Shakespeare Studies & Criticism

Double Shakespeares examines contemporary performances of Shakespeare plays that employ the “emotional realist” traditions of acting that were codi...

Hamlet stands as a high water mark of canonical art, yet it has equally attracted rebels and experimenters, those avant-garde writers, dramatists, ...

This book argues that the idea of metamorphosis is central to both the theory and practice of Shakespearean comedy. It offers a synthesis of severa...

Avi Erlich finds that Hamlet deals not with repressed patricidal impulses but with a complex search, partially unconscious, for a strong father. Mu...

Shakespeare’s Style presents a detailed consideration of aspects of Shakespeare’s writing style in his plays. Each chapter offers a detailed discu...

In this bold reconceptualization of Shakespeare's histories as plays that ultimately generate and seek to legitimize new kings, Barbara Hodgdon exa...

In Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons, Travis Curtright examines the influence of the classical rhetorical tradition on early modern theories of acting...

This book contends that in Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare sought to discover the ways in which the imagination uses and abuses language. The auth...

Making a Match examines the various options posed at every stage of English wooing, together with the presentation of these protocols in the plays ...

Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare makes available a transcript of a previously unpublished early modern journal kept by...

Shakespeare's Spiral aims to explore a figure forgotten in the dramatic texts of Shakespeare and in Renaissance painting: the snail. Taking as its ...

For all that we love and admire Shakespeare, he is not that easy to grasp. He may have written in Elizabethan English, but when we read him, we can...

Dealing mainly with the works of William Shakespeare, the essays in Close Readings without Readings reflect Stephen Booth’s lifelong interest in un...

The last quarter century has seen a “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies as well as competing assertions by secular critics that Shakespeare’s...

A Mirror for Lovers: Shake-speare’s Sonnets as Curious Perspective, by William F. Zak, seeks to identify in Shake-speare’e sonnet sequence the stru...

This book presents a scholarly edition of five of the first adaptations of Shakespeare from the eighteenth century, the period when Shakespeare bec...

In Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons, Travis Curtright examines the influence of the classical rhetorical tradition on early modern theories of acting...

Hamlet's Problematic Revenge: Forging a Royal Mandate provides a new argument within Shakespearean studies that argues the oft-noted arrest of the ...

Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare’s political outlook by comparing some of the playwright’s best-known works to the w...

Marriage and Land Law in Shakespeare and Middleton examines the dynamics of early modern marriage-making, a time-honored practice that was evolving...

The purpose of this book is to honor the scholarly legacy of Charles R. Forker with a series of essays that address the problem of literary influen...

Despite their diversity in tone and subject matter, Shakespeare's four mature tragedies--Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth--all have an essen...

Robert Heilman gives an appreciation of Shakespeare as a whole man. Northrop Frye writes on balance and symbolism. Harry Levin shows how Shakespear...

If Shakespeare's last plays--Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII--are to be neither debunked nor idealized but take...

Patterned after his previous books on Shakespeare's plays, Jan H. Blits's New Heaven, New Earth is a scene-by-scene, line-by-line philosophical stu...

In the reincarnation myth in Book X of Plato’s Republic, the unnamed first soul, who has lived a good life and has been rewarded in the afterlife, ...

James S. Baumlin’s Theologies of Language in English Renaissance Literature offers a revisionist history of discourse, taking Shakespeare, Donne, a...

This volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood’s engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how ...

Michael D. Friedman’s second edition of this stage history of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus adds an examination of twelve major theatrical product...

Shakespeare’s tutor: The influence of Thomas Kyd adds to the critical and scholarly discussion that seeks to establish the early modern playwright ...