William Shakespeare

A. R. Braunmuller

Stephen Orgel

Hamlet

Russ Mcdonald

Midsummer Night's Dream

William Montgomery

Douglas Trevor

Julius Caesar

King Lear

Frances E. Dolan

As You Like It

Antony and Cleopatra

Claire McEachern

Henry V

In this lavishly illustrated book, one of the most important and influential scholars of the Renaissance stage brings together essays that have changed the way we think about the age of Shakespeare. His subjects are varied and interconnected: the theater as social phenomenon, the development of the stage as an architectural presence and a cultural institution, the changing use of setting and costume, the changing status of the acting profession, the complex relation of theater to the political life of the age. Most of all, The Authentic Shakespeare is about how the modern constructs the past, how the texts that were performed on the Elizabethan stage became the books and editions that are, for our time, Renaissance drama. Many essays in The Authentic Shakespeare have become classics. Collected here for the first time, they essential reading for students of the Renaissance stage and the history of the book.

and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage

The Authentic Shakespeare

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this beautifully illustrated book, one of the foremost Shakespeareans of our time explores the ways in which Shakespeare has been imagined from his time to ours. In a penetrating series of interpretations, Stephen Orgel explores the ironies and paradoxes that have characterized the reconstruction of Shakespeare's texts, his image, the staging and illustration of his plays over the past four centuries, as he is perennially reinvented for new cultural ends. Drawing on performance history, textual history, and the visual arts (including a fascinating chapter on portraiture), Imagining Shakespeare displays throughout the cultural versatility, elegance, lucidity, and wit which have become the hallmarks of Orgel's style.

Imagining Shakespeare

Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities Stephen Orgel

Presents a study of political theater in the English Renaissance, discussing the differences between a public playhouse and a private, or court theater, and looking at masques and the role of king in the Renaissance court.

Political Theater in the English Renaissance

The Illusion of Power

In this beautifully illustrated book, one of the foremost Shakespeareans of our time explores the ways in which Shakespeare has been imagined from his time to ours. Drawing on performance history, textual history and the visual arts (including a fascinating chapter on portraiture), Imagining Shakespeare displays throughout the cultural versatility, elegance, lucidity and wit which have become the hallmarks of Stephen Orgel's style.

A History of Texts and Visions

Sean Keilen

Shakespeare has never been more ubiquitous, not only on the stage and in academic writing, but in film, video and the popular press. On television, he advertises everything from cars to fast food. His birthplace, the tiny Warwickshire village of Stratford-Upon-Avon, has been transformed into a theme park of staggering commercialism, and the New Globe, in its second season, is already a far bigger business than the old Globe could ever have hoped to be. If popular culture cannot do without Shakespeare, continually reinventing him and reimagining his drama and his life, neither can the critical and scholarly world, for which Shakespeare has, for more than two centuries, served as the central text for analysis and explication, the foundation of the western literary canon and the measure of literary excellence.The Shakespeare the essays collected in these volumes reveal is fully as multifarious as the Shakespeare of theme parks, movies and television. Indeed, it is part of the continuing reinvention of Shakespeare. The essays are drawn for the most part from work done in the past three decades, though a few essential, enabling essays from an earlier period have been included. They not only chart the directions taken by Shakespeare studies in the recent past, but they serve to indicate the enormous and continuing vitality of the enterprise, and the extent to which Shakespeare has become a metonym for literary and artistic endeavor generally.

Shakespeare and the Editorial Tradition

Stephen Orgel

Books

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