Simon Palfrey

A thoroughly revised edition of the successful student text Doing Shakespeare, first published in 2005. The revised edition introduces a new way of approaching Shakespeare's text, through ideas of performance and the actor's role and restructures the content to make it easier to navigate.

Doing Shakespeare

New methods are needed to do justice to Shakespeare. His work exceeds conventional models, past and present, for understanding playworlds. In this book, Simon Palfrey goes right to the heart of early modern popular drama, revealing both how it works and why it matters. Unlike his contemporaries, Shakespeare gives independent life to all his instruments, and to every fraction and fragment of the plays. Palfrey terms these particles 'formactions' - theatre-specific forms that move with their own action and passion. Palfrey's book is critically daring in both substance and format. Its unique mix of imaginative gusto, thought experiments, and virtuosic technique generates piercing close readings of the plays. There is far more to playlife than meets the eye. Influenced by Leibniz's visionary original model of possible worlds, Palfrey opens up the multiple worlds of Shakespeare's language, scenes, and characters as never before.

Shakespeare's Possible Worlds

Ewan Fernie

With commentary throughout on the narrative's sources and the process of adaptation, this critical reimagining of Shakespeare's Macbeth opens up vivid new insights into one of the most familiar plays in the literary canon.

Macbeth, Macbeth

Tiffany Stern

A truly groundbreaking collaboration of original theatre history with exciting literary criticism, Shakespeare in Parts is the first book fully to explore the original form in which Shakespeare's drama overwhelmingly circulated. This was not the full play-text; it was not the public performance. It was the actor's part, consisting of the bare cues and speeches of each individual role. With group rehearsals rare or non-existent, the cued part alone had to furnish the actor with his character. But each such part-text was riddled with gaps and uncertainties. The actor knew what he was going to say, but not necessarily when, or why, or to whom; he may have known next to nothing of any other part. It demanded the most sensitive attention to the opportunities inscribed in the script, and to the ongoing dramatic moment. Here is where the young actor Shakespeare learnt his trade; here is where his imagination, verbal and technical, learnt to roam. This is the story of Shakespeare in Parts. As Shakespeare developed his playwriting, the apparent limitations of the medium get transformed into expressive opportunities. Both cue and speech become promise-crammed repositories of meaning and movement, and of individually discoverable space and time. Writing always for the same core group of players, Shakespeare could take - and insist upon - unprecedented risks. The result is onstage drama of astonishing immediacy. Starting with a comprehensive history of the part in early modern theatre, Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern's mould-altering work of historical and imaginative recovery provides a unique keyhole onto hitherto forgotten practices and techniques. It not only discovers a newly active, choice-ridden actor, but a new Shakespeare.

Shakespeare in Parts

A throroughly revised edition of the successful student text Doing Shakespeare, first published in 2005. The book's success lies in the close readings it gives students, demystifying the language of the plays and critical approaches to it. The new edition introduces a new way of approaching Shakespeare's text, through ideas of performance and the actor's role and restructures the content to make it easier to navigate. Simon Palfrey takes a direct approach to the common difficulties faced by students "doing" Shakespeare and tackles them head on in a no-nonsense style which makes the book especially accessible. He bring us much closer to the animate life of the plays, as things that are not finished monuments but living material, in process and up for grabs, empowering students to see opportunities for their own creative or re-creative readings of Shakespeare.

Doing Shakespeare offers a fresh insight into the difficulties and excesses of Shakespeare's drama and language. Written primarily for students making the transition from school to university, it aims both to demystify and illuminate the study of Shakespeare, tackling many of the challenges students face as they move towards a more complex critical engagement with Shakespeare's work. Equally, it shows how recovering the layered energies within and between Shakespeare's words, and the role of such dense language in constructing character, is indispensable if we are to rediscover the plays' ethical, political and emotional punch. "Simon Palfrey's Doing Shakespeare is far more than a primer. Readers and watchers of Shakespeare, however experienced, will find a host of new insights here. Indeed, I cannot think of another critic since Empson who has teased out so much so lucidly and (usually) so persuasively from the intricacies of Shakespearean language. Sometimes wayward, frequently vertiginous, always provocative of serious thought" Jonathan Bate, International Books of the Year 2004, The Times Literary Supplement, October 2004. Doing Shakespeare offers a fresh insight into the difficulties and excesses of Shakespeare's drama and language. Written primarily for students making the transition from school to university, it aims both to demystify and illuminate the study of Shakespeare, tackling many of the challenges students face as they move towards a more complex critical engagement with Shakespeare's work. Equally, it shows how recovering the layered energies within and between Shakespeare's words, and the role of such dense language in constructing character, is indispensable if we are to rediscover the plays' ethical, political and emotional punch. "Simon Palfrey's Doing Shakespeare is far more than a primer. Readers and watchers of Shakespeare, however experienced, will find a host of new insights here. Indeed, I cannot think of another critic since Empson who has teased out so much so lucidly and (usually) so persuasively from the intricacies of Shakespearean language. Sometimes wayward, frequently vertiginous, always provocative of serious thought" Jonathan Bate, International Books of the Year 2004, The Times Literary Supplement, October 2004.

"A miracle, an instant classic." -- Slavoj Žižek, philosopher The tragedy is done, the tyrant Macbeth dead. The time is free. But for how long? As Macduff pursues dreams of national revival, smaller lives are seeding. In the ruins of Dunsinane, the Porter tries to keep his three young boys safe from the nightmare of history. In a nunnery deep in Birnam Wood, a girl attempts to forget what she lost in war. Flitting between them, a tortured clairvoyant trembles with the knowledge of what's to come. A collaboration between two of the world's most eminent Shakespeare scholars, "Macbeth, Macbeth" is a unique mix of creative fiction and literary criticism that charts a new way of doing both, sparking a whole new world from the embers of Shakespeare's original tragedy. "Macbeth, Macbeth" weaves a thread that enrichens the original classic with the manic energy of Tristram Shandy, the grim intensity of Crime and Punishment, and the existential absurdity of Waiting for Godot. "A thrilling re-imagination of Shakespeare’s darkest play." -- Lucy Bailey, theatre director "Shakespeare, I suspect, would have been delighted." -- Don Paterson, poet Beyond Criticism Editions is the reincarnation of the Beyond Criticism book series, originally published by Bloomsbury and now part of Boiler House Press' own experiments with the radical new forms that literary criticism might take in the 21st century.

Emma Josephine Smith

Pyramus: 'Now die, die, die, die, die.' [Dies]A Midsummer Night's Dream'Shakespeare's Dead' reveals the unique ways in which Shakespeare brings dying, death, and the dead to life. It establishes the cultural, religious and social contexts for thinking about early modern death, with particular reference to the plague which ravaged Britain during his lifetime, and against the divisive background of the Reformation. But it also shows how death on stage is different from death in real life. The dead come to life, ghosts haunt the living, and scenes of mourning are subverted by the fact that the supposed corpse still breathes.Shakespeare scripts his scenes of dying with extraordinary care. Famous final speeches - like Hamlet's 'The rest is silence', Mercutio's 'A plague o' both your houses', or Richard III's 'My kingdom for a horse' - are also giving crucial choices to the actors as to exactly how and when to die. Instead of the blank finality of death, we get a unique entrance into the loneliness or confusion of dying. 'Shakespeare's Dead' tells of death-haunted heroes such as Macbeth and Hamlet, and death-teasing heroines like Juliet, Ophelia, and Cleopatra. It explores the fear of 'something after death', and characters' terrifying visions of being dead. But it also uncovers the constant presence of death in Shakespeare's comedies, and how the grinning jester might be a leering skull in disguise. This book celebrates the paradox: the life in death in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's Dead

Romeo and Juliet is routinely called “the world’s greatest love story”, as though it is all about romance. The play features some of the most lyrical passages in all of drama, and the lovers are young, beautiful, and ardent. But when we look at the play, the lyricism and the romance are not really what drive things along. It is true that Romeo, especially early on in the play, acts like a young man determined to take his place in an immortal tale of love. Everything he says is romantic – but rather like an anniversary card is romantic. His words propel nothing, or nothing but sarcastic admonitions from his friends to forget about love and to treat women as they should be treated, with careless physical appetite. The world we have entered is rapacious more than romantic. Everyone knows something of this, from the film versions of the story if nothing else. Romeo and Juliet must fight for their love inside a culture of stupid hatreds. But it is not a simple case of love versus war, or the city against the couple. If it were, it would nicely reinforce clichés about true love, fighting against the odds. In this book Simon Palfrey suggests that the play Shakespeare actually wrote is more troubling than this. Juliet’s passion – for all her youth, for all its truth – is at the very cusp of murderousness. Juliet is the world’s scourge, in the sense that she will whip and punish and haunt it; she is also its triumph, in the sense of its best and truest thing. The deaths her love leads to are in no way avoidable, and in no way accidental. They are her inheritance, the thing she was born to. Of course she takes Romeo with her. But it is at heart her play.

Simon Palfrey

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