Titus Andronicus

by William Shakespeare, Alan Hughes (Editor), Sue Hall-Smith (Contribution by)

Overview

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. For this second edition of Titus Andronicus Sue Hall-Smith has written a new section on recent scholarship and important contemporary performances of the play. The edition retains the text prepared by Alan Hughes, based on the first quarto and supplemented by crucial additions and stage directions from the Folio. In the introduction, Hughes contradicts the historically popular view that Titus Andronicus is a poor play of dubious authorship. Joining the growing ranks of critics who take the play seriously, Hughes applauds its thematic unity and grim humour, and demonstrates that it is the work of a brilliant stage craftsman, confident in his mastery of space, movement and verse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521857086
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2006
Series:	The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.22(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England’s Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children—an older daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died in childhood. The bulk of Shakespeare’s working life was spent in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright and poet, but also as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.

Barbara A. Mowat is Director of Research emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Consulting Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and author of The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances and of essays on Shakespeare’s plays and their editing.

Paul Werstine is Professor of English at the Graduate School and at King’s University College at Western University. He is a general editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare and author of Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare and of many papers and articles on the printing and editing of Shakespeare’s plays.

Date of Death:

2018

Place of Birth:

Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom

Place of Death:

Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Preface; List of abbreviations and conventions; Introduction: Date; Sources; Authorship; Early stage history; The Longleat manuscript; From the Restoration to the nineteenth century; Twentieth-century performance and criticism; Recent stage, film and critical interpretations by Sue Hall-Smith; Note on the text; List of characters; The Play; Textual analysis; Appendix 1. Titus Andronicus at the Rose; Appendix 2. Performance by a small company; Reading list.

Editorial Reviews

Review of the first edition: 'The great strength of Hughes's edition is its attention to the theatrical aspects of the play … his discussion of the play in performance is illuminating.' Studies in English Literature

From the Publisher