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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. Edited and introduced by L. A. Beaurline, the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of King John offers the most complete account to date of the play's stage history, with accompanying illustrations to demonstrate its dramatic potential. Although King John fell out of fashion by the end of the nineteenth century, Beaurline shows how its political importance, rich and varied language, and skilful design suggest that it should occupy a prominent position among Shakespeare's historical tragedies. In the Appendix, Beaurline surveys the arguments about the dating of the play and the anonymous Troublesome Reign of King John, and presents new evidence to support the view that Shakespeare's play was written first.

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work is available both individually and as a set, and each contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary printed at the back. The edition, which began with The Tempest and ended with The Sonnets, put into practice the techniques and theories that had evolved under the 'New Bibliography'. Remarkably by today's standards, although it took the best part of half a century to produce, the New Shakespeare involved only a small band of editors besides Dover Wilson himself. As the volumes took shape, many of Dover Wilson's textual methods acquired general acceptance and became an established part of later editorial practice, for example in the Arden and New Cambridge Shakespeares.

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 Measure for Measure Angela Stock has written a new introductory section that takes account of recent scholarly criticism and important contemporary productions on stage and film. The edition retains the text prepared by Brian Gibbons together with his comprehensive introduction, in which he shows how the play's critical reception and stage history varies from one period to the next according to the prevailing social, moral and religious issues of the day. Gibbons explores the thrilling experience of watching the play in performance, with its shocking reversals and surprises, great tragic poetry and exuberant comic prose. An updated reading list completes the edition.

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. This second edition of The Merchant of Venice retains the text and Introduction prepared by M. M. Mahood and features a new introductory section by Charles Edelman. Where Mahood focuses in her Introduction on the expectations of the play's first audience and on our modern experience of seeing and hearing the drama performed, Edelman explores the play's sexual politics. He also foregrounds recent scholarship on the position of Jews in Shakespeare's time and surveys the international scope and diversity of theatrical interpretations of the text in the 1980s and 1990s. He pays particular attention to the ways in which directors and actors tackle the troubling figure of Shylock.

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. In this second edition of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor David Crane emphasises the liveliness of the play in stage terms. He also claims that this citizen comedy was an expression of Shakespeare's fundamental understanding of human life, conveyed centrally in the character of Falstaff. In the process he examines Shakespeare's free and vigorous use of different linguistic worlds. An account of the play's textual history concludes that at the time of its earliest performances Shakespeare's text was being adapted to specific theatrical needs, and as much in the possession of its players as of its author.

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. This second edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream retains R. A. Foakes' text and has been extensively updated by him. In the Introduction to what is widely acknowledged as Shakespeare's most popular comedy, Foakes describes the two main traditions in the play's stage history, one emphasising charm and innocence, the other stressing darker suggestions of violence and sexuality. He shows that both are necessary to a full understanding of the play. For this edition the editor has added a new account of important theatrical productions and scholarly criticism on the play that have appeared in recent years. The reading list has also been revised and updated.

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. This second edition of Much Ado About Nothing retains the text and introduction prepared by F. H. Mares and features a new section by Angela Stock on recent film, stage and critical interpretations of the play. Mares pays special attention in the Introduction to the range of theatrical interpretations that have flourished since the first documented production of the play in the early seventeenth century. In particular, he explores notable performances of the roles of Benedick and Beatrice, from David Garrick to John Gielgud, and Peggy Ashcroft to Judi Dench. The commentary explicates the many sexual jokes in the text that are obscured by the complexity of Elizabethan English.

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. This second edition of Othello retains the text and Introduction prepared by Norman Sanders and features a new section by Scott McMillin on recent scholarship and key performances of the play since the 1980s. Building on the full and well-illustrated stage history compiled by Sanders, McMillin focuses on political, feminist and postcolonial treatments of Othello in various parts of the world and discusses important performances on stage, film and television. Sanders' discussion of the stylistic and racial problems facing modern readers and spectators is complemented by McMillin who explores the influence of new historicism and cultural materialism and the issue of black/white casting of the main characters.

This second edition of Shakespeare's narrative poems contains an introductory section on recent critical interpretations. Fully annotated and introduced, it includes all the poems which can be confidently assigned to Shakespeare, excluding the Sonnets: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim and A Lover's Complaint. An updated reading list completes the edition.

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary.

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary.

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. This second edition of Romeo and Juliet retains the text prepared by G. Blakemore Evans, together with his introduction and detailed textual notes. A thorough stage history features illustrations and photographs of notable performances from the eighteenth century onwards while a lucid commentary alerts the reader to the difficulties of language, thought and staging. For this second edition, Thomas Moisan has added a new introductory section which focuses on recent scholarly criticism and contemporary productions of the play. The reading list has also been revised and updated.

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 The Sonnets, Stephen Orgel has written a new introduction to Shakespeare's best-loved and most widely read poems. In a series of focused readings he probes the sonnets' sexual and temperamental ambiguity as well as their complex textual history, and explores the difficulties editors face when modernising the spelling, punctuation and layout of the 1609 quarto. Orgel reminds us that the order in which the sonnets were composed bears no relation to the order in which they appear in the quarto and he warns against reading them biographically. This edition retains the text prepared by G. Blakemore Evans, together with his notes and commentary.

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. This is the third New Cambridge edition of The Taming of the Shrew, one of Shakespeare's most popular yet controversial plays. Ann Thompson considers its reception in the light of the hostility and embarrassment that the play often arouses, taking account of both scholarly defences and modern feminist criticism. For this version the editor pays lively attention to the problematic nature of debates about the play and its reception in the twenty-first century. She discusses recent editions and textual, performance and critical studies.

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 The Tempest, David Lindley has thoroughly revised the Introduction to take account of the latest developments in criticism and performance. He has also added a completely new section on casting in recent productions of the play. The complex questions this new section raises about colonisation, racial and gender stereotypes and the nature of theatrical experience are explored throughout the introduction. Careful attention is paid to dramatic form, stagecraft, and the use of music and spectacle in The Tempest, a play that is widely regarded as one of Shakespeare's most elusive and suggestive. A revised and updated reading list completes the edition.

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work is available both individually and as a set, and each contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary printed at the back. The edition, which began with The Tempest and ended with The Sonnets, put into practice the techniques and theories that had evolved under the 'New Bibliography'. Remarkably by today's standards, although it took the best part of half a century to produce, the New Shakespeare involved only a small band of editors besides Dover Wilson himself. As the volumes took shape, many of Dover Wilson's textual methods acquired general acceptance and became an established part of later editorial practice, for example in the Arden and New Cambridge Shakespeares.

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.

Troilus and Cressida, long considered one of Shakespeare's most problematic plays, is both difficult and fascinating. Largely neglected during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it has recently proved popular and rewarding on the stage as well as in the study. This edition questions certain received ideas about the play's text, especially the relationship between quarto and folio and offers several new readings of old problems. Dawson's textual choices are often surprising but at the same time carefully grounded. He views the play from a performance perspective - both in the commentary as well as in the detailed section on stage history in the introduction. The introduction also covers the cultural context in which the play was written, probes the controversy about its early performance and provides extensive analysis of character, language, genre and contemporary significance.

For four centuries Twelfth Night has inspired theatre directors and performers. Surveying a dazzling range of Twelfth Night productions - including many significant productions which have not received due critical attention previously - Schafer provides the reader with an indispensable stage history of this popular play, from its first performance to today.

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. In this second edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Kurt Schlueter approaches Shakespeare's early comedy as a parody of two types of Renaissance educational fiction: the love-quest story and the test-of-friendship story, which in combination show high-flown human ideals as incompatible with each other and with human nature. Since the first known production at David Garrick's Drury Lane Theatre, the play has tempted major directors and actors, though changing conceptions of the play often fail to recognise its subversive impetus. This updated edition includes a new introductory section by Lucy Munro on recent stage and critical interpretations, bringing the thoroughly researched, illustrated performance history up to date.

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 and an extensive introduction. The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's most varied, theatrically self-conscious, and emotionally wide-ranging plays. Much of the play's copiousness inheres in its generic intermingling of tragedy, comedy, romance, pastoral, and the history play. In addition to dates and sources, the introduction attends to iterative patterns, the nature and cause of Leontes' jealousy, the staging and meaning of the bear episode, and the thematic and structural implications of the figure of Time. Special attention is paid to the ending and its tempered happiness. Performance history is integrated throughout the introduction and commentary. Appendices include the theatrical practice of doubling.

George Charles Moore Smith (1858-1940) was a renowned literary scholar who graduated from St John's College, Cambridge, with a first-class degree in the classics in 1881. In 1896 he was made professor of English language and literature at Firth College, Sheffield, and he played a key role in building up the social and academic position of the institution after it became the University of Sheffield in 1905. College Plays Performed in the University of Cambridge (1923) includes a chronological table of the Latin plays performed by scholars at the university in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study also contains Moore Smith's 48-page introduction along with an appendix of actor lists. The introduction provides useful context to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary and theatrical culture at the University of Cambridge, discussing both the 'outlines of [the plays] histories' and the 'manner of [their] production'.

In 1911, the New York Times alerted its readers to the forthcoming 'authoritative' biography of Ruskin with the words 'out of a life's devotion to Ruskin and the Herculean task of editing the definitive Ruskin, Mr E. T. Cook is to give us a definitive Ruskin biography also. It will have the authority of a brilliant Oxford scholar, combined with the charm and lightness of a style which makes Mr Cook one of the first of English journalists'. Cook had been given complete access to Ruskin's diaries, notebooks and letters by his literary executors, and Ruskin's family and friends co-operated fully with him. His depth of knowledge of, and sympathy for, his subject make Cook's biography a vital tool for anyone wishing to understand Ruskin's extraordinary achievements in so many fields. Volume 1 covers the period to 1860, the year in which the final volume of Modern Painters was published.

In 1911, the New York Times alerted its readers to the forthcoming 'authoritative' biography of Ruskin with the words 'out of a life's devotion to Ruskin and the Herculean task of editing the definitive Ruskin, Mr E. T. Cook is to give us a definitive Ruskin biography also. It will have the authority of a brilliant Oxford scholar, combined with the charm and lightness of a style which makes Mr Cook one of the first of English journalists'. Cook had been given complete access to Ruskin's diaries, notebooks and letters by his literary executors, and Ruskin's family and friends co-operated fully with him. His depth of knowledge of, and sympathy for, his subject make Cook's biography a vital tool for anyone wishing to understand Ruskin's extraordinary achievements in so many fields. Volume 2 covers the period from 1860 to Ruskin's death in 1900, and includes an index to both volumes.

Hausa is an African language originating in Niger and northern Nigeria and spoken widely in West and Central Africa as a trading language. This anthology of Hausa texts (mainly Islamic religious verse and historical narratives) was the first publication supported by the short-lived Hausa Association, formed in 1891 to promote the study of the Hausa language and people. Under its aegis the Reverend C. H. Robinson went on to produce a Hausa Grammar in 1897 and a Dictionary in 1899, making great advances in Western knowledge of the language, despite the fact that some in the field criticised him for his relatively short exposure to Hausa-speaking countries. With facsimile reproductions of the manuscripts at actual size, the texts collected in this book were the first published specimens of Hausa writing. Each text is transcribed into in roman script and an English translation is given on facing pages.

One of the few records of German heroic poetry, Widsith was found in the Exeter Book, a manuscript of Old English poetry compiled in the late tenth century. The tale, in which the wandering poet and narrator Widsith recounts his travels across northern Europe, is often seen as a catalogue of tribes, people and heroes who existed between the third and fifth centuries. Yet it is also, in Raymond Wilson Chambers' words, a rare and valuable 'record of lost heroic song'. Originally published in 1912, Chambers' study provides an introduction to the background of the German heroic tradition, as well as detailed analyses of specific aspects of Widsith, such as the metre, geography, and critical reception of the poem. This scholarly edition also includes an annotated version of the poem, and maps, as well as an appendix which will be valuable to students and scholars of Old English literature.

In his autobiography, Goethe half-apologetically admits the youthful enthusiasm he experienced for alchemical and mystical readings: Georg von Welling's obscure Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum and the anonymously published Aurea Catena Homeri, as well as works by Paracelsus, Basilis Valentinus and van Helmont. Originally published in 1952, this study shows how the symbols and concepts of alchemy played a key role in the genesis of Goethe's later works, both scientific and literary. Author of, among other books on German literature, Goethe: A Critical Introduction (1967) and An Introduction to German Poetry (1965), Ronald D. Gray details Goethe's alchemical readings, and shows how these influences were processed and transformed into a unique blend of scientific and poetic accounts of reality. Unprecedented in its approach, this study will be of interest to readers of German literature, as well as to anyone interested in the history and evolution of mysticism.

Originally delivered in November 1915 as a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge, this close textual analysis of Shakespeare overturned the conventional methods of Shakespearean bibliography. In this careful study, Pollard, a bibliographer and literary scholar, called into question the long-held assumption that the early Quartos were of little bibliographical value because of the errors, mis-spellings and mis-lineations. By emphasizing the efforts made to impede printing piracy in early modern England, Pollard argued that the Quartos are much closer to Shakespeare's manuscripts than previous scholarship had allowed. Pollard, along with J. Dover Wilson, W. W. Greg and R. B. McKerrow, was instrumental in establishing the theoretical framework of New Bibliography, and on its publication the book was greeted with what is described in the introduction as 'friendly controversy'. First published in 1915, the book was revised for republication in 1920. This reissue is of the 1967 reprint.

First published in 1923, this book consists of a series of papers written by Pollard, W. W. Greg, E. Maunde Thompson, J. Dover Wilson, and R. W. Chambers, all advocates of the then newly-established New Bibliography. The book was assembled with the intention of strengthening the argument that three pages of Sir Thomas More in the Harleian Manuscript at the British Museum were written in Shakespeare's own hand. The well-established scholars examine the case from several different angles, considering the handwriting in comparison to the known versions of Shakespeare's signature, the bibliographical links between these three pages and the 'good' quartos, and the content of the pages in relation to political ideas expressed elsewhere in Shakespeare. The volume also includes plates of Shakespeare's signatures, analysis of individual letter shapes and parts of the manuscript, and a special transcript of the pages in question.

Matthew Prior (1664-1721) was a minor poet and diplomat under King William III and subsequently Queen Anne. As an envoy to the Netherlands and France and negotiator of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 he had a ringside seat at the European power struggles of his time, while at the same time forging a literary career by publishing poetry and angling for the post of Poet Laureate. Prior's surviving correspondence to his patrons and paymasters is a uniquely witty record of diplomatic life. The first full-length biography of Prior, this book was first published in 1921. Its author, Leopold George Wickham Legg, was an editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. The appendixes include detailed information about Prior's family background and transcriptions of some of his surviving letters and a diary from 1712.