The Island Princess


Book Description

The Island Princess is a tragicomic romance set in the Spice Islands of Indonesia. Fletcher rewrites Shakespeare's The Tempest through the encounter of Islam and Christianity and the fierce European competition for wealth at the farthest reaches of empire. The play also stages the degeneration of religious tolerance into fanaticism. This ground-breaking edition explores the play in its gendered, political, social and religious contexts whilst also finding its resonances for a twenty-first century audience. The critical introduction and on-page commentary notes create an ideal teaching text giving a comprehensive account of the play from both literary and performance perspectives.










John Fletcher's Rome


Book Description

John Fletcher’s Rome is the first book to explore John Fletcher’s engagement with classical antiquity. Like Shakespeare and Jonson, Fletcher wrote, alone or in collaboration, a number of Roman plays: Bonduca, Valentinian, The False One and The Prophetess. Unlike Shakespeare’s or Jonson’s, however, Fletcher’s Roman plays have seldom been the subject of critical discussion. Domenico Lovascio’s ground-breaking study examines these plays as a group for the first time, thus identifying disorientation as the unifying principle of Fletcher’s portrayal of imperial Rome. John Fletcher’s Rome argues that Fletcher’s dramatization of ancient Rome exudes a sense of detachment and scepticism as to the authority of Roman models resulting from his irreverent approach to the classics. The book sheds new light on Fletcher’s intellectual life, his vision of history, and the interconnections between these plays and the rest of his canon.




The Shakespeare Circle


Book Description

This collection tells the life stories of the people whom we know Shakespeare encountered, shedding new light on Shakespeare's life and times.










Moving Shakespeare Indoors


Book Description

Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, played at the Globe, and also in an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. The year 2014 witnessed the opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, based on seventeenth-century designs of an indoor London theatre and built within the precincts of the current Globe on Bankside. This volume, edited by Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, asks what prompted the move to indoor theatres, and considers the effects that more intimate staging, lighting and music had on performance and repertory. It discusses what knowledge is required when attempting to build an archetype of such a theatre, and looks at the effects of the theatre on audience behaviour and reception. Exploring the ways in which indoor theatre shaped the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods, this book will find a substantial readership among scholars of Shakespeare and Jacobean theatre history.







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