"I feel that I have spent half my career with one or another Pelican Shakespeare in my back pocket. Convenience, however, is the least important aspect of the new Pelican Shakespeare series. Here is an elegant and clear text for either the study or the rehearsal room, notes where you need them and the distinguished scholarship of the general editors, Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller who understand that these are plays for performance as well as great texts for contemplation." (Patrick Stewart) The distinguished Pelican Shakespeare series, which has sold more than four million copies, is now completely revised and repackaged. Each volume features: * Authoritative, reliable texts * High quality introductions and notes * New, more readable trade trim size * An essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare and essays on Shakespeare's life and the selection of texts
This thesis examines the actor-clown Will Kemp and his working relationship with Shakespeare. In particular, the thesis explores the theatrical and literary influence Kemp had on his roles for Shakespeare. In the chapters which follow, I investigate the traces of Kemp in some of the early editions of the plays in which he first appeared, before looking at more solid evidence of his continuing rapport with Shakespeare in the two plays which name Kemp in a role. In each case the focus is on the first entry of his clown figure in the plays examined and the interplay of performance and authorial script. The study reveals Kemp not only as an agent of performance for Shakespeare, but also as a catalyst of textual and eventually thematic change in the composition of his plays. Their professional association thus maps the cultural shift identified by a number of critics from a players' to an authors' theatre in the late sixteenth century. Over the last three decades, there have been two major revisionist theories about how Shakespeare wrote and disseminated his dramatic works and which acknowledge the dynamic and pragmatic processes leading to the eventual posthumous publication of the First Folio in 1623. One is the hypothesis, embedded most tangibly in The Oxford Shakespeare (1986), that the dramatist revised and reworked his plays primarily for performance. In the second, related but distinct theory laid out in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003), Lukas Erne argued that Shakespeare also reworked certain plays specifically for publication. Both theories uphold the notion of authorial revision and both raise questions about how we are to understand the creative and commercial processes which lie behind the surface of Shakespeare's printed plays. Neither of these overarching theories, however, perhaps pays sufficient attention to the daily realities of the Elizabethan stage, or to the relationship between the plays and the actors who performed them. In the thesis, I contend that Shakespeare's plays emerged from a vibrant and collaborative theatrical context, articulated in the extant early printed editions, captured in their myriad textual variances and proved in a multitude of details. By scrutinizing these details, I argue, it is possible to see how the conditions of performance made for a dispersal of authorship in playwriting. Actors were not merely the vehicles for the play-texts they performed, but also a root source of written variation. Kemp's presence undermines the simple binary view of Shakespeare as a theatrical or literary author around which most revisionary scholarship still tends to revolve and points, rather, to far more fluid processes of composition and adaptation in the plays on which he worked with Shakespeare. Indeed, in the stage direction 'Enter Will Kemp', where writing meets performance, a whole world of possible change to Shakespeare's protean art is thus opened up.
Vols. for 1921-1969 include annual bibliography, called 1921-1955, American bibliography; 1956-1963, Annual bibliography; 1964-1968, MLA international bibliography.
More troubled and troubling than King Henry IV Part 1, the play continues the story of King Henry's decline and Hal's reform. Though Part 2 echoes the structure of the earlier play, it is a darker and more unsettling world, in which even Falstaff's revelry is more tired and cynical, and the once-merry Hal sloughs off his tavern companions to become King Henry V. James C. Bulman's authoritative edition provides a wealth of incisive commentary on this complex history play.
This lively, lucid book undertakes a detailed and provocative study of Shakespeare's fascination with clowns, fools, and fooling. Through close reading of plays over the whole course of Shakespeare's theatrical career, Bell highlights the fun, wit, insights, and mysteries of some of Shakespeare's most vibrant and often vexing figures.
In this engaging text, Arthur Kinney introduces students to Shakespeare’s plays in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. Introduces students to Shakespeare's plays in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. Focuses on the material conditions of playing and of playgoing. Covers venues, audiences, actors, society, government and regulation. Each topic is considered in relation to a selection of Shakespeare's plays. Shows students how the plays and the context in which they were produced illuminate one another.
