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An illuminating account of how Shakespeare worked through the tensions of Queen Elizabeth’s England in two canon-defining plays Conspiracies and revolts simmered beneath the surface of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. England was riven with tensions created by religious conflict and the prospect of dynastic crisis and regime change. In this rich, incisive account, Peter Lake reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In both Hamlet and Titus the princes are faced with successions forged under questionable circumstances and they each have a choice: whether or not to resort to political violence. The unfolding action, Lake argues, is best understood in terms of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of resistance and the relation between religion and politics. Relating the plays to their broader political and polemical contexts, Lake sheds light on the nature of revenge, resistance, and religion in post-Reformation England.
This 1921 volume attempts to view Hamlet in the light of contemporary history, pointing out possible links between the action of the play and the surrounding context of its creation. A fascinating and controversial study that will be of value to anyone interested in Shakespeare, Elizabethan and Jacobean history.
The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition is part of the landmark New Oxford Shakespeare—an entirely new consideration of all of Shakespeare's works, edited afresh from all the surviving original versions of his work, and drawing on the latest literary, textual, and theatrical scholarship. In one attractive volume, the Modern Critical Edition gives today's students and playgoers the very best resources they need to understand and enjoy all Shakespeare's works. The authoritative text is accompanied by extensive explanatory and performance notes, and innovative introductory materials which lead the reader into exploring questions about interpretation, textual variants, literary criticism, and performance, for themselves. The Modern Critical Edition presents the plays and poetry in the order in which Shakespeare wrote them, so that readers can follow the development of his imagination, his engagement with a rapidly evolving culture and theatre, and his relationship to his literary contemporaries. The New Oxford Shakespeare consists of four interconnected publications: the Modern Critical Edition (with modern spelling), the Critical Reference Edition (with original spelling), a companion volume on Authorship, and an online version integrating all of this material on OUP's high-powered scholarly editions platform. Together, they provide the perfect resource for the future of Shakespeare studies.
Shakespeare's Hamlet is considered by many to be the cornerstone of the English literary canon, a play that remains universally relevant. Yet it seems likely that we have spent so long reading the play for its capacity to reflect ourselves that we have lost sight of the thing itself. The goal of this book is to look beyond the Hamlet that has bedazzled critics for centuries, to seek to apprehend the play in all of its historical distinctness. This is not simply the search for what the play me...
The "Dark Side of Shakespeare" trilogy by W. Ron Hess has been his 20-year undertaking to try to fill-in many of the gaps in knowledge of Shakespeare's personality and times. The first two volumes investigated wide-ranging topics, including the key intellectual attributes that Shakespeare exhibited in his works, including the social and political events of the 1570s to early-1600s. This was when Hess believes the Bard's works were being "originated" (the earliest phases of artistry, from conception or inspiration to the first of multiple iterations of "writing"). Hess highlights a peculiar fascination that the Bard had with the half-brother of Spain's Philip II, the heroic Don Juan of Austria, or in 1571 "the Victor of Lepanto." From that fascination, as determined by characters based on Don Juan in the plays (e.g., the villain "Don John" in "Much Ado")and other matters, Hess even made so bold as to propose a series of phases from the mid-1570s to mid-80s in which he feels each Shakespeare play had been originated, or some early form of each play then existed -- if not in writing, at least in the Bard's imagination. Thus, the creative process Hess describes is a vastly more protracted on than most Shakespeare scholars would admit to -- the absurd notion that the Bard would jot off the lines of a work in a few days or weeks and then immediately have it performed on the public stage or published shortly thereafter still dominates orthodox dating systems for the canon. Hess draws on the works of many other scholars for using "topical allusions" within each work in order to set practical limits for when the "origination" and subsequent "alterations" of each play occurred. In the trilogy's Volume III, Hess continues to amplify a heroic "knight-errant" personality type that Shakespeare's very "pen-name" may have been drawn from, a type which envied and transcended the brutal chivalry of Don Juan. This was channeled into a patriotic anti-Spanish and pro-British imperial spirit -- particularly with regard to reforming and improving the English language so that it could rival the Greco-Roman, Italian, and Frenchpoetic traditions -- one-upping the best that the greats of antiquity and the Renaissance had achieved in literature. In fact, as vast as the story is that Hess tells in his three volumes, there is a huge volume of material he is making available out of print (on his webpage at http://home.earthlink.net/~beornshall/index.html and via a "Volume IV" that he plans to offer on CD for a nominal cost via his e-mail [email protected]). Among this added material is a searchable 1,000-page Chronological listing of "Everything" that Hess deems relevant to Shakespeare and his age, or to the providing of the canon to modern times. Hess feels that discernable patterns can be detected through that chronology that help to illuminate the roles of others in the Bard's circle, such as Anthony Munday and Thomas Heywood. The network of 16th and 17th century "Stationers" (printers, publishers, and book sellers) and their often curious doings provide many of those patterns. Hess invites his readers to help to continuously update the Chronology and other materials, so that those can remain worthwhile research resources for all to use. For, the mysteries of Shakespeare and his age can only be unraveled through fully understanding the patterns within.
