Arden Student Guides: Language and Writing offer a new type of study aid which combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the critical writing skills you need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's complex dramatic language, and expanding your own critical vocabulary, as you respond to his plays. Key features include: an introduction considering when and how the play was written, addressing the language with which Shakespeare created his work, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal detailed examination and analysis of the individual text, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies discussion of performance history and the critical reception of the work a 'Writing matters' section in every chapter, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations. Written by world-class academics with both scholarly insight and outstanding teaching skills, each guide will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm. At a climactic point in the play, Macbeth realises that the witches have deceived him through their ambiguous language: 'they palter with us in a double sense'. This book explores Shakespeare's own paltering in the play – the densely rich language of ambition, of blood, and of guilt that structures Macbeth.
Arden Student Guides: Language and Writing offer a new type of study aid which combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the critical writing skills you need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's complex dramatic language, and expanding your own critical vocabulary, as you respond to his plays. Key features include: an introduction considering when and how the play was written, addressing the language with which Shakespeare created his work, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal detailed examination and analysis of the individual text, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies discussion of performance history and the critical reception of the work a 'Writing matters' section in every chapter, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations. Written by world-class academics with both scholarly insight and outstanding teaching skills, each guide will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm. At a climactic point in the play, Macbeth realises that the witches have deceived him through their ambiguous language: 'they palter with us in a double sense'. This book explores Shakespeare's own paltering in the play – the densely rich language of ambition, of blood, and of guilt that structures Macbeth.
This guide offers a new type of study aid which combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the critical and writing skills students need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's rich and complex dramatic language and the students' own critical language and how they can improve and develop this to become a critical writer. This volume on 'Macbeth' discusses the play in its Jacobean context and in relation to Shakespeare's other tragedies before looking closely at its language and poetry.
This new Complete Works marks the completion of the Arden Shakespeare Third Series and includes all of Shakespeare's plays, poems and sonnets, edited by leading international scholars. New to this edition are the 'apocryphal' plays, part-written by Shakespeare: Double Falsehood, Sir Thomas More and King Edward III. The anthology is unique in giving all three extant texts of Hamlet from Shakespeare's time: the first and second Quarto texts of 1603 and 1604-5, and the first Folio text of 1623. With a simple alphabetical arrangement the Complete Works are easy to navigate. The lengthy introductions and footnotes of the individual Third Series volumes have been removed to make way for a general introduction, short individual introductions to each text, a glossary and a bibliography instead, to ensure all works are accessible in one single volume. This handsome Complete Works is ideal for readers keen to explore Shakespeare's work and for anyone building their literary library.
This book is a compilation of articles written by academicians residing in India and abroad, on some major texts which are studied in the course of undergraduate syllabi of English studies. The articles are on: Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Jew of Malta, Look Back in Anger, Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, The Lagoon, The Fly, The Ox, Shooting an Elephant and Araby. Although the book is meant for students of undergraduate levels, researchers would also be benefitted from some of the topics of the articles.
This engaging study offers fresh readings of canonical Shakespeare plays, illuminating ways stagecraft and language of movement create meaning for playgoers. The discussions engage materials from the period, present revelatory readings of Shakespeare's language, and demonstrate how these continually popular texts engage all of us in making meaning.
Shakespeare's plays are works of art made out of words. To read the plays closely, that is, to pay careful attention to the multiple, shifting meanings of and relationships between their words, is to gain a deep and lasting appreciation for the complex artistry of their construction and of their effects. In fourteen chapters, the book takes readers on a guided tour through some of the most productive sites in Shakespeare's plays for analysis, providing an introduction to the practice of reading Shakespeare's plays closely, and some examples of the interpretive work that such close reading can enable. Topics of analysis include verbal patterning, dramatic structure, staging and stage directions, soliloquies and character-construction and poetic meter. This is an ideal teaching text for introductory courses on Shakespeare. Offering a wide range of examples from nearly all of Shakespeare's plays, it will give students the analytical tools they need to develop sustained close readings of their own.
Child characters feature more numerously and prominently in the Shakespearean canon than in that of any other early modern playwright. Focusing on stage and film productions from the past four decades, this study addresses how Shakespeare's child characters are reflected, refracted and reinterpreted in performance. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates close reading, semiotics, childhood studies, queer theory and performance studies, Gemma Miller explores how a close analysis of Shakespeare's child characters, both in the text and in performance, can reveal often uncomfortable truths about contemporary ideas of childhood, as well as offer fresh insights into the plays. Among the works and productions analysed are stage productions of Richard III by Sean Holmes and Thomas Ostermeier; Jamie Lloyd's and Michael Boyd's stage productions of Macbeth and the films of Roman Polanski and Justin Kurzel; Deborah Warner's stage production of Titus Andronicus and filmed adaptations by Jane Howell and Julie Taymor; and stage productions of The Winter's Tale by Nicholas Hytner, and by Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford, and the ballet adaptation by Christopher Wheeldon.
A new series of bespoke, full-coverage resources developed for the 2015 GCSE English qualifications. Endorsed for the AQA GCSE English Literature specification for first teaching from 2015, this print Student Book provides specific set text coverage for the Shakespeare aspect of the specification. With progress at its heart and designed for classroom and independent use, students will build their skills through a range of active learning approaches, including class, group and individual activities. Incorporating differentiated support, activities will also help students develop whole-text knowledge. An enhanced digital version and free Teacher's Resource are also available.
"This full colour graphic novel presents "The Scottish Play" just as Shakespeare intended: in its original and unabridged format. Ideal for purists, students and readers who will appreciate the unaltered text." "Macbeth is probably the most dramatic of Shakespeare's tragedies and this version will give you a brand new and totally fulfilling view of the sheer genius of Shakespeare's story telling. Featuring stunning artwork, and full of action, atmosphere and intrigue from start to finish, this new treatment of The Bard's tragedy will have you on the edge of your seat."--BOOK JACKET.
Many people are intimidated by poetry, thinking it difficult and high-brow and not for them. But it is still considered an essential part of art and literature. RE:Verse asks; Why and How should we read poetry? This book, aimed at people just starting with literature, takes nothing for granted but opens poetry up to all in a way that makes it both exciting and fresh. Examples are taken from a balanced combination of traditional writers such as Keats, Wordsworth, Blake and Shakespeare, and modern poets such as Seamus Heaney, Jackie Kay and Benjamin Zephaniah. RE:Verse ranges over all periods of literature, and over the many critical theories that attempt to show why poetry matters. It places poems into their historical context, looks at poetry in translation, and discusses why much poetry is so difficult as to seem almost unreadable. It sets the standard for talking about how to read poetry, and what to do when this seems to be impossibly difficult. Ultimately, it is the essential, easy-to-read guide to the subject.
This volume offers a wealth of critical analysis, supported with ample historical and bibliographical information about one of Shakespeare’s most enduringly popular and globally influential plays. Its eighteen new chapters represent a broad spectrum of current scholarly and interpretive approaches, from historicist criticism to performance theory to cultural studies. A substantial section addresses early modern themes, with attention to the protagonists and the discourses of politics, class, gender, the emotions, and the economy, along with discussions of significant ‘minor’ characters and less commonly examined textual passages. Further chapters scrutinize Macbeth’s performance, adaptation and transformation across several media—stage, film, text, and hypertext—in cultural settings ranging from early nineteenth-century England to late twentieth-century China. The editor’s extensive introduction surveys critical, theatrical, and cinematic interpretations from the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, while advancing a synthetic argument to explain the shifting relationship between two conflicting strains in the tragedy’s reception. Written to a level that will be both accessible to advanced undergraduates and, at the same time, useful to post-graduates and specialists in the field, this book will greatly enhance any study of Macbeth. Contributors: Rebecca Lemon, Jonathan Baldo, Rebecca Ann Bach, Julie Barmazel, Abraham Stoll, Lois Feuer, Stephen Deng, Lisa Tomaszewski, Lynne Bruckner, Michael David Fox, James Wells, Laura Engel, Stephen Buhler, Bi-qi Beatrice Lei, Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson, Bruno Lessard, Pamela Mason.