Originally published in 1993. Presenting excerpts and articles on the themes and characters from the most famous story of young lovers, this collection brings together scholarship relating to the language, performance, and impact of the play. Ordered in three parts, the chapters cover analysis, reviews and interpretation from a wide ranging array of sources, from the play’s contemporary commenters to literary critics of the early 1990’s. The volume ends with an article by the editor on the action in the text which concludes the final section of 8 pieces looking at the story as being a product of Elizabethan Culture. It considers the attitude to the friar, to morality and suicide, the stars and fate, and gender differences. Comparisons are made to Shakespeare’s source as well as to productions performed long after the Bard’s death.
Despite the outpour of interpretations, from critics of all schools, on Shakespeare's dramatic works and other poetic works, A Lover's Complaint has been almost totally ignored by criticism. This collection of essays is designed to bring to the poem the attention it deserves for its beauty, its aesthetic, psychological and conceptual complexity, and its representation of its cultural moment. A series of readings of A Lover's Complaint, particularly engaging with issues of psychoanalysis and gender, the volume cumulatively builds a detailed picture of the poem, its reception, and its critical neglect. The essays in the volume, by leading Shakespeareans, open up this important text before scholars, and together generate the long-overdue critical conversation about the many intriguing facets of the poem.
Uniquely, this guide analyses the play's critical and performance history and recent criticism, as well as including five essays offering radically new paths for contemporary interpretation. The subject matter of these essays is rich and diverse, ranging across the play's philosophical identification of sexual love with self-realization, the hermeneutic implications of an editor's textual choices, the minor characters of the play in relation to Renaissance performance traditions, Romeo and Juliet in opera and ballet, and the play's Italian sources and afterlives. The guide also contains a chapter on the key resources available, including scholarly editions and easily available DVDs, and discusses the ways in which they can be used in the classroom to aid understanding and provoke further debate. Edited by leading scholar Julia Reinhard Lupton, this is an essential guide for both students and scholars of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is a tragedy about two teenagers who fall in love. Both are dead by the play’s end. The play is set in Verona, Italy during the Renaissance. The plot is driven by the feud between two families, the Capulets and the Montagues. The play begins by introducing the rivalry through a brawl that is taking place amongst the servants of the two families. Romeo, son of Lord Montague, overhears that Lord Capulet is going to be hosting a ball. Romeo decides that he will attend, uninvited. He goes to the ball with his friends Mercutio and Benvolio. Romeo meets the lovely Juliet Capulet and they fall in love. Later on Romeo visits Juliet and stands under her balcony – they exchange vows of love. Romeo asks Friar Laurence to marry them – the Friar agrees in the hope that it will end the families’ feud. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.
Shakespeare's As You Like It is a play without a theme. Instead, it repeatedly poses one question in a variety of forms: What if the world were other than it is? As You Like It is a set of experiments in which its characters conditionally change an aspect of their world and see what comes of it: what if I were not a girl but a man? What if I were not a duke, but someone like Robin Hood? What if I were a deer? "What would you say to me now an [that is, "if"] I were your very, very Rosalind?" (4.1.64-65). "Much virtue in 'if'," as one of its characters declares near the play's end; 'if' is virtual. It releases force even if the force is not that of what is the case. Change one thing in the world, the play asks, and how else does everything change? In As You Like It, unlike Shakespeare's other plays, the characters themselves are both experiment and experimenters. They assert something about the world that they know is not the case, and their fictions let them explore what would happen if it were-and not only if it were, but something, not otherwise apparent, about how it is now. What is as you like it? What is it that you, or anyone, really likes or wants? The characters of As You Like It stand in 'if' as at a hinge of thought and action, conscious that they desire something, not wholly capable of getting it, not even able to say what it is. Their awareness that the world could be different than it is, is a step towards making it something that they wish it to be, and towards learning what that would be. Their audiences are not exempt. As You Like It doesn't tell us that it knows what we like and will give it to us. It pushes us to find out. Over the course of the play, characters and audiences experiment with other ways the world could be and come closer to learning what they do like, and how their world can be more as they like it. By exploring ways the world can be different than it is, the characters of As You Like It strive to make the world a place in which they can be at home, not as a utopia-Arden may promise that, but certainly doesn't fulfill it-but as an ongoing work of living. We get a sense at the play's end not that things have been settled once and for all, but that the characters have taken time to breathe-to live in their new situations until they discover better ones, or until they discover newer desires. As You Like It, in other words, is a kind of essay: a set of tests or attempts to be differently in the world, and to see what happens. These essays in As If: As You Like It, originally commissioned as an introductory guide for students, actors, and admirers of the play, trace the force and virtue of someof the claims of the play that run counter to what is the case-its 'ifs.' William N. West is Associate Professor of English, Classics, and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also chair of the Department of Classics and co-editor of the journal Renaissance Drama. He is co-editor (with Helen Higbee) of Robert Weimann's Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Writing and Playing in Shakespeare's Theatre (Cambridge, 2000) and (with Bryan Reynolds) of Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage (Palgrave, 2005). In addition to his book Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (2002), he has recently published articles on Romeo and Juliet's understudies, irony and encyclopedic writing before and after the Enlightenment, Ophelia's intertheatricality (with Gina Bloom and Anston Bosman), humanism and the resistance to theology, Shakespeare's matter, and conversation as a theory of knowledge in Browne's Pseudodoxia. His work has been supported by grants from the NEH and the Beinecke, Folger, Huntington, and Newberry libraries.
