Othello - The New Cambridge Shakespeare, Updated Edition
Professor Sanders provides a full analysis of the textual problem and theories of transmission of Othello, and offers possible solutions to the stylistic and racial problems which face modern readers and spectators. His edition includes contemporary maps of Venice and Cyprus, photographs of famous actors who have played the leading roles, and reconstructions of staging at the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres.
With its cross-dressed heroine, gender games and explorations of sexual ambivalence, its Forest of Arden and melancholy Jacques, As You Like It speaks directly to the twenty-first century. Juliet Dusinberre demonstrates that Rosalind’s authority in the play grows from new ideas about women and reveals that Shakespeare’s heroine reinvents herself for every age.
Much Ado About Nothing boasts one of Shakespeare's most delightful heroines, most dancing wordplay, and the endearing spectacle of intellectual and social self-importance bested by the desire to love and be loved in return. It offers both the dancing wit of the "merry war" between the sexes, and a sobering vision of the costs of that combat for both men and women. Shakespeare dramatizes a social world in all of its vibrant particulars, in which characters are shaped by the relations between social convention and individual choice.
The Merchant of Venice has been performed more often than any other comedy by Shakespeare. Molly Mahood pays special attention to the expectations of the play's first audience, and to our modern experience of seeing and hearing the play.
Renowned as Shakespeare's most boisterous comedy, The Taming of the Shrew is the tale of two young men—the hopeful Lucentio and the worldly Petruchio—and the two sisters they meet in Padua. Lucentio falls in love with Bianca, the apparently ideal younger daughter of the wealthy Baptista Minola. But before they can marry, Bianca's formidable elder sister, Katherine, must be wed.
