Product Description: Unlike the contrast between the sacred and the taboo, the opposition of "comic" and "tragic" is not a way of categorizing experience that we find in cultures all over the world or even at different periods in Western civilization...read more

Product Description: In Phenomenal Shakespeare, leading Shakespeare scholar Bruce R. Smith presents an original account for the ways in which Shakespeare’s poems and plays continue to resonate with audiences, readers and scholars because of their engagement with the whole body, not just the reading mind...read more

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Product Description: This edition of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night reprints the Bevington edition of the play along with seven sets of thematically arranged primary documents and illustrations designed to facilitate many different approaches to Shakespeare's play and the early modern culture out of which the play emerges...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Richard III, Romeo, Prince Harry, Malvolio, Hamlet, Lear, Antony, Coriolanus, Prospero: Shakespeare's roster of male protagonists is astonishingly various. Shakespeare and Masculinity juxtaposes these memorable characters with the medical beliefs, ethical ideals, and social realities that shaped masculine identity for Shakespeare, as for his fellow actors and their audiences. At the same time it explores the process of male self-definition against various sorts of "others"--women, foreigners, social inferiors, sodomites. Reflecting the truth that the plays' principal existence is in the live theater, the book finishes with a transhistorical, multicultural survey of how masculinity has been performed in productions of Shakespeare's plays--in France, Germany, Hungary, Iraq, Japan, and elsewhere--and with a challenge to imagine masculinity in fuller and more satisfying ways. (view table of contents)

Product Description: We know how a Shakespeare play sounds when performed today, but what would listeners have heard within the wooden "O" of the Globe Theater in 1599? What sounds would have filled the air in early modern England, and what would these sounds have meant to people in that largely oral culture?In this ear-opening journey into the sound-worlds of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Bruce R...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In the most comprehensive study yet of homosexuality in the English Renaissance, Bruce R. Smith examines and rejects the assessments of homosexual acts in moral philosophy, laws, and medical books in favor of a poetics of homosexual desire...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Being a cultural hero isn't easy. From his own day to ours, William Shakespeare has had his fair share of mockers, debunkers, and deconstructors, not to mention fans who don't equate admiration with reverence. All of them put in an appearance and get their say in this lively album of images and texts from the Folger collection...read more