Books in the Routledge Studies in Shakespeare series

Explores the relationship between performances of Shakespeare's plays and the ways in which they engage with various traumatic events and histories. In considering this relationship, the author asks how performance might articulate traumatic events. She interrogates a range of narratives about Shakespeare, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.

Covering the work of philosophers including Richardson, Kant, Hume, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Dewey, this study examines the history of what philosophers have had to say about 'Shakespeare' as a subject of philosophy, from the seventeenth century to the present. It is of interest to Shakespeareans, literary critics, and philosophers.

Drawing on theories of play and adaptation, Playfulness in Shakespearean Adaptations demonstrates how the practices of Shakespearean adaptations are frequently products of playful, and sometimes irreverent, engagements that allow new `Shakespeares¿ to emerge, revealing Shakespeare¿s ongoing impact in popular culture.

"Post-Hamlet: Shakespeare in an Era of Textual Exhaustion" examines how postmodern audiences continue to reengage with Hamlet in spite of our culture's oversaturation with this most canonical of texts. Combining adaptation theory and performance theory with examinations of avant-garde performances and other unconventional appropriatio

This book gives Asia's Shakespeares the critical, theoretical, and political space they demand, offering rich, alternative ways of thinking about Asia, Shakespeare, and Asian Shakespeare based on Asian experiences and histories. Challenging dominant critical and theoretical structures, it demonstrates how Shakespeare helps articulate Asianess. M

In this interdisciplinary book, scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature offer new perspectives on the engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the 16th to the 21stcentury. Essays address how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaiss

This volume introduces 'civic Shakespeare' as a category entailing the relation between the individual and the community on issues of authority, liberty, and cultural production. It investigates civic Shakespeare via Romeo and Juliet to interrogate the possibilities of theatre and the civic. The play's focus on civil strife, political cha

Visiting scenes of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering, this volume focuses on hospitality in Shakespeare's work, demonstrating how hospitality provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare's and our time. By reading the plays in conjunction with contemporary theory

Shakespeare's Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter is the first study in Shakespeare criticism to examine the entirety of Shakespeare's dramatic suicides. It addresses all plays featuring suicides and near-suicides in chronological order from Titus Andronicus to Antony and Cleopatra, thus establishing that suicide becomes increasingly

Written by an international group of highly regarded scholars and rooted in the field of intermedial approaches to literary studies, this volume explores the complex aesthetic process of "picturing" in early modern English literature.

Shakespeare and Asia brings together innovative scholars from Asia or with Asian connections to explore these matters of East-West and global contexts then and now. The collection ranges from interpretations of Shakespeare's plays to studies of film, opera or scholarship in Asia.

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world.

This study begins with a short survey of the history and practice of biography and then surveys the very limited biographical material for Shakespeare.

In this interdisciplinary book, scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature offer new perspectives on the engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the 16th to the 21stcentury. Essays address how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare¿s drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare in Italy has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. This book moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange.

This volume gives Asia''s Shakespeares the critical, theoretical, and political space they demand, offering rich, alternative ways of thinking about Asia, Shakespeare, and Asian Shakespeare based on Asian experiences and histories. Challenging and supplementing the dominant critical and theoretical structures that determine Shakespeare studies today, close analysis of Shakespeare''s Asian journeys, critical encounters, cultural geographies, and the political complexions of these negotiations reveal perspectives different to the European. Exploring what Shakespeare has done to Asia along with what Asia has done with Shakespeare, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare helps articulate Asianess, unfolding Asia''s past, reflecting Asia''s present, and projecting Asia''s future. This is achieved by forgoing the myth of the Bard''s universality, bypassing the authenticity test, avoiding merely descriptive or even ethnographic accounts, and using caution when applying Western theoretical frameworks. Many of the productions studied in this volume are brought to critical attention for the first time, offering new methodologies and approaches across disciplines including history, philosophy, sociology, geopolitics, religion, postcolonial studies, psychology, translation theory, film studies, and others. The volume explores a range of examples, from exquisite productions infused with ancient aesthetic traditions to popular teen manga and television drama, from state-dictated appropriations to radical political commentaries in areas including Japan, India, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, China, and the Philippines. This book goes beyond a showcasing of Asian adaptations in various languages, styles, and theatre traditions, and beyond introductory essays intended to help an unknowing audience appreciate Asian performances, developing a more inflected interpretative dialogue with other areas of Shakespeare studies.

This book asks new questions about how and why Shakespeare engages with source material, and about what should be counted as sources in Shakespeare studies. The essays demonstrate that source study remains an indispensable mode of inquiry for understanding Shakespeare, his authorship and audiences, and early modern gender, racial, and class relations, as well as for considering how new technologies have and will continue to redefine our understanding of the materials Shakespeare used to compose his plays. Although source study has been used in the past to construct a conservative view of Shakespeare and his genius, the volume argues that a rethought Shakespearean source study provides opportunities to examine models and practices of cultural exchange and memory, and to value specific cultures and difference. Informed by contemporary approaches to literature and culture, the essays revise conceptions of sources and intertextuality to include terms like "haunting," "sustainability," "microscopic sources," "contamination," "fragmentary circulation" and "cultural conservation." They maintain an awareness of the heterogeneity of cultures along lines of class, religious affiliation, and race, seeking to enhance the opportunity to register diverse ideas and frameworks imported from foreign material and distant sources. The volume not only examines print culture, but also material culture, theatrical paradigms, generic assumptions, and oral narratives. It considers how digital technologies alter how we find sources and see connections among texts. This book asserts that how critics assess and acknowledge Shakespeare''s sources remains interpretively and politically significant; source study and its legacy continues to shape the image of Shakespeare and his authorship. The collection will be valuable to those interested in the relationships between Shakespeare''s work and other texts, those seeking to understand how the legacy of source study has shaped Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon, and those studying source study, early modern authorship, implications of digital tools in early modern studies, and early modern literary culture.

Visiting scenes of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering, this volume focuses on hospitality in Shakespeare¿s work, demonstrating how hospitality provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare¿s and our time. By reading the plays in conjunction with contemporary theory as well as early modern texts and objects, this book reimagines Shakespeare¿s playworld as one charged with the risks of hosting and the limits of generosity, demonstrating the importance of historicist, rhetorical, and phenomenological approaches to this diverse subject.

This volume introduces `civic Shakespeare¿ as a category entailing the relation between the individual and the community on issues of authority, liberty, and cultural production. It investigates civic Shakespeare via Romeo and Juliet to interrogate the possibilities of theatre and the civic. The play¿s focus on civil strife, political challenge, and a new conception of the individual makes ideal for examining how early modern civic topics were received and reconfigured on stage, and how R&J has triggered new interpretations and civic performances over time. This book clarifies the role of theatre within civic space and questions the relation between citizens as spectators and the community.

This book sets out to explore the ways in which Mary Wroth negotiated the discourses that are embedded in the Shakespearean canon in order to develop an understanding of her oeuvre based, not on influence and imitation, but on difference, originality and innovation.

This collection considers issues that have emerged in Early Modern Studies in the past fifteen years relating to understandings of mind and body in ShakespeareΓÇÖs world. Informed by The Body in Parts, the essays in this book respond also to the notion of an early modern ΓÇÿbody-mindΓÇÖ in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are understood in terms of bodily parts and cognitive processes. What might the impact of such understandings be on our picture of ShakespeareΓÇÖs theatre or on our histories of the early modern period, broadly speaking? This book provides a wide range of approaches to this challenge, covering histories of cognition, studies of early modern stage practices, textual studies, and historical phenomenology, as well as new cultural histories by some of the key proponents of this approach at the present time. Because of the breadth of material covered, full weight is given to issues that are hotly debated at the present time within Shakespeare Studies: presentist scholarship is presented alongside more historically-focused studies, for example, and phenomenological studies of material culture are included along with close readings of texts. What the contributors have in common is a refusal to read the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries either psychologically or materially; instead, these essays address a willingness to study early modern phenomena (like the Elizabethan stage) as manifesting an early modern belief in the embodiment of cognition.

This book considers early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness, uncovering the complex negotiations among physical embodiment, emotional response, and communally-sanctioned behavior in Shakespeare's world. It visits the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor, emotional competence or satisfaction, and joy or self-fulfillment. Integrating insights from Disability Studies, Health Studies, and Happiness Studies, this book develops a detailed literary-historical analysis and a provocative cultural argument about the emphasis we place on popular notions of fitness and contentment today.