In this book Craig, Kinney and their collaborators confront the main unsolved mysteries in Shakespeare's canon through computer analysis of Shakespeare's and other writers' styles. In some cases ...their analysis confirms the current scholarly consensus, bringing long-standing questions to something like a final resolution. In other areas the book provides more surprising conclusions: that Shakespeare wrote the 1602 additions to The Spanish Tragedy, for example, and that Marlowe along with Shakespeare was a collaborator on Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2. The methods used are more wholeheartedly statistical, and computationally more intensive, than any that have yet been applied to Shakespeare studies. The book also reveals how word patterns help create a characteristic personal style. In tackling traditional problems with the aid of the processing power of the computer, harnessed through computer science, and drawing upon large amounts of data, the book is an exemplar of the new domain of digital humanities.
This compendium reflects the latest international research into the many and various uses of music in relation to Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the contributors’ lines of inquiry extending from the ...Bard’s own time to the present day. The coverage is global in its scope, and includes studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the more familiar Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the United Kingdom and the United States. The range of genres surveyed by the book’s team of distinguished authors embraces music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare’s ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches: some investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed analyses of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the volume provides a wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music without parallel in the history of the global arts.
Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted English author of all time. Quotations appear everywhere, from the epigraphs of novels to the mottoes on coffee cups. But Shakespeare was also a frequent ...quoter himself - of classical and contemporary literature, of the Bible, of snatches of popular songs and proverbs. This volume brings together an international team of scholars to trace the rich history of quotation from Shakespeare's own lifetime to the present day. Exploring a wide range of media, including Romantic poetry, theatre criticism, novels by Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Ian McEwan, political oratory, propaganda, advertising, drama, film and digital technology, the chapters draw fresh connections between Shakespeare's own practices of creative reworking and the quotation of his work in new and traditional forms. Richly illustrated and featuring an Afterword by Margreta de Grazia, the collection tells a new story of the making and remaking of Shakespeare's plays and poems.
Fathers and sons in Shakespeare Tromly, Fred B
Fathers and sons in Shakespeare,
c2010, 20100330, 2010, 2010-01-01, 2010-05-01
eBook
Through careful scrutiny of word and deed, the scholarship in Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare reveals the complex attitude Shakespeare's sons harbour towards their fathers.
This interdisciplinary study combines legal, historical and literary approaches to the practice and theory of marriage in Shakespeare's time. It uses the history of English law and the history of the ...contexts of law to study a wide range of Shakespeare's plays and poems. The authors approach the legal history of marriage as part of cultural history. The household was viewed as the basic unit of Elizabethan society, but many aspects of marriage were controversial, and the law relating to marriage was uncertain and confusing, leading to bitter disagreements over the proper modes for marriage choice and conduct. The authors point out numerous instances within Shakespeare's plays of the conflict over status, gender relations, property, religious belief and individual autonomy versus community control. By achieving a better understanding of these issues, the book illuminates both Shakespeare's work and his age.
Focusing on the practical means and media of Shakespeare's stage, this study envisions horizons for his achievement in the theatre. Bridging the gap between today's page- and stage-centred ...interpretations, two renowned Shakespeareans demonstrate the artful means by which Shakespeare responded to the competing claims of acting and writing in the Elizabethan era. They examine how the playwright explored issues of performance through the resonant trio of clown, fool and cross-dressed boy actor. Like this trio, his deepest and most captivating characters often attain their power through the highly performative mode of 'personation' – through playing the character as an open secret. Surveying the whole of the playwright's career in the theatre, Shakespeare and the Power of Performance offers not only compelling ways of approaching the relation of performance and print in Shakespeare's works, but also new models for understanding dramatic character itself.
A detailed exploration of the significance of Hebrew Biblical stories in The Merchant of Venice
What happens when we consider Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice as a play with 'real' Jewish ...characters who are not mere ciphers for anti-Semitic Elizabethan stereotypes? Is Shylock Jewish studies Shakespeare's extensive use of stories from the Hebrew Bible in The Merchant of Venice, and argues that Shylock and his daughter Jessica draw on recognizably Jewish ways of engaging with those narratives throughout the play. By examining the legacy of Jewish exegesis and cultural lore surrounding these biblical episodes, this book traces the complexity and richness of Merchant's Jewish aspect, spanning encounters with Jews and the Hebrew Bible in the early modern world as well as modern adaptations of Shakespeare's play on the Yiddish stage.
Key Features
Analyses alternative contexts for the moral agency of Jewish characters in The Merchant of Venice
Provides an innovative study of Renaissance Christian Hebraism in England and English perceptions of Jews and Jewishness in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
Discusses important nineteenth- and twentieth-century Yiddish-language adaptations of The Merchant of Venice
Makes a provocative and original argument about the importance of Judaic biblical exegesis to the long afterlife of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
In the 1980s influential scholars argued that Shakespeare revised King Lear in light of theatrical performance, resulting in two texts by the bard’s own hand. The two-text theory hardened into ...orthodoxy. Here Sir Brian Vickers makes the case that Shakespeare did not cut his original text. At stake is the way his greatest play is read and performed.
Shakespeare and the Classics demonstrates that the classics are of central importance in Shakespeare's plays and in the structure of his imagination. Written by an international team of ...Shakespeareans and classicists, this book investigates Shakespeare's classicism and shows how he used a variety of classical books to explore crucial areas of human experience such as love, politics, ethics and history. The book focuses on Shakespeare's favourite classical authors, especially Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Plautus and Terence, and, in translation only, Plutarch. Attention is also paid to the humanist background and to Shakespeare's knowledge of Greek literature and culture. The final section, from the perspective of reception, examines how Shakespeare's classicism was seen and used by later writers. This accessible book offers a rounded and comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare's classicism and will be a useful first port of call for students and others approaching the subject.
This book shows that William Shakespeare was a more personal writer than any of his innumerable commentators have realised. It asserts that numerous characters and events were drawn from the author's ...life, and puts faces to the names of Jaques, Touchstone, Feste, Jessica, the 'Dark Lady' and others. Steven Sohmer explores aspects of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets that have been hitherto overlooked or misinterpreted in an effort to better understand the man and his work. If you've ever wondered who Pigrogromitus was, or why Jaques spies on Touchstone and Audrey - or what the famous riddle M.O.A.I. stands for - this is the book for you.