Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

70 results

Page 1 of 4

A Midsummer Night's Dream
  • 2nd edition
  • William Shakespeare
  • Edited by R. A. Foakes
  • Published online:
    02 August 2019
    Print publication:
    28 April 2003
  • The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream retains R. A. Foakes' text and has been extensively updated by him. In the Introduction to what is widely acknowledged as Shakespeare's most popular comedy, Foakes describes the two main traditions in the play's stage history, one emphasising charm and innocence, the other stressing darker suggestions of violence and sexuality. He shows that both are necessary to a full understanding of the play. For this edition the editor has added a new account of important theatrical productions and scholarly criticism on the play that have appeared in recent years. The reading list has also been revised and updated.

Hamlet versus Lear
  • Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art
  • R. A. Foakes
  • Published online:
    14 August 2009
    Print publication:
    29 January 1993
  • This book focuses on the two plays of Shakespeare that have generally contended for the title of 'greatest' among his works. Hamlet remained a focal point of reference until about 1960, when it was displaced by King Lear, a play which at the same time ceased to be perceived as a play of redemption and became a play of despair. Foakes attempts to explain these shifts by analysing the reception of the plays since about 1800, an analysis which necessarily engages with the politics of the plays and the politics of criticism. Recent critical theorising has destabilised the texts and undermined the notion of 'greatness' or any consideration of the plays as works of art. Foakes takes issue with such theories and reconsiders textual revisions, in order to argue for the integrity of the plays as reading texts, and to recover a flexible sense of their artistry in relation to meaning. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Shakespeare and to theatre-goers.

  • ‘Armed at point exactly’: The Ghost in Hamlet

  • Edited by Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book:
    Shakespeare Survey
    Published online:
    28 March 2007
    Print publication:
    03 November 2005, pp 34-47

  • Summary

    The ghost of Hamlet’s father has received some notable attention recently, especially in two commentaries on the play. One is Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), which is concerned with the resonances of the ghost’s apparent claim to have come from purgatory, and the way contradictory interpretations of what happens in a play in which a ‘young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost’. The other is in the chapter devoted to ‘ghosts and garments’ in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory by Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass (2000). Here the emphasis is on what the authors see as the ‘gross materiality’ of renaissance stage ghosts, a materiality inescapable in the ways in which they were clothed. The ghost in Hamlet, they argue, has become an embarrassment since the eighteenth century, and ‘Ridicule, rather than fear, has been the usual lot of Hamlet’s ghost.’ It is worth pursuing further the question not considered by Greenblatt and touched on but not adequately considered by Jones and Stallybrass: why is this ghost, uniquely among the more than sixty stage ghosts in the drama of the period, clad in armour?

    In the opening scene of the play the sceptical Horatio has to acknowledge seeing a ghost that appears in

    that fair and warlike form

    In which the majesty of buried Denmark

    Did sometimes march.

    (1.1.50–2)

Page 1 of 4