Eating and drinking-vital to all human beings-were of central importance to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Culinary Shakespeare, the first collection devoted solely to the study of food and drink in Shakespeare's plays, reframes questions about cuisine, eating, and meals in early modern drama. As a result, Shakespearean scenes that have long ......
The Philosophy of Generosity in Shakespeare and Marlowe
Original readings of Dr. Faustus, The Merchant of Venice, Edward II, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest, in which Sean Lawrence challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges or negotiations. Lawrence uses the philosophies of Levinas and Derrida to argue that these plays depict a radical generosity that breaks the ......
A collection of essays that considers the editorial and interpretive strategies for dealing with complex Shakespearean texts In his own time, Shakespeare was not a monument, but a man of the theater whose plays were less finished artifacts than works in process. In contrast to a book, a thing we have come to think of as final and achieved, a play ......
In this slim, poetically powerful volume, Piero Boitani develops his earlier work in The Bible and Its Rewritings, focusing on Shakespeare's "rescripturing" of the Gospels. Boitani persuasively urges that Shakespeare read the New Testament with great care and an overall sense of affirmation and participation, and that many of his plays constitute ......
Shakespeare, Literary Landmines, and an Eccentric Patron's Royal Obsession
Part literary mystery, part an examination of what constitutes fiction versus reality, Ghostwriter is based on the true story of author Lawrence Wells, 45, hired by the University of Mississippi in 1987 to ghostwrite a novel for a wealthy, eccentric donor (""Mrs. F,"" 75), who was convinced that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was William ......
Published in 1623, it has been the object of continued scholarly focus, while three subsequent folio printings-occurring in 1632, 1663/64, and 1685-are often considered mere derivatives of the First.
Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Duree
Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a "collected works" of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men, the project ran ......
A gripping, funny, joyful account of how the books you read shape your own life in surprising and profound ways. Bookworms know what scholars of literature are trained to forget: that when they devour a work of literary fiction, whatever else they may be doing, they are reading about themselves. Read Shakespeare, and you become Cleopatra, Hamlet, ......
Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery
In Inkface, Miles P. Grier traces productions of Shakespeare's Othello from seventeenth-century London to the Metropolitan Opera in twenty-first-century New York. Grier shows how the painted stage Moor and the wife whom he theatrically stains became necessary types, reduced to objects of interpretation for a presumed white male audience. In an era ......
