Alison Findlay

In Renaissance drama, the bastard is an extraordinarily powerful and disruptive figure. We have only to think of Caliban or of Edmund to realise the challenge presented by the illegitimate child. Drawing on a wide range of play texts, Alison Findlay shows how illegitimacy encoded and threatened to deconstruct some of the basic tenets of patriarchal rule. She considers bastards as indicators and instigators of crisis in early modern England, reading them in relation to witchcraft, spiritual insecurities and social unrest in family and State. The characters discussed range from demi-devils, unnatural villains and clowns to outstandingly heroic or virtuous types who challenge officially sanctioned ideas of illegitimacy. The final chapter of the book considers bastards in performance; their relationship with theatre spaces and audiences. Illegitimate voices, Findlay argues, can bring about the death of the author/father and open the text as a piece of theatre, challenging accepted notions of authority.

Bastards in Renaissance Drama

Illegitimate Power

Sean Murphy

Dawn Archer

The Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare's Language is the first comprehensive account of Shakespeare's language to use computational methods derived from corpus linguistics – methods of choice for today's historical linguist. Volume 3 focuses on keywords in Shakespeare's plays. Play keywords are derived by conducting a statistical comparison between the words in one play with those in all the other plays. For characters, the statistical comparison is made between the vocabulary of one character and that of all the other characters in the same play. These keywords are then used to create 'linguistic profiles' of each play and main character. The profiles show how patterns of words around keywords contribute to themes in plays and characterization of the protagonists. For example, we reveal how the simple word 'Goodnight' contributes to dramatic tension in Julius Caesar, or how in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet's most distinctive yet apparently innocuous words, 'if', 'yet' and 'but', create an important aspect of her character.

Plays and Characters

The Arden Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language

Vassiliki Markidou

This book seeks to invert Ben Jonson's claim that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek' and to prove that, in fact, there is more Greek and less Latin in a significant group of Shakespeare's texts: a group whose generic hybridity (tragic-comical-historical-romance) exemplifies the hybridity of Greece in the early modern imagination. To early modern England, Greece was an enigma. It was the origin and idealised pinnacle of Western philosophy, tragedy, democracy, heroic human endeavour and, at the same time, an example of decadence: a fallen state, currently under Ottoman control, and therefore an exotic, dangerous, 'Other' in the most disturbing senses of the word. Indeed, while Britain was struggling to establish itself as a nation state and an imperial authority by emulating classical Greek models, this ambition was radically unsettled by early modern Greece's subjection to the Ottoman Empire, which rendered Europe's eastern borders dramatically vulnerable. Focussing, for the first time, on Shakespeare's 'Greek' texts (Venus and Adonis, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen), the volume considers how Shakespeare's use of antiquity and Greek myth intersects with early modern perceptions of the country and its empire.

Shakespeare and Greece

An A-Z of over 350 entries which explores the role of women within Shakespearean drama, how women were represented on the Shakespearean stage, And The role of women in Shakespeare's personal and professional lives.

A Dictionary

Women in Shakespeare

This study examines the playing spaces for early modern women's drama.

Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama

Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary is a comprehensive reference guide to Shakespeare and women. An A-Z of over 350 entries explores the role of women within Shakespearean drama, how women were represented on the Shakespearean stage, and the role of women in Shakespeare's personal and professional lives. Women in Shakespeare examines in detail the language employed by Shakespeare in his representation of women in the full range of his poetry and plays and the implications these representations have for the position of women in Elizabethan and Jacobean society. Women in Shakespeare is an ideal guide to Shakespeare's women for all students and scholars of Shakespeare.

Much Ado About Nothing shows the violence of desire as well as its drive towards creative plotting or matchmaking. In this Handbook, Alison Findlay examines the play's comic and tragic potential in the theatre; its attempts to harmonise love and war, attraction and repulsion. The volume: * explores the play's resonance in early performances with reference to the crisis over fast-changing fashions, gendered notions of honour, and the changing personnel of Shakespeare's company * analyses the play from a performance point of view scene by scene, considering the interactions between spectators and actors * surveys key productions and films, including Barry Jackson's radical modernist production of 1919, the recently-rediscovered television film of Zeffirelli's 1965 National Theatre Production, and Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film version * outlines the play's critical history from the eighteenth century to the present day, with a focus on contemporary concerns such as genre hybridity, sources and intertexts, and the instability of signs and appearances.

Much Ado About Nothing

This is a comprehensive reference guide examining the language employed by Shakespeare to represent women in the full range of his poetry and plays. Including over 350 entries, Alison Findlay shows the role of women within Shakespearean drama, their representations on the Shakespearean stage, and their place in Shakespeare's personal and professional lives.

Alison Findlay

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