Product Description

This four–volume Companion to Shakespeare′s Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.

• Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world – Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
  
• Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis.
  
• Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems.
  
• Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre.
  
• Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty–first century.

This companion to Shakespeare’s histories contains original essays on every history play from Henry VI to Henry V as well as fourteen additional articles on such topics as censorship in Shakespeare’s histories, the relation of Shakespeare’s plays to other dramatic histories of the period, Shakespeare’s histories on film, the homoerotics of Shakespeare’s history plays, and nation formation in Shakespeare’s histories.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3167706 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

From the Back Cover
This four–volume Companion to Shakespeare′s Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.

Complementing David Scott Kastan′s A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), which focused on Shakespeare as an author in his historical context, these volumes examine each of his plays and major poems using all the resources of contemporary criticism from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analyses.

Scholars from all over the world – Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States – have joined in the writing of new essays addressing virtually the whole of Shakespeare′s canon from a rich variety of critical perspectives. A mixture of younger and more established scholars, their work reflects some of the most interesting research currently being conducted in Shakespeare studies.

Arguing for the persistence and utility of genre as a rubric for teaching and writing about Shakespeare′s works, the editors have organized the four volumes in relation to generic categories: namely, the tragedies, the histories, the comedies, and the poems, problem comedies and late plays. Each volume thus contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre.

This ambitious project offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twentieth–first century.

This companion to Shakespeare′s histories contains original essays on every history play from Henry VI to Henry V as well as fourteen additional articles on such topics as censorship in Shakespeare′s histories, the relation of Shakespeare′s plays to other dramatic histories of the period, Shakespeare′s histories on film, the homoerotics of Shakespeare′s history plays, and nation formation in Shakespeare′s histories.

About the Author
Jean E. Howard is William E. Ransford Professor of English at Columbia University and a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is an editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and author of, among other works The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994) and, with Phyllis Rackin, of Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (1997).

Richard Dutton is currently Professor of English at Lancaster University, author of Mastering the Revels: the Regulation and Censorship of Renaissance Drama (1991) and Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England:Buggeswords (2000). He is editor of the Palgrave Literary Lives series. From 2003, he will be Professor of English at Ohio State University.