A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume I

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 tragedies contains original essays on every tragedy from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus as well as thirteen additional essays on such topics as Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, Shakespeare's tragedies on film, Shakespeare's tragedies of love, Hamlet in performance, and tragic emotion in Shakespeare.

Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction 1

1 “A rarity most beloved”: Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy 4
David Scott Kastan

2 The Tragedies of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries 23
Martin Coyle

3 Minds in Company: Shakespearean Tragic Emotions 47
Katherine Rowe

4 The Divided Tragic Hero 73
Catherine Belsey

5 Disjointed Times and Half-Remembered Truths in Shakespearean Traged 95
Philippa Berry

6 Reading Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra in Early Modern England 108
Sasha Roberts

7 Hamlet Productions Starring Beale, Hawke, and Darling From the Perspective of Performance History 134
Bernice W. Kliman

8 Text and Tragedy l58
Graham Holderness

9 Shakespearean Tragedy and Religious Identity 178
Richard C. McCoy

10 Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedies 199
Gordon Braden

11 Tragedy and Geography 219
Jerry Brotton

12 Classic Film Versions of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: A Mirror for the Times 241
Kenneth S. Rothwell

13 Contemporary Film Versions of the Tragedies 262
Mark Thornton Burnett

14 Titus Andronicus: A Time for Race and Revenge 284
Ian Smith

15 “There is no world without Verona walls”: The City in Romeo and Juliet 303
Naomi Conn Liebler

16 “He that thou knowest thine”: Friendship and Service in Hamlet 319
Michael Neill

17 Julius Caesar 339
Rebecca W. Bushnell

18 Othello and the Problem of Blackness 357
Kim F. Hall

19 King Lear 375
Kiernan Ryan

20 Macbeth, the Present, and the Past 393
Kathleen McLuskie

21 The Politics of Empathy in Antony and Cleopatra: A View from Below 411
Jyotsna G. Singh

22 Timon of Athens: The Dialectic of Usury, Nihilism, and Art 430
Hugh Grady

23 Coriolanus and the Politics of Theatrical Pleasure 452
Cynthia Marshall

Index 473

"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

"Those who are intimidated by the publishers' grandiose claim that the set would constitute 'a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century' will breathe a sigh of relief to discover that the essays are not only readable, they are informative and stimulating. Essential."
Choice

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.

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

Complementing David Scott Kastan's A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), which focused on Shakespeare as an author in his historical context, these volumes examine each of his plays and major poems using all the resources of contemporary criticism from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analyses.

Scholars from all over the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States - have joined in the writing of new essays addressing virtually the whole of Shakespeare's canon from a rich variety of critical perspectives. A mixture of younger and more established scholars, their work reflects some of the most interesting research currently being conducted in Shakespeare studies.

Arguing for the persistence and utility of genre as a rubric for teaching and writing about Shakespeare's works, the editors have organized the four volumes in relation to generic categories: namely, the tragedies, the histories, the comedies, and the poems, problem comedies and late plays. Each volume thus 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.

This ambitious project offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twentieth-first century.

This companion to Shakespeare's tragedies contains original essays on every tragedy from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus as well as thirteen additional essays on such topics as Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, Shakespeare's tragedies on film, Shakespeare's tragedies of love, Hamlet in performance, and tragic emotion in Shakespeare.