in the theatrical profession’.
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare ’ s Poetry , edited by Jonathan F.S. Post, contains thirty-eight essays each focusing on different aspects of Shakespeare’s poetry. Despite the title, the majority of the book contains essays which are not specifically about Shakespeare’s poems as such, but engage with a number of his dramatic works. The book is divided into seven parts, grouping between three and ten essays in each. Part I, ‘Style and Language’, contains five essays. The first of these, ‘Shakespeare’s Styles’ by Gordon Teskey, focuses on the changing of Shakespeare’s writing style over the course of his life, with Teskey noting, ‘Over the course of his approximately twenty-year career, Shakespeare’s style quite naturally changed, so that we may speak of him writing in a succession of styles’ (p. 3). Teskey examines the Shakespeare canon as a whole, engaging with a number of the plays, but spends significant time on Hamlet and the ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy. There is a similar focus on later passages both in this play and also a number of others to bolster his position. Chapter 2 is ‘Shakespeare’s Style in the 1590’s’ by Goran Stanivukovic, in which the author argues that the final decade of the sixteenth century saw greater importance being placed on language than on stories and characters. Stanivukovic frames his argument in three subsections and engages with critics from both Renaissance and modern times. Chapter 3, ‘Shakespeare’s Late Style’ by A.R. Braunmuller, continues the focus begun by Stanivukovic but looks in more depth at Shakespeare’s later activity. Braunmuller engages with a number of plays, with particular focus on the comparatively early Macbeth and ending his essay with an examination of The Winter’s Tale . As with Stanivukovic’s essay there is also reference to older critics; Braunmuller makes specific reference to John Dryden and discusses Shakespeare’s work in the terms framed by this author. Chapter 4 is ‘Shakespeare and the Arts of Cognition’ by Sophie Read, and begins with a brief discussion of Hamlet and Macbeth . Read compares the two, noting ‘If Hamlet drags in the most fascinating of ways until its high-speed ending, Macbeth traces the reverse trajectory of temporal extremes’, noting that the difference in tempo in the two plays can be ascribed to the mental state of the eponymous characters. Read moves on to engage with the sonnets, and again notes the differing cadence throughout the sequence and discusses what may be gleaned from this. Margaret Ferguson’s ‘Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples’, which forms chapter 5 and closes Part I, is primarily engaged with Shakespeare’s use of wordplay and puns. Ferguson looks at a number of the plays and unsurprisingly spends some time focusing on Sonnet 135, with its frequent repetition of the word ‘will’. Ferguson discusses other interpretations of this and other sonnets as well as presenting her own theories.
As well as producing his own studies showing that A Lover’s Complaint is by Shakespeare, MacDonald P. Jackson, in ‘ A Lover’s Complaint and the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic’ ( EMLS 16:iii [2013] n.p.), is able to show that others’ studies that reach the opposite conclusion are flawed.
James P. Bednarz ’s ‘Contextualizing “The Phoenix and Turtle”: Shakespeare, Edward Blount and the Poetical Essays Group of Love’s Martyr ’ ( ShS 67 [2014] 130–48) treats The Phoenix and the Turtle as Shakespeare’s intentional collaboration in the 1601 book project Love’s Martyr .
This book explores the role of Edgar, who has more lines than anyone except the king but who is relatively ignored by critics. It argues that by attending to Edgar, and especially his role as poor Tom, we can understand how ‘He irrupts in the middle of the Edgar-role, somehow its totem, in some obscure way almost the role’s cause, at once patchwork of the already lived and previously spoken, and an image of pure potentiality’ (p. 9). It is Palfrey’s attentiveness to King Lear , and especially Tom, which is so compelling. The book is made up of twenty-eight short chapters, each with twelve ‘scenes’ with twelve ‘interludes’, a prelude, introduction, conclusion, and a brief afterword. With the exception of the prelude and the afterword, the book does not tend to offer the personal memoir seen in some other experimental literary criticism on Shakespeare recently.