The third volume in Terry Deary's gritty and humorous history series for adults The reign of Elizabeth I, a Golden Age? Try asking her subjects. Elizabethans did all they could to survive in an age of sin and bling, of beddings and beheadings, galleons and guns. Explorers set sail for new worlds, risking everything to bring back slaves, gold, and the priceless potato. Elizabeth lined her coffers while her subjects lived in squalor with hunger, violence, and misery as bedfellows. Shakespeare shone and yet the beggars and thieves, the doxies and bawdy baskets, scraped and cheated to survive in the shadows.
Shakespeare and Judicial Rhetoric illustrates Shakespeare's creative processes by revealing some of the intellectual materials out of which some of his most famous works were composed. Focusing on the narrative poem Lucrece, on four of his late Elizabethan plays -- Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Hamlet -- and on three early Jacobean dramas, Othello, Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well, Quentin Skinner argues that there are major speeches, and sometimes sequences of scenes, that are crafted according to a set of rhetorical precepts about how to develop a persuasive judicial case, either in accusation or defence.
Now in a new edition, Lukas Erne's groundbreaking study argues that Shakespeare, apart from being a playwright who wrote theatrical texts for the stage, was also a literary dramatist who produced reading texts for the page. Examining the evidence from early published playbooks, Erne argues that Shakespeare wrote many of his plays with a readership in mind and that these "literary" texts would have been abridged for the stage because they were too long for performance.
The first up-to-date monograph on Shakespeare's reception in Spain. "Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre" offers an account of Shakespeare's presence on the Spanish stage, from a production of the first Spanish rendering of Jean-Francois Ducis' Hamlet in 1772 to the creative and controversial work of directors like Calixto Bieito and Alex Rigola in the early 21st century. Despite a largely indirect entrance into the culture, Shakespeare has gone on to become the best and known and most widely performed of all foreign playwrights.
