A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume II: The Histories / Edition 1

by Richard Dutton, Jean E. Howard

Overview

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.

• Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
• Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis.
• Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems.
• Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre.
• Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century.

This companion to Shakespeare's histories contains original essays on every history play from Henry VI to Henry V as well as fourteen additional articles on such topics as censorship in Shakespeare's histories, the relation of Shakespeare's plays to other dramatic histories of the period, Shakespeare's histories on film, the homoerotics of Shakespeare's history plays, and nation formation in Shakespeare's histories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781405136068
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	08/26/2005
Series:	Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture , #83
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.78(w) x 9.70(h) x 1.42(d)

About the Author

Jean E. Howard is William E. Ransford Professor of English at Columbia University and a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is an editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and author of, among other works The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994) and, with Phyllis Rackin, of Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (1997).

Richard Dutton is currently Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is author of Mastering the Revels: the Regulation and Censorship of Renaissance Drama(1991) and Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England:Buggeswords(2000), and editor of the Palgrave Literary Lives series.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors.

Introduction.

1. The Writing of History in Shakespeare’s England (Ivo Kamps).

2. Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists of History (Richard Helgerson).

3. Censorship and the Problems with History in Shakespeare’s England (Cyndia Susan Clegg).

4. Nation Formation and the English History Plays (Patricia A. Cahill).

5. The Irish Text and Subtext of Shakespeare’s English Histories (Willy Maley).

6. Theories of Kingship in Shakespeare’s England (William C. Carroll).

7. "To beguile the time, look like the time": Contemporary Film Versions of Shakespeare’s Histories (Peter J. Smith).

8. The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre (Paulina Kewes).

9. Damned Commotion: Riot and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s Histories (James Holstun).

10. Manliness Before Individualism: Masculinity, Effeminacy, and Homoerotics in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Rebecca Ann Bach).

11. French Marriages and the Protestant Nation in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Linda Gregerson).

12. The First Tetralogy in Performance (Ric Knowles).

13. The Second Tetralogy: Performance as Interpretation (Lois Potter).

14. 1 Henry VI (David Bevington).

15. Suffolk and the Pirates: Disordered Relations in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI (Thomas Cartelli).

16. Vexed Relations: Family, State, and the Uses of Women in 3 Henry VI (Kathryn Schwarz).

17. "The power of hope?" An Early Modern Reader of Richard III (James Siemon).

18. King John (Virginia Mason Vaughan).

19. The King’s Melting Body: Richard II (Lisa Hopkins).

20. 1 Henry IV (James Knowles).

21. Henry IV, Part 2: A Critical History (Jonathan Crewe).

22. Henry V (Andrew Hadfield).

Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Whether for the student wishing for an overview of critical approaches or anxious to fill in the gaps in his Shakespearean culture, for those wishing to catch up on the diversity of literary theories, or for the inquisitive browser, this set of volumes assuredly charts the map of current criticism." Cahiers Elisabethains

Editorial Reviews

"Whether for the student wishing for an overview of critical approaches or anxious to fill in the gaps in his Shakespearean culture, for those wishing to catch up on the diversity of literary theories, or for the inquisitive browser, this set of volumes assuredly charts the map of current criticism." Cahiers Elisabethains

From the Publisher

Compiled by Dutton (English, Ohio State Univ.; editor, "Palgrave Literary Lives" series) and Howard (English, Columbia Univ.; editor, The Norton Shakespeare), this four-volume set offers a comprehensive view of current Shakespeare criticism, concentrating on ongoing critical research on Shakespeare's works. It is meant to complement the publisher's Companion to Shakespeare, which focuses on Shakespeare as an author. The essays are organized generically and represent a diversity of approaches, including historicist, Derridaen, Marxist, performance-oriented, feminist, and textual/editorial. A variety of organizing rubrics such as race, class, gender, reader response, political theory, and religion are also presented. The resulting multifaceted work provides a stimulating matrix for future critical research. Vol. 1: The Tragedies contains an essay on each tragedy and 13 additional essays on topics such as the Roman tragedies, film versions of the tragedies, and the tragic hero. Vol. 2: The Histories contains an essay on each history play and 14 additional essays on topics such as riot and rebellion, censorship in the histories, and Shakespeare's portrayal of men and women. Vol. 3: The Comedies contains one essay each on most of the comedies and 12 essays discussing subjects such as Shakespeare's use of English stage comedy traditions, social relationships in comic households, and cross-dressing. Vol. 4: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays contains essays on Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Sonnets, and another 11 essays on topics such as place and space in the late plays, generic classification of the late plays, and scatology and satire. Each essay is enriched with notes and ample bibliographies, and indexes are provided for each volume. The intended audience of scholars and graduate students will be well served by this work.-Shana C. Fair, Ohio Univ., Zanesville Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal