Shakespeare High and Low: Character, Audience, Career

by Jeffrey Knapp

Overview

For many theatergoers and readers, Shakespeare’s lofty reputation as the world’s greatest playwright has turned him into an intimidating, even a forbidding figure. In Shakespeare High and Low, Jeffrey Knapp helps us to understand and enjoy Shakespeare’s plays by restoring Shakespeare’s own sense of them as neither high culture nor low culture, but a potent amalgam of both. Only in recognizing Shakespeare’s determination to connect with every social class in his theater can we begin to grasp how his plays have managed to thrill audiences for so many centuries and across so many cultures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399543705
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2026
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey Knapp is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of numerous awards for both scholarship and teaching, he has written extensively on Shakespeare, in An Empire Nowhere (1992), Shakespeare’s Tribe (2002), Shakespeare Only (2009) and Pleasing Everyone (2017).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Series Editors' Preface
A Note on Pronouns

Introduction: Shakespeare and His Audience
1. Shakespeare’s Society and Theater
2. Shakespeare’s Life on the Stage
3. The Comedy of Errors: Style as Comedy
4. The Comedy of Errors: Identity and the Marketplace
5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Heterosexuality as Perversity
6. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Loving Difference
7. The Merchant of Venice: Money Talks
8. The Merchant of Venice: Turning Less into More
9. As You Like It: Is Anyone Better Than Anyone Else?
10. As You Like It: Acting Like Yourself
11. Richard II: Royalty as Theater
12. Richard II: The King’s Multiplicity
13. 1 Henry IV: Nation and Self Divided
14. 1 Henry IV: Recreating the Prince
15. Hamlet: The Death of Fathers
16. Hamlet: Something Within
17. Hamlet: Hamlet’s Mystique
18. Measure for Measure: Self-Usurpation
19. Measure for Measure: Craft Against Vice
20. Othello: Heterosexuality as Tragedy
21. Othello: Who Is the Real Othello?
22. Othello: Killing for Loving
23. The Winter’s Tale: The One vs. the Many
24. The Winter’s Tale: Bearing Children
25. The Winter’s Tale: The Resurrection of Comedy
26. The Tempest: Playwright as Tyrant
27. The Tempest: Gaining Through Loss

Further Reading
Selected Performances on DVD
Index

Editorial Reviews

Dramatic, energetic, humane, witty, able to appeal to a wide audience without ever compromising intelligence, nuance or sophistication – Jeffrey Knapp's new introduction to Shakespearean drama demonstrates many of the characteristics it cherishes in the plays it analyses. A wonderfully persuasive and accessible introduction to eleven of the best scripts ever written.

Michael Dobson

Witty, learned, and above all humane, Shakespeare High and Low demonstrates that in casting Shakespeare as a paragon of high literary culture, modern readers have diminished his signal achievement: to speak across differences. Knapp introduces a Shakespeare who reveals the precarity and smallness of the certainties by which we live – a reckoning that brings us to laughter as well as tears.

Melissa E. Sanchez