We boast a rich tradition of releasing books that explore the work and enduring impact of William Shakespeare. We proudly publish esteemed academics who are highly regarded in the field of Renaissance Literature, as well as emerging up-and-coming researchers.
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Shakespeare's borrowed feathers
This book uses the latest techniques in textual analysis to reveal the influence of a community of English playwrights on the celebrated works of William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's liminal spaces provides a unique set of perspectives through which Shakespeare's forests, battlefields, shores and gardens are revealed as deliberate dramatic devices with the capacity to destabilise social structures.
This is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Fletcher, Massinger, and Field's Thierry and Theodoret, with an introduction that reassesses sources (including Shakespeare) and discusses the authorship and reception of this captivating play, pointing the way for future study, especially of a historical or gender-based nature.
The Family of Love is a rumbustious citizen comedy. Delivering farcical twists on familiar dramatic situations, it offers a glimpse of spiritual freedom in paraperopandemical times.
Adaptation and resilience in the performing arts
Eight teams share their research about live performing arts during the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting on digital innovations and analogue adaptations in dance and theatre, accessibility and community-building, and on how the pandemic impacted on artists and companies.
Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid
A fully annotated critical edition of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's ground-breaking comedy Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid (1615), a fascinating exploration of the journey of two transgender characters in an adverse heteronormative society. This Revels Plays edition offers a modernised text and a full critical commentary.
Hyde Park is a striking Caroline example of London city comedy. This critical edition unpicks its valuable insights into the shifting nature of the genre and early modern conceptions of London and courtship.
Shakespeare's adolescents examines the varied representation of adolescent characters in Shakespeare's plays. Using early modern medical knowledge, the book unpacks complexities that surrounded the cultural and theatrical representations of the 'signs' of the maturation used to construct Shakespeare's many adolescent characters.
This book offers essential reading on a wide array of theatre and film productions of Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. Richly contextualised analyses of individual productions by major directors help produce a nuanced picture of the performance history of the play, guiding the reader from the 1930s through the early twenty-first century.
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.
The first single-text scholarly edition in English. An indispensable resource for scholars, students, and theatre practitioners. Edited by Ruth Lunney.
Blending theatre history and sensory studies this book recaptures the sound of early modern drama, acknowledging its intangibility while attempting to both describe those sounds heard on the stage and to try and identify those sound's effects on the playgoers.
Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature
Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature explores the intertextual connections between early modern English and modern Irish literature. Characterising the relationship as 'dismemorial', the book explores how ghosts, bodies, and the land are sites of literary connection through which contemporary Ireland draws on Shakespeare's England.
Cowboy Hamlets and zombie Romeos
The book focuses on the interpretation of Shakespeare film adaptations in commercial film genres, from the classical Hollywood era to contemporary blockbuster cinema. Its genre-based analyses revisit old favourites and rediscover long-forgotten treasures of film history, taking adaptation studies in a new direction.
Shakespeare's tutor: The influence of Thomas Kyd defines Thomas Kyd's dramatic canon and indicates where and how Kyd contributed to the development of Shakespeare's drama. Groundbreaking in its implications for our understanding of Shakespeare's dramatic development, the book aims to revolutionise our understanding of the early modern canon.
Three sixteenth-century dietaries
Three sixteenth century dietaries makes a significant contribution to our understanding of early modern culture. It provides the first modern edition of three of the most important dietaries of the time - with the texts offering advice on the best ways to maintain well-being.
Love's Victory is the first romantic comedy written in English by a woman, and this Revels edition is the first fully-authorised, modern spelling edition of this play by Lady Mary Wroth.
Examines Fletcher's Roman plays and identifies disorientation as the unifying principle of his portrayal of imperial Rome. The book sheds new light on his intellectual life by arguing that his dramatization of Rome exudes a sense of scepticism over the authority of Roman models resulting from his irreverent approach to the classics.
Shakespeare and the supernatural
This edited collection of twelve essays from an international range of contemporary Shakespeare scholars explores the supernatural in Shakespeare from a variety of perspectives and approaches.
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.
Five Elizabethan progress entertainments
A fully annotated, modern-spelling edition of entertainments performed for the monarch during her summer progress, the collection affords an insight into a neglected area of Elizabethan cultural activity.
This book explores Shakespeare's presence in the American cultural imaginary at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It traces how his texts are disseminated and reassembled in contemporary TV shows such as The Wire, Deadwood, Westworld, House of Cards and The Americans.
This books looks at Antony and Cleopatra in performance from 1606 to 2018, examining how actors, directors and designers pick up the play's themes of desire and delinquency, exoticism and erotic politics to locate the most ambituous love story ever told in a new present. Is the play tragedy? Comedy? Farce? Rutter shows it's all three.
Interweaving myths in Shakespeare and his contemporaries
This volume considers classical mythology in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The eleven essays approach tropes and figures from multiple perspectives: genre, gender, translation, classical reception and history.
Shakespeare's cinema of love addresses the question, how much has Shakespeare influenced modern film genres? Convincing arguments are made for the links between his comedies of love and genres such as 'screwball' comedy, musicals, romantic comedy and tragic love films.
The Shakespearean comic and tragicomic
Richard Hillman's latest book on the French connections of early modern English drama shows that Shakespeare regularly inflected the models provided by Italian comedy and tragicomedy by evoking French material, dramatic and non-dramatic. Such inflection especially bears on the tragic overtones that menace or complicate comic resolutions.
A detailed account of the performance history of As You Like It through the modern period, focusing on landmark stage and film productions.
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.
A study of twenty stage productions, adaptations and screen versions of Shakespeare's final Roman play
William Shakespeare and John Donne
William Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and John Donne's Holy Sonnets are read against the background of concepts of the soul during the early modern period. This approach provides new insights into concepts of interiority and performance as well as a new understanding of the soliloquy in both poetry and drama.
An accessible, enjoyable, occasionally speculative study based on a vast amount of research into some of Shakespeare's more uninterpretable moments.
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
John Lyly and early modern authorship
During Shakespeare's lifetime, John Lyly was repeatedly described as the central figure in contemporary English literature. This book takes that claim seriously, asking how and why Lyly was considered the most important writer of his time.
Dr Faustus: The A- and B- texts (1604, 1616)
Dr. Faustus is one of the jewels of early modern English drama, and is still widely performed today. Interestingly, the play has come down to the contemporary audience in two distinct versions that...
Innovative approach and study of Spenser's literature. Original ideas and perspectives methodolodgy when studying Spenser. Will appeal to wide market of Renaissance students.
The Tamer Tamed; or, The Woman's Prize
This is the first edition for students and general readers of a pro-woman reply to Shakespeare's 'The Tamer of the Shrew' written in Shakespeare's lifetime . Co-edited by a feminist critic and a distinguished textual scholar, it makes clear why 'The Tamer Tamed' should be restored to the theatrical repertoire and the literary canon.
Introduces students to the study of Shakespeare and grounds their understandings of his work in theoretical discourses. By addressing what is primarily at stake in the major theoretical approaches to Shakespeare's works, the book breaks down both fears and preconceptions to offer students a map of the current critical practices of others.