Literature

This is the first comprehensive account of the relationship between Shakespeare and his favourite poet, Ovid. The author examines the full range of Shakespeare's work, identifying Ovid's presence not only in the narrative poems and pastoral comedies, but also in the Sonnets and mature tragedies. He shows how profoundly creative Ovid's influence was, from the raped Lavinia's turning of the pages of the Metamorphoses in Titus Andronicus and the staging of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream, to the reanimation of Hermione's statue in The Winter's Tale and Prospero's renunciation of his magic in The Tempest. The Heroides are shown to have been vital to Shakespeare's female characters, but it is the Metamorphoses which animate the author's book, just as they animated the whole of Shakespeare's career. This original and elegantly written book reveals Shakespeare as an extraordinarily sophisticated reader of Ovidian myth and as a metamorphic artist as fluid and nimble as his classical original.

The ‘book’ — both material and metaphoric — is a recurring theme in William Shakespeare’s plays: it is held by Hamlet as he turns through revenge to madness; buried deep in the mudded ooze by Prospero when he has shaken out his art like music and violence; forced by Richard II to withstand the mortality of deposition, fetishised by lovers, tormented by pedagogues, lost by kings, written by the alienated, and hung about war with the blood of lost voices. The ‘book’ begins and ends Shakespeare’s dramatic career as change itself, standing the distance between violence and hope, between holding and losing. This book is about the book in Shakespeare’s plays and focuses on seven plays, not only for the chronology and range they present, but also for their particular relationship to the book — whether it is political or humanist, cognitive or illusory, satirical or sexual, spiritual or secular, social or subjective. It is argued that the book on stage, its literal and semantic presence, offers one of the most articulate and developed hermeneutic tools available for the study of early modern English culture.

This book is about what there was before the subject known as English existed, and about how that became English. The first half of the book deals principally with English as an academic discipline that emerges out of the study of rhetoric, while the second half is more concerned with the development of a national body of literature in the vernacular. The book is focused specifically on Shakespeare’s role in the origins of the subject, and discusses the kinds of literary and educational practice that would have formed his experience and shaped his work. It traces the origins of English in the aspects of the educational regime that existed before English literature became an established part of the curriculum, and then presents Shakespeare as both a product of those disciplines and, in the 18th century, as an agent of their transformation into the subject that emerged as the modern study of English. This earlier historical period is also addressed from the perspective of the current state of English as a subject, and shows the affinity between rhetoric and modern concepts and practices, such as media studies, creative writing, and the online literary database. It is argued that the future for English lies in its reclaiming the creative, performative, and interactive territory originally covered by rhetoric and illustrated most powerfully by Shakespeare.

It has been established by textual specialists, and is now becoming widely accepted, that Shakespeare revised many of his plays, including some of the most celebrated. But how were the great tragedies altered and with what effect? This book looks at the implications of Shakespeare's revisions for the reader and spectator alike and shows the playwright getting to grips with the problems of characterization and scene formation in such plays as Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Troilus and Cressida. The book carries its argument down, as it puts it, to the very tip of Shakespeare's quill pen. The book assesses recent textual scholarship on Shakespeare's revisions and illuminates the artistic impact of the revised texts and their importance for our understanding of each play's moral and metaphysical foundations.

This book is about two very different kinds of company. On the one hand it concerns Shakespeare’s poet-playwright contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Jonson, and Fletcher. On the other, it examines the contribution of his fellow actors, including Burbage, Armin, and Kemp. Traditionally, criticism has treated these two influences in separation, so that Shakespeare is considered either in relation to educated Renaissance culture, or as a man of the theatre. Shakespeare in Company unites these perspectives. It argues that Shakespeare’s decision, in 1594, to become an investor (or ‘sharer’) in the newly formed Chamberlain’s acting company had a transformative effect on his writing, moving him beyond the conventions of Renaissance dramaturgy. On the basis of the physical distinctiveness of his actors, Shakespeare developed ‘relational drama’, something no previous dramatist had explored. This book traces the evolution of that innovation, showing how Shakespeare responded to changes in the personnel of his acting fellowship and to competing drama, such as that produced for the children’s companies after 1599. Covering over two decades of theatrical history, Shakespeare in Company explores the playwright’s career through four distinct phases, ending on the conditions that shaped Shakespeare’s late style. Paradoxically, Shakespeare emerges as a playwright who is unique ‘in company’—special, in part, because of the unparalleled working conditions that he enjoyed.