George Hibbard has always endorsed T.S. Eliot's idea that 'we must know all of Shakespeare's work in order to know any of it,' and this idea, implicit in the first essay in this volume, informs the whole collection, written in honour of one of Canada's leading Shakespearian editors and scholars.The two essays which begin the collection present broad overviews of Elizabethan drama and discuss Shakespeare's first great editor, Theobald. Together with the final essay – on publication ...

A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country’s foremost authorities on his life and work.Drawing on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years, Marjorie Garber offers passionate and revealing readings of the plays in chronological sequence, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen. Supremely read...

The Oxford Shakespeare General Editor: Stanley Wells The Oxford Shakespeare offer authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers - a new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from the early texts - wide-ranging introduction discusses the play's historical contexts, political significance, characters, sources, and language - detailed stage history designed to meet the needs of students and theatre...

In The Age of Shakespeare, Frank Kermode uses the history and culture of the Elizabethan era to enlighten us about William Shakespeare and his poetry and plays. Opening with the big picture of the religious and dynastic events that defined England in the age of the Tudors, Kermode takes the reader on a tour of Shakespeare’s England, vividly portraying London’s society, its early capitalism, its court, its bursting population, and its epidemics, as well as its arts—includin...

A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BEST BOOK OF THE YEARDrawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape–the industry, the animals, even the flowers–that wou...

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of Coriolanus, edited by Lee Bliss, provides a thorough reconsideration of what was probably Shakespeare's last tragedy. In the introduction, Bliss situates the pl...

In Cymbeline, Ancient Britain's female heir to the throne is slandered by a decadent Italian while the Romans invade Britain to retain it as part of their empire. Shakespeare's late romance is full of unpredictable conjunctions that are explored in the comprehensive introduction to this new, fully-illustrated Arden edition. Valerie Wayne takes a transformative look at the play's critical and performance history by examining its attention to gender, calumny and sexuality together w...

From the dean of Shakespeare studies comes a lively, entertaining work of biography that firmly locates Shakespeare within the hectic, exilarating world in which he lived and worked.Theatre in Shakespeare's day was a growth industry. Everyone knew everyone else, and they all sought to learn, borrow, or steal from one another. Stanley Wells explores the theatre world from behind the scenes, examining how the great actors of the time influenced Shakespeare's work. He writes about the lives a...

From one of the country’s foremost experts on Shakespeare and theatre arts, actor, director, and master teacher Tina Packer offers an exploration—fierce, funny, fearless—of the women of Shakespeare’s plays. A profound, and profoundly illuminating, book that gives us the playwright’s changing understanding of the feminine and reveals some of his deepest insights. Packer, with expert grasp and perception, constructs a radically different understanding of power, sexuality, and redemption....

The Oxford Shakespeare General Editor: Stanley Wells The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers - A new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings - On-page commentary and notes explain meaning, staging, language, and allusions - Detailed introduction provides a full account of the play's performance history and explores issues of gender, g...

Ben Jonson is, in many ways, the figure of greatest centrality to literary study of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. He wrote in virtually every literary genre: in drama, comedy, tragedy and masque; in poetry, epigram, epistle and lyric; in prose, literary criticism and English grammar. He became the most visible poet of his age, honored more than even William Shakespeare, and his dramatic works, in particular his major comedies, continue to be performed today. This Companion brings to...

Shakespeare was acutely aware of our intimate struggles with aging. His dramatic characters either prosper or suffer according to their relationship with maturity, and his sonnets eloquently explore time's ravaging effects. "Wrinkled deep in time" is how the queen describes herself in Antony and Cleopatra, and at the end of King Lear, there is a tragic sense that both the king and Gloucester have acquired a wisdom they otherwise lacked at the beginning of the play. Even J...