To celebrate the release of two new Shakespearean books, we’ve pulled together a reading list of some of our newest and bestselling titles on the great bard himself.
Reading list
A challenging re-appraisal of the ways in which we have conceived of 'source' study in relation to Shakespeare. By combining a theoretical and a practical approach this study challenges existing shibboleths and proposes new ways of conceiving the relations between Texts (oral and literary) and their antecedents.
Shakespeare and the denial of territory
This book examines three Shakespeare plays in which abusive banishment participates in a dialectics of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus). It draws on analyses by French philosophers (notably Deleuze and Foucault), so as to understand strategies of resistance when one is denied one's territory.
Why did Queen Elizabeth I compare herself with her disastrous ancestor Richard II? Why would Ben Jonson transform Queen Anne and her ladies into Amazons as entertainment for the pacifist King James?...
Doing Kyd reads Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, the box-office and print success of its time, as the play that established the revenge genre in England and served as a 'pattern and precedent' for the golden generation of early modern playwrights.
Explains the special effects used to represent storms in the early modern playhouses, and details how those effects filter into Shakespeare's dramatic language. With chapters on Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Pericles and The Tempest
The second edition of Friedman's stage history of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus adds an examination of twelve major theatrical productions and one film that appeared in the years 1989-2009, identifying four lines of descent in the recent performance history of the play: the stylised, realistic, darkly comic, and political approaches.
Shakespeare's histories and counter-histories
Shakespeare's history plays have always been pivotal to our understanding of his works and their relationship to their political and cultural context. This collection renews attention to these crucial plays by exploring official and unofficial versions of the past, histories and counter-histories.
Written by Shakespeare's son-in-law John Hall, The Little Book of Cures is a fascinating look into the life of a doctor in seventeenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon.
*Discount valid until 3rd December 2021.