With a thirty-year run of award-winning, critically acclaimed, and commercially successful plays, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) to The Invention of Love (1997), Tom Stoppard is arguably the pre-eminent playwright in Britain today. His popularity also extends to the United States, where his plays have won three Tony awards and his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
In this addition to the Arden Shakespeare series, approximately 3000 quotations, both familiar and little-known, are drawn from throughout Shakespeare's work, both plays and poems. Quotations are selected for their intrinsic interest and organised by topic, as being both user-friendly and stimulating for the casual reader, with speaker and play reference, and with some annotation to give a context to the quotation. Included are: a Shakespeare biography; a chronology of plays; a keyword index; and selections from Arden glossary.
Discworld is a comedic fantasy book series by the British author Terry Pratchett, set on the Discworld, a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the back of a giant turtle, Great A'Tuin. The books frequently parody, or at least take inspiration from, J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft and William Shakespeare, as well as mythology, folklore and fairy tales, often using them for satirical parallels with current cultural, technological and scientific issues.
The most familiar assertion of Shakespeare scholarship is that he is our contemporary. Shakespeare After Theory provocatively argues that he is not, but what value he has for us must at least begin with a recognition of his distance from us. Only then can we be sure that what we hear are his concerns, rather than the projections of our own. Shakespeare After Theory sees Shakespeare's artistry as it is realized in the earliest conditions of its materialization and intelligibility: in the collaborations of the theatre in which the plays were acted, in the practices of the book trade in which they were published, in the unstable political world of late Tudor and Stuart England in which the plays were engaged by various publics.
"Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain" examines the work of two of the most important English Renaissance authors in terms of the cultural, social and political contexts of early modern Britain. Andrew Hadfield demonstrates that the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the plays of William Shakespeare demand to be read in terms of an expanding Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in which a dominant English identity had to come to terms with the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were now also subjects of the crown.