Author : Paul Collins
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 47,45 MB
Release : 2009-07-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1596911956
A history of the Bard's competitively pursued First Folio traces the author's travels from the site of a Sotheby auction to regions in Asia, throughout which he investigated the roles played by those who have sought and owned the Folios.
Author : Emma Smith
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 44,43 MB
Release : 2016-03-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0191069280
This is a biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its first purchaser in London in December 1623, and goes on to explore the ways people have interacted with this iconic book over the four hundred years of its history. Throughout the stress is on what we can learn from individual copies now spread around the world about their eventful lives. From ink blots to pet paws, from annotations to wineglass rings, First Folios teem with evidence of its place in different contexts with different priorities. This study offers new ways to understand Shakespeare's reception and the history of the book. Unlike previous scholarly investigations of the First Folio, it is not concerned with the discussions of how the book came into being, the provenance of its texts, or the technicalities of its production. Instead, it reanimates, in narrative style, the histories of this book, paying close attention to the details of individual copies now located around the world - their bindings, marginalia, general condition, sales history, and location - to discuss five major themes: owning, reading, decoding, performing, and perfecting. This is a history of the book that consolidated Shakespeare's posthumous reputation: a reception history and a study of interactions between owners, readers, forgers, collectors, actors, scholars, booksellers, and the book through which we understand and recognise Shakespeare.
Author : Faith D. Acker
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 40,67 MB
Release : 2020-09-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1000190811
For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers’ responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets’ first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers’ interests in Shakespeare’s classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Author : Jean-Christophe Mayer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 32,84 MB
Release : 2018-09-06
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1107138337
This is the first dedicated account of the ways in which Shakespeare's texts were read in the two centuries after they were produced. A close examination of rare, often unpublished material offers a reconsideration of the role of readers in the history of Shakespeare's rise to fame.
Author : Mary Ellen Dakin
Publisher : National Council of Teachers of English (Ncte)
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 12,9 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780814139073
In Reading Shakespeare Film First, Mary Ellen Dakin asserts that we need to read Shakespeare in triplicate--as the stuff of transformative literature, theater, and film. The potential for the mutual reinforcement and transfer of twenty-first-century literacy skills between text and film is too promising for classroom teachers to overlook. Studying Shakespeare in the high school classroom can and sometimes should begin with images and film. In Reading Shakespeare Film First, Mary Ellen Dakin asserts that we need to read Shakespeare in triplicate--as the stuff of transformative literature, theater, and film. The potential for the mutual reinforcement and transfer of twenty-first-century literacy skills between text and film is too promising for classroom teachers to overlook. The heart of this book is a triangle whose three points are literary, theatrical, and cinematic; the chapters map a route around the perimeter of the triangle, guiding teachers and students with carefully researched and classroom-tested strategies for crossing over from Shakespeare's rich and strange early modern English to equally rich and strange modern film and illustrated productions of his plays. Along the way, readers engage in reading and analyzing film stills, movie posters, and book covers; recognizing the three faces of film: literary, theatrical, and cinematic; exploring in depth the theatrical and cinematic elements of Shakespeare and then reconnecting them to the text; reading Shakespeare in full-length films; and transmediating Shakespeare's scripts into theater and film. As the "old" language of Shakespeare is constantly renewed through the "new" language of film, students develop twenty-first-century literacy skills through a marriage of the two.
Author : Jason Scott-Warren
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 28,31 MB
Release : 2019-09-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0812296346
Richard Stonley has all but vanished from history, but to his contemporaries he would have been an enviable figure. A clerk of the Exchequer for more than four decades under Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I, he rose from obscure origins to a life of opulence; his job, a secure bureaucratic post with a guaranteed income, was the kind of which many men dreamed. Vast sums of money passed through his hands, some of which he used to engage in moneylending and land speculation. He also bought books, lots of them, amassing one of the largest libraries in early modern London. In 1597, all of this was brought to a halt when Stonley, aged around seventy-seven, was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison, convicted of embezzling the spectacular sum of £13,000 from the Exchequer. His property was sold off, and an inventory was made of his house on Aldersgate Street. This provides our most detailed guide to his lost library. By chance, we also have three handwritten volumes of accounts, in which he earlier itemized his spending on food, clothing, travel, and books. It is here that we learn that on June 12, 1593, he bought "the Venus & Adhonay per Shakspere"—the earliest known record of a purchase of Shakespeare's first publication. In Shakespeare's First Reader, Jason Scott-Warren sets Stonley's journals and inventories of goods alongside a wealth of archival evidence to put his life and library back together again. He shows how Stonley's books were integral to the material worlds he inhabited and the social networks he formed with communities of merchants, printers, recusants, and spies. Through a combination of book history and biography, Shakespeare's First Reader provides a compelling "bio-bibliography"—the story of how one early modern gentleman lived in and through his library.
Author : Robert S. Miola
Publisher : Oxford Shakespeare Topics
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 28,1 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198711698
Oxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, including some general anthologies relating to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Reading explores Shakespeare's marvelous reshaping of sources into new creations. Beginning with a discussion of how and what Elizabethans read--manuscripts, popular pamphlets, and books--Robert S. Miola examines Shakespeare's use of specific texts such as Holinshed's Chronicles, Plutarch's Lives, and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. As well as reshaping other writers' work, Shakespeare transformed traditions--the inherited expectations, tropes, and strategies about character, action and genre. For example, the tradition of Italian love poetry, especially Petrarch, shapes Romeo and Juliet as well as the sonnets; the Vice figure finds new life in Richard III and Falstaff. Employing a traditional understanding of sources as well as more recent developments in intertextuality, this book traces Shakespeare's reading throughout his career, as it inspires his poetry, histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. Repeated references to the plays in performance enliven and enrich the account.
Author : E. Nesbit
Publisher : Courier Corporation
Page : 82 pages
File Size : 12,55 MB
Release : 2012-03-05
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 0486114007
Twelve of the Bard's most famous plays, delightfully adapted for young readers: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, As You Like It, and eight others.
Author : Leonard Barkan
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 40,39 MB
Release : 2024-04-02
Category :
ISBN : 9781531507312
A gripping, funny, joyful account of how the books you read shape your own life in surprising and profound ways. Bookworms know what scholars of literature are trained to forget: that when they devour a work of literary fiction, whatever else they may be doing, they are reading about themselves. Read Shakespeare, and you become Cleopatra, Hamlet, or Bottom. Or at the very least, you experience the plays as if you are in a small room alone with them, and they are speaking to your life, your sensibility. Drawing on fifty years as a Shakespearean, Leonard Barkan has produced a captivating book that asks us to reconsider what it means to read. Barkan violates the rule of distance he was taught and has always taught his students. He asks: Where does this brilliantly contrived fiction actually touch me? Where is Shakespeare in effect telling the story of my life? King Lear, for Barkan, raises unanswerable questions about what exactly a father does after planting the seed. Mothers from Gertrude to Lady Macbeth are reconsidered in the light of the author's experience as a son of a former flapper. The sonnets and comedies are seen through the eyes of a gay man who nevertheless weeps with joy when all the heterosexual couples are united at the end. A Midsummer Night's Dream is interpreted through the author's joyous experience of performing the role of Bottom and finding his aesthetic faith in the pantheon of antiquity. And the exquisitely poetical history play Richard II intersects with, of all things, Ru Paul's Drag Race. Full of engrossing stories, from family secrets to the world of the theater, and written with humor and genuine excitement about literary experiences worthy of our attention and our love, Reading Shakespeare Reading Me makes Shakespeare's plays come alive in new ways.
Author : Emma Smith
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 36,62 MB
Release : 2023-04-18
Category :
ISBN : 9781851245987
A revised and updated edition of Shakespeare's First Folio that explains the significance of the iconic publication. The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio offers the first comprehensive biography of the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. In November 1623, the book arrived in the bookshop of the London publisher Edward Blount at the Black Bear. Long in the making, Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies--as the First Folio was then known--appeared seven years after Shakespeare's death. Nearly one thousand pages in length, the collection comprised thirty-six plays, half of which had never been previously published. Yet no fanfare surrounded the initial publication of Shakespeare's First Folio--no queue of eager readers, no launch to the top of the best-seller list. Nevertheless, it is hard to overstate the importance of this literary, cultural, and commercial moment. Emma Smith tells the story of the First Folio's origins, locating it within the social and political context of Jacobean London and bringing in the latest scholarship on the seventeenth-century book trade. Generously illustrated in color with key pages from the publication and comparative works, this new edition combines the 2016 discovery of a hitherto unknown edition of the First Folio at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute with the human, artistic, economic and technical stories of the birth of this landmark publication--and the birth of Shakespeare's towering reputation.
