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Book excerpts, reviews, author interviews, and reading recommendations
Excerpt - Shakespeare and Forgetting - by Peter Holland
Shakespeare and Forgetting cover
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Excerpt - Shakespeare and Forgetting - by Peter Holland

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Shakespeare and Forgetting by Peter Holland considers how Shakespeare explores the concept of forgetting and how forgetting functions in performance. The excerpt below focuses on the character of Sir John Falstaff, who appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays. Why do…

Excerpt: Shakespeare and Latinidad - "In a Shakespearean Key" by Caridad Svich
Caridad Svich and Shakespeare and Latinidad book cover
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Excerpt: Shakespeare and Latinidad - "In a Shakespearean Key" by Caridad Svich

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Caridad Svich. Photo by Jody Christopherson. Playwright and translator Caridad Svich writes about encountering A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a child growing up in a Cuban-American community in Florida: “In Shakespeare, before he was a writer on my syllabus in…

Richard III and disability: Excerpt - "Unfixable Forms" by Katherine Schaap Williams
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Richard III and disability: Excerpt - "Unfixable Forms" by Katherine Schaap Williams

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What did Richard III and his disability represent to Shakespeare’s original audiences? And how has this Shakespeare villain shaped the field of early modern disability studies today? Katherine Schaap Williams takes a closer look at these questions in the below…

Excerpt - "A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance" by Richard Schoch
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Excerpt - "A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance" by Richard Schoch

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How have directors sought to make Shakespeare productions relevant to contemporary political issues? What is it about these plays that makes them so politically resonant? Richard Schoch (Queen’s University Belfast) explores these questions in the excerpt below, taken from A…

Excerpt - "Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée" by Zachary Lesser
Edward Gwynn’s set of Pavier Quartos
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Excerpt - "Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée" by Zachary Lesser

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What’s the most influential book for Shakespeare scholarship? The First Folio of 1623 immediately comes to mind for many. However, there’s another book, less famous but still incredibly important for Shakespeare scholars: Edward Gwynn’s set of Pavier Quartos, found in…

Excerpt: 'Irregular Unions' by Katharine Cleland
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Excerpt: 'Irregular Unions' by Katharine Cleland

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Katharine Cleland examines Jessica and Lorenzo’s clandestine marriage in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” in this excerpt from her book “Irregular Unions.”

Better than laughing: Renaissance melancholy
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Better than laughing: Renaissance melancholy

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Mary Ann Lund

The most famous book about Renaissance melancholy, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), celebrates its four hundredth anniversary this year. Though it was published five years after Shakespeare’s death, it gathers together ideas about melancholy from antiquity right through…

Excerpt: 'Shakespeare and Lost Plays' by David McInnis
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Excerpt: 'Shakespeare and Lost Plays' by David McInnis

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When it comes to the theatrical landscape of Shakespeare’s London, there are the plays whose names we are familiar with — plays like Hamlet and Henry V — and then there are the plays that were being performed around the…

The Master of the Revels: Edmund Tilney
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The Master of the Revels: Edmund Tilney

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Nicole Galland

Author Nicole Galland gives Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels for Queen Elizabeth I, his proper due. She writes: “Because of Tilney, playwrights became more revered among the reading classes; because of Tilney, only certain playwrights’ works were greatly…

“Racist Humor and Shakespearean Comedy” – An excerpt from The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race
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“Racist Humor and Shakespearean Comedy” – An excerpt from The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race

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Patricia Akhimie writes about racist humor in Shakespeare’s comedies in this excerpt from her essay in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race.

Excerpt — ‘Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy’ by Paula Marantz Cohen
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Excerpt — ‘Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy’ by Paula Marantz Cohen

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“Its sense of empathy for the gendered position—and the pains and difficulties that accompany it on both sides—is at the heart of its comic warmth,” writes Paula Marantz Cohen about Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” in this excerpt from her…

Excerpt: ‘Shakespeare and the Political Way’ by Elizabeth Frazer
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Excerpt: ‘Shakespeare and the Political Way’ by Elizabeth Frazer

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“Shakespeare’s dramas, in my interpretation, play with rival ideas of the nature of the political way,” writes Elizabeth Frazer. Read more in this excerpt from the introduction.

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