Download or read book Shakespeare s Alternative Tales written by Leah Scragg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A knowledge of the history and evolution of the tales on which Shakespeare drew in the composition of his plays is essential for the understanding of his work. In re-telling a particular story, a Renaissance writer was not simply reshaping the structure of the narrative but participating in a species of debate with earlier writers and the meanings their tales had accrued. The stories upon which Shakespeare's plays are constructed did not descend to him as innocent collections of incidents, but brought with them considerable cultural baggage, substantially lost to the modern spectator but an essential component, for a contemporary audience, of the meaning of the work. Shakespeare's Alternative Tales explores this literary dialogue, focusing on those plays in which the expectations generated by an inherited story are in some way overthrown, setting up a tension for a Renaissance spectator between 'received' and 'alternative' readings of the text. Each chapter opens with a familiar story, supplying a context for the subsequent discussion, and exhibits the way in which the dramatist's reworking of a traditional motif interrogates the assumptions implicit in his source. While offering the twentieth-century reader a fresh perspective from which to view the plays, the approach also supplies an introduction to contemporary readings of the Shakespearean canon. The tales Leah Scragg considers may be seen as 'alternative' in more than one sense: they radically rework conventional situations, while lending themselves to analysis in terms of new critical methodologies. The text will be of interest to both students of Shakespeare and the general reader. In conjunction with the author's companion volume, Shakespeare's Mouldy Tales, it provides an ideal introduction to contemporary developments in source studies.
Download or read book Alternative Shakespeare Auditions for Women written by Simon Dunmore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like the companion volume for men, Alternative Shakespeare Auditions for Women brings together fifty speeches from plays frequently ignored such as Coriolanus, Pericles, and Love's Labours Lost. It also features good, but over-looked speeches from more popular plays such as Diana from All's Well That Ends Well, Perdita from The Winter's Tale and Hero from Much Ado About Nothing. Each speech is accompanied by a character description, brief explanation of the context, and notes on obscure words, phrases and references--all written from the viewpoint of the auditioning actor. It is the perfect resource for your best audition ever.
Download or read book Shakespeare Stories written by Leon Garfield and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1985 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By skillfully weaving his own prose with Shakespeare's language, Leon Garfield has refashioned twelve of the Elizabethan playwright's most memorable dramas into stories, capturing all the richness of the characters, plot, mood, and setting. This format will delight both those who know the great dramatist's works and those who are new to them. Michael Foreman's dramatic color illustrations and varied black-and-white line drawings are the perfect complement to this celebration of Shakespeare's genius.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Stories for Young Readers written by E. Nesbit and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve of the Bard's most famous plays, delightfully adapted for young readers: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, As You Like It, and eight others.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Kitchen written by Lore Segal and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2008-04-29 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thirteen interrelated stories of Shakespeare's Kitchen concern the universal longing for friendship, how we achieve new intimacies for ourselves, and how slowly, inexplicably, we lose them. Featuring six never-before-published pieces, Lore Segal's stunning new book evolved from seven short stories that originally appeared in the New Yorker (including the O. Henry Prize–;winning “The Reverse Bug”). Ilka Weisz has accepted a teaching position at the Concordance Institute, a think tank in Connecticut, reluctantly leaving her New York circle of friends. After the comedy of her struggle to meet new people, Ilka comes to embrace, and be embraced by, a new set of acquaintances, including the institute's director, Leslie Shakespeare, and his wife, Eliza. Through a series of memorable dinner parties, picnics, and Sunday brunches, Segal evokes the subtle drama and humor of the outsider's loneliness, the comfort and charm of familiar companionship, the bliss of being in love, and the strangeness of our behavior in the face of other people's deaths. A magnificent and deeply moving work, Shakespeare's Kitchen marks the long-awaited return of a writer at the height of her powers.
Download or read book The Shakespeare Wars written by Ron Rosenbaum and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-11-09 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Ron Rosenbaum] is one of the most original journalists and writers of our time.” –David Remnick In The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum gives readers an unforgettable way of rethinking the greatest works of the human imagination. As he did in his groundbreaking Explaining Hitler, he shakes up much that we thought we understood about a vital subject and renews our sense of excitement and urgency. He gives us a Shakespeare book like no other. Rather than raking over worn-out fragments of biography, Rosenbaum focuses on cutting-edge controversies about the true source of Shakespeare’s enchantment and illumination–the astonishing language itself. How best to unlock the secrets of its spell? With quicksilver wit and provocative insight, Rosenbaum takes readers into the midst of fierce battles among the most brilliant Shakespearean scholars and directors over just how to delve deeper into the Shakespearean experience–deeper into the mind of Shakespeare. Was Shakespeare the one-draft wonder of Shakespeare in Love? Or was he rather–as an embattled faction of textual scholars now argues–a different kind of writer entirely: a conscientious reviser of his greatest plays? Must we then revise our way of reading, staging, and interpreting such works as Hamlet and King Lear? Rosenbaum pursues key partisans in these debates from the high tables of Oxford to a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop in a strip mall in the Deep South. He makes ostensibly arcane textual scholarship intensely seductive–and sometimes even explicitly sexual. At an academic “Pleasure Seminar” in Bermuda, for instance, he examines one scholar’s quest to find an orgasm in Romeo and Juliet. Rosenbaum shows us great directors as Shakespearean scholars in their own right: We hear Peter Brook–perhaps the most influential Shakespearean director of the past century–disclose his quest for a “secret play” hidden within the Bard’s comedies and dramas. We listen to Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as he launches into an impassioned, table-pounding fury while discussing how the means of unleashing the full intensity of Shakespeare’s language has been lost–and how to restore it. Rosenbaum’s hilarious inside account of “the Great Shakespeare ‘Funeral Elegy’ Fiasco,” a man-versus-computer clash, illustrates the iconic struggle to define what is and isn’t “Shakespearean.” And he demonstrates the way Shakespearean scholars such as Harold Bloom can become great Shakespearean characters in their own right. The Shakespeare Wars offers a thrilling opportunity to engage with Shakespeare’s work at its deepest levels. Like Explaining Hitler, this book is destined to revolutionize the way we think about one of the overwhelming obsessions of our time.
Download or read book A Midsummer night s Dream written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1874 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Collecting Shakespeare written by Stephen H. Grant and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-04-26 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first biography of Henry and Emily Folger, who acquired the largest and finest collection of Shakespeare in the world. In Collecting Shakespeare, Stephen H. Grant recounts the American success story of Henry and Emily Folger of Brooklyn, a couple who were devoted to each other, in love with Shakespeare, and bitten by the collecting bug. Shortly after marrying in 1885, the Folgers started buying, cataloging, and storing all manner of items about Shakespeare and his era. Emily earned a master's degree in Shakespeare studies. The frugal couple worked passionately as a tight-knit team during the Gilded Age, financing their hobby with the fortune Henry earned as president of Standard Oil Company of New York, where he was a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller Sr. While a number of American universities offered to house the collection, the Folgers wanted to give it to the American people. Afraid the price of antiquarian books would soar if their names were revealed, they secretly acquired prime real estate on Capitol Hill near the Library of Congress. They commissioned the design and construction of an elegant building with a reading room, public exhibition hall, and the Elizabethan Theatre. The Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on the Bard's birthday, April 23, 1932. The library houses 82 First Folios, 275,000 books, and 60,000 manuscripts. It welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year and provides professors, scholars, graduate students, and researchers from around the world with access to the collections. It is also a vibrant center in Washington, D.C., for cultural programs, including theater, concerts, lectures, and poetry readings. The library provided Grant with unprecedented access to the primary sources within the Folger vault. He draws on interviews with surviving Folger relatives and visits to 35 related archives in the United States and in Britain to create a portrait of the remarkable couple who ensured that Shakespeare would have a beautiful home in America.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion written by David Loewenstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an international team of literary scholars and historians, this collaborative volume illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England, and considers how religious culture is imaginatively reanimated in Shakespeare's plays. Fourteen new essays explore the creative ways Shakespeare engaged with the multifaceted dimensions of Protestantism, Catholicism, non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam, and secular perspectives, considering plays such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. The collection is of great interest to readers of Shakespeare studies, early modern literature, religious studies, and early modern history.
Download or read book A Narratology of Drama written by Christine Schwanecke and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume argues against Gérard Genette’s theory that there is an “insurmountable opposition” between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.
Download or read book Shakespeare as Children s Literature written by Velma Bourgeois Richmond and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2008-05-14 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, he traditionally receives little notice in studies of children's literature. However, there is a fascinating relationship between Shakespeare and children's interests, and the Bard's works have been successfully adapted for children's use over several centuries. This book continues and parallels the author's previous study, Chaucer as Children's Literature, as part of a greater endeavor to evaluate the significance of traditional literature retold as children's literature in modern English studies. It examines the ways in which William Shakespeare's stories have been adapted for children, particularly in Mary and Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, which was almost immediately recognized as a classic of children's literature when it was first published in 1807. The author describes the significance of the Lamb's Tales as the pre-eminent children's adaptation of Shakespeare's literature, focusing particularly on the lavishly illustrated Edwardian editions which used pictures to convey Shakespeare's stories for children. Other topics include Victorian alternatives to the Lambs' stories, including anthologies from David Murray Smith, Abby Sage Richardson, and Mary Seymour; the lavish illustrations of Shakespeare's stories found in antique English textbooks; Shakespeare in nursery books, including sophisticated collections from Mary Macleod, Thomas Carter, Alice S. Hoffman, and other noted authors; and Shakespeare in multi-volume American collections, including The Children's Hour, Journeys through Bookland, and The Junior Classics.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Classic Works in the Classroom written by Dennis Carter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With supportive guidelines for Key Stages 2 and 3 this book offers active approaches for teaching pre-twentieth century literature with confidence. Key texts including The Odyssey, Hamlet and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are explained in a very practical and accessible way. This text allows for creativity amongst pupils at the same time as improving their reading and writing abilities within the literacy strategy objectives and KS3 English framework guidelines. The author looks to develop an active pedagogy that encompasses the literacy strategy, the KS3 English framework and the creative arts. Using case studies from primary and secondary school projects a series of lessons are proposed for each year group from Year 4 though to Year 8. The lessons cover poetry, drama, story and the novel.
Download or read book Adaptations of Shakespeare written by Daniel Fischlin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's plays have been adapted or rewritten in various, often surprising, ways since the seventeenth century. This groundbreaking anthology brings together twelve theatrical adaptations of Shakespeares work from around the world and across the centuries. The plays include The Woman's Prize or the Tamer Tamed John Fletcher The History of King Lear Nahum Tate King Stephen: A Fragment of a Tragedy John Keats The Public (El P(blico) Federico Garcia Lorca The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui Bertolt Brecht uMabatha Welcome Msomi Measure for Measure Charles Marowitz Hamletmachine Heiner Müller Lears Daughters The Womens Theatre Group & Elaine Feinstein Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief Paula Vogel This Islands Mine Philip Osment Harlem Duet Djanet Sears Each play is introduced by a concise, informative introduction with suggestions for further reading. The collection is prefaced by a detailed General Introduction, which offers an invaluable examination of issues related to
Download or read book 1 Henry IV written by Stephen Longstaffe and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-08-18 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to Shakespeare's I Henry IV - introducing its critical and performance history, current critical landscape and new directions in research on the play.
Download or read book A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare written by Dympna Callaghan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question is not whether Shakespeare studies needs feminism, but whether feminism needs Shakespeare. This is the explicitly political approach taken in the dynamic and newly updated edition of A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare. Provides the definitive feminist statement on Shakespeare for the 21st century Updates address some of the newest theatrical andcreative engagements with Shakespeare, offering fresh insights into Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and gender dynamics in early modern England Contributors come from across the feminist generations and from various stages in their careers to address what is new in the field in terms of historical and textual discovery Explores issues vital to feminist inquiry, including race, sexuality, the body, queer politics, social economies, religion, and capitalism In addition to highlighting changes, it draws attention to the strong continuities of scholarship in this field over the course of the history of feminist criticism of Shakespeare The previous edition was a recipient of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award; this second edition maintains its coverage and range, and bringsthe scholarship right up to the present day
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Story written by Joan Rees and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a commonplace of Shakespeare criticism that he invented few of the plots of his plays and the sources he drew upon have been often and rewardingly studied. The emphasis of this book, however, is not on sources but on what may be called Shakespeare's story-telling technique especially as seen in the articulation and pacing of events. Ranging widely through the canon, the book identifies characteristic problems and achievements which occur in the course of Shakespeare's handling of his story material. Different aspects of Shakespeare's treatment of, and attitude to, story are studied with reference groups of plays and, in two final chapters, essays on Hamlet and King Lear apply and extend the findings of the preceding discussions. The point of view adopted serves, above all, to bring out the vitality and resourcefulness of Shakespeare's creative imagination, recognition of which must underpin all commentary but may easily be lost to sight in the increasing sophistication of criticism and scholarship.
Download or read book The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare written by Christopher J. Cobb and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Shakespeare's response in his late plays to the challenge of making romance stories believable through theatrical representation and the kind of experience the late plays in performance seek to create for their spectators. Taking The Winter's Tale as a case study, the book's central chapters demonstrate how Shakespeare tests and transforms the techniques to create the sweeping, restorative transformations of individuals and communities that are central to both earlier dramatic romances and Shakespeare's own romance experiments. The book's three other chapters address the methodologies for study of spectator's experience through a dramatic text, the history of dramatic romance to 1610, and Shakespeare's further experiments with the staging of romance after The Winter's Tale.-
