Portions of several chapters were presented, formally and informally, at meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America, the International Conference at the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, the Folger Shakespeare Library Teaching Shakespeare Institute, and to various audiences at the following institutions: Nazareth College, the Ohio State University, the University of Rochester, the University of North Carolina atGreensboro, St. LawrenceUniversity, theUniversity ofCalifornia at Berkeley, the University of Alabama. I am indebted to many who on those occasions responded with criticism, advice, suggestions, doubts, and kindness.
Shakespeare's Late Work is a detailed reading of the plays written at the end of Shakespeare's career, centring on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Unlike many previous studies it considers all the late work, including Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the revised Folio version of King Lear, and even what can be ascertained about the lost Cardenio. From this broadened canon emerge signs of a distinct identity for the late work. Lyne explores how Shakespeare sets great store in grand principles - faith in God, love of family, reverence for monarchs, and belief in theatrical representations of truth.
Shakespeare's plays are stuffed with letters - 111 appear on stage in all but five of his dramas. But for modern actors, directors, and critics they are frequently an awkward embarrassment. Alan Stewart shows how and why Shakespeare put letters on stage in virtually all of his plays. By reconstructing the very different uses to which letters were put in Shakespeare's time, and recapturing what it meant to write, send, receive, read, and archive a letter, it throws new light on some of his most familiar dramas
Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays
David Schalkwyk offers a sustained reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in relation to his plays. He argues that the la nguage of the sonnets is primarily performative rather than descriptive. In a wide-ranging analysis of both the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's sonnets and the Petrarchan discourses in a selection of plays, Schalkwyk addresses such issues as embodiment and silencing, interiority and theatricality, inequalities of power, status, gender and desire, both in the published poems and on the stage and in the context of the early modern period.
War and nation in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries
This original study explores a vital aspect of early-modern cultural history: the way that warfare is represented in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
The book contrasts the Tudor and Stuart prose that called for the establishment of a standing army in the name of nation, discipline and subjectivity and the drama of the period that invited critique of this imperative. Barker examines contemporary dramatic texts both for their radical position on war and, in the case of the later drama, for their subversive commentary on an emerging idealisation of Shakespeare and his work.
