Product Description: Uniquely, this guide analyses the play's critical and performance history and recent criticism, as well as including five essays offering radically new paths for contemporary interpretation.The subject matter of these essays is rich and diverse, ranging across the play's philosophical identification of sexual love with self-realization, the hermeneutic implications of an editor's textual choices, the minor characters of the play in relation to Renaissance performance traditions, Romeo and Juliet in opera and ballet, and the play's Italian sources and afterlives...read more

Product Description: Turning to the potent idea of political theology to recover the strange mix of political and religious thinking during the Renaissance, this bracing study reveals in the works of Shakespeare and his sources the figure of the citizen-saint, who represents at once divine messenger and civil servant, both norm and exception...read more

Product Description: This work assembles a composite picture of Shakespeare's afterlives in media and cultural imagination. Each essay in this collection provides new insight about how our understanding of Shakespeare has changed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001...read more

Product Description: What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? What are their rights? To whom are they obligated? Such questions—bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life—animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has been obscured by historicist approaches to literature...read more

Product Description: This book examines the ways in which the literary genre of hagiography and the hermeneutical paradigm of Biblical typology together entered into the construction of “the Renaissance” as a canon and period. It is not about saints’ lives in themselves, as either literary or historical phenomena, but instead addresses the structural effects of hagiography in the secular literature of the Renaissance...read more

Product Description: Exploring the dialogue between psychoanalytic and literary discourses, the authors examine the models of plot, character, and ways of reading which each of these discourses has developed in interpreting Shakespeare. Since Freud's writings on Oedipus and Hamlet, Shakespearean tragedy has been paradigmatic for psychoanalytic theory and criticism...read more