Fascinating study revealing Shakespeare's career-long engagement with the sea and his frequent use of maritime imagery.

Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In Shakespeare’s Ocean, Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship. Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging from The Comedy of Errors to the valedictory The Tempest, Brayton demonstrates Shakespeare’s remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.

Shakespeare was an astute observer of contemporary life, culture, and politics. The emerging practice of territory as a political concept and technology did not elude his attention. In Shakespearean Territories, Stuart Elden reveals just how much Shakespeare’s unique historical position and political understanding can teach us about territory. Shakespeare dramatized a world of technological advances in measuring, navigation, cartography, and surveying, and his plays open up important ways of thinking about strategy, economy, the law, and colonialism, providing critical insight into a significant juncture in history. Shakespeare’s plays explore many territorial themes: from the division of the kingdom in King Lear, to the relations among Denmark, Norway, and Poland in Hamlet, to questions of disputed land and the politics of banishment in Richard II. Elden traces how Shakespeare developed a nuanced understanding of the complicated concept and practice of territory and, more broadly, the political-geographical relations between people, power, and place. A meticulously researched study of over a dozen classic plays, Shakespearean Territories will provide new insights for geographers, political theorists, and Shakespearean scholars alike.

How can you turn an English department into a revenue center? How do you grade students if they are "customers" you must please? How do you keep industry from dictating a university's research agenda? What happens when the life of the mind meets the bottom line? Wry and insightful, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line takes us on a cross-country tour of the most powerful trend in academic life today--the rise of business values and the belief that efficiency, immediate practical usefulness, and marketplace triumph are the best measures of a university's success. With a shrewd eye for the telling example, David Kirp relates stories of marketing incursions into places as diverse as New York University's philosophy department and the University of Virginia's business school, the high-minded University of Chicago and for-profit DeVry University. He describes how universities "brand" themselves for greater appeal in the competition for top students; how academic super-stars are wooed at outsized salaries to boost an institution's visibility and prestige; how taxpayer-supported academic research gets turned into profitable patents and ideas get sold to the highest bidder; and how the liberal arts shrink under the pressure to be self-supporting. Far from doctrinaire, Kirp believes there's a place for the market--but the market must be kept in its place. While skewering Philistinism, he admires the entrepreneurial energy that has invigorated academe's dreary precincts. And finally, he issues a challenge to those who decry the ascent of market values: given the plight of higher education, what is the alternative? Table of Contents: Introduction: The New U Part I: The Higher Education Bazaar 1. This Little Student Went to Market 2. Nietzsche's Niche: The University of Chicago 3. Benjamin Rush's "Brat": Dickinson College 4. Star Wars: New York University Part II: Management 101 5. The Dead Hand of Precedent: New York Law School 6. Kafka Was an Optimist: The University of Southern California and the University of Michigan 7. Mr. Jefferson's "Private" College: Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia Part III: Virtual Worlds 8. Rebel Alliance: The Classics Departments of Sixteen Southern Liberal Arts Colleges 9. The Market in Ideas: Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 10. The British Are Coming-and Going: Open University Part IV: The Smart Money 11. A Good Deal of Collaboration: The University of California, Berkeley 12. The Information Technology Gold Rush: IT Certification Courses in Silicon Valley 13. They're All Business: DeVry University Conclusion: The Corporation of Learning Notes Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: An illuminating view of both good and bad results in a market-driven educational system. --David Siegfried, Booklist Reviews of this book: Kirp has an eye for telling examples, and he captures the turmoil and transformation in higher education in readable style. --Karen W. Arenson, New York Times Reviews of this book: Mr. Kirp is both quite fair and a good reporter; he has a keen eye for the important ways in which bean-counting has transformed universities, making them financially responsible and also more concerned about developing lucrative specialties than preserving the liberal arts and humanities. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is one of the best education books of the year, and anyone interested in higher education will find it to be superior. --Martin Morse Wooster, Washington Times Reviews of this book: There is a place for the market in higher education, Kirp believes, but only if institutions keep the market in its place...Kirp's bottom line is that the bargains universities make in pursuit of money are, inevitably, Faustian. They imperil academic freedom, the commitment to sharing knowledge, the privileging of need and merit rather than the ability to pay, and the conviction that the student/consumer is not always right. --Glenn C. Altschuler, Philadelphia Inquirer Reviews of this book: David Kirp's fine new book, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line, lays out dozens of ways in which the ivory tower has leaned under the gravitational influence of economic pressures and the market. --Carlos Alcal', Sacramento Bee Reviews of this book: The real subject of Kirp's well-researched and amply footnoted book turns out to be more than this volume's subtitle, 'the marketing of higher education.' It is, in fact, the American soul. Where will our nation be if instead of colleges transforming the brightest young people as they come of age, they focus instead on serving their paying customers and chasing the tastes they should be shaping? Where will we be without institutions that value truth more than money and intellectual creativity more than creative accounting? ...Kirp says plainly that the heart of the university is the common good. The more we can all reflect upon that common good--not our pocketbooks or retirement funds, but what is good for the general mass of men and women--the better the world of the American university will be, and the better the nation will be as well. --Peter S. Temes, San Francisco Chronicle Reviews of this book: David Kirp's excellent book Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line provides a remarkable window into the financial challenges of higher education and the crosscurrents that drive institutional decision-making...Kirp explores the continuing battle for the soul of the university: the role of the marketplace in shaping higher education, the tension between revenue generation and the historic mission of the university to advance the public good...This fine book provides a cautionary note to all in higher education. While seeking as many additional revenue streams as possible, it is important that institutions have clarity of mission and values if they are going to be able to make the case for continued public support. --Lewis Collens, Chicago Tribune Reviews of this book: In this delightful book David Kirp...tells the story of markets in U.S. higher education...[It] should be read by anyone who aspires to run a university, faculty or department. --Terence Kealey, Times Higher Education Supplement The monastery is colliding with the market. American colleges and universities are in a fiercely competitive race for dollars and prestige. The result may have less to do with academic excellence than with clever branding and salesmanship. David Kirp offers a compelling account of what's happening to higher education, and what it means for the future. --Robert B. Reich, University Professor, Brandeis University, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Can universities keep their purpose, independence, and public trust when forced to prove themselves cost-effective? In this shrewd and readable book, David Kirp explores what happens when the pursuit of truth becomes entwined with the pursuit of money. Kirp finds bright spots in unexpected places--for instance, the emerging for-profit higher education sector--and he describes how some traditional institutions balance their financial needs with their academic missions. Full of good stories and swift character sketches, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is engrossing for anyone who cares about higher education. --Laura D'Andrea Tyson, former Chair, Council of Economic Advisers David Kirp wryly observes that "maintaining communities of scholars is not a concern of the market." His account of the state of higher education today makes it appallingly clear that the conditions necessary for the flourishing of both scholarship and community are disappearing before our eyes. One would like to think of this as a wake-up call, but the hour may already be too late. --Stanley Fish, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the University of Illinois at Chicago This is, quite simply, the most deeply informed and best written recent book on the dilemma of undergraduate education in the United States. David Kirp is almost alone in stressing what relentless commercialization of higher education does to undergraduates. At the same time, he identifies places where administrators and faculty have managed to make the market work for, not against, real education. If only college and university presidents could be made to read this book! --Stanley N. Katz, Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, Princeton University Once a generation a book brilliantly gives meaning to seemingly disorderly trends in higher education. David Kirp's Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is that book for our time [the early 21st century?]. With passion and eloquence, Kirp describes the decline of higher education as a public good, the loss of university governing authority to constituent groups and external funding sources, the two-edged sword of collaboration with the private sector, and the rise of business values in the academy. This is a must read for all who care about the future of our universities. --Mark G. Yudof, Chancellor, The University of Texas System David Kirp not only has a clear theoretical grasp of the economic forces that have been transforming American universities, he can write about them without putting the reader to sleep, in lively, richly detailed case studies. This is a rare book. --Robert H. Frank, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University David Kirp wanders America's campuses, and he wonders--are markets, management and technology supplanting vision, values and truth? With a large dose of nostalgia and a penchant for academic personalities, he ponders the struggles and synergies of Ivy and Internet, of industry and independence. Wandering and wondering with him, readers will feel the speed of change in contemporary higher education. --Charles M. Vest, President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

While our physical surroundings fashion our identities, we, in turn, fashion the natural elements in which or with which we live. This complex interaction between the human and the non-human already resonated in Shakespeare's plays and poems. As details of the early modern supra- and infra-celestial landscape feature in his works, this dictionary brings to the fore Shakespeare's responsiveness to and acute perception of his 'environment' and it covers the most significant uses of words related to this concept. In doing so, it also examines the epistemological changes that were taking place at the turn of the 17th century in a society which increasingly tried to master nature and its elements. For this reason, the intersections between the natural and the supernatural receive special emphasis. All in all, this dictionary offers a wide variety of resources that takes stock of the 'green criticism' that recently emerged in Shakespeare studies and provides a clear and complete overview of the idea, imagery and language of environment in the canon.

This book explores how recollections and traces of the reign of Richard III survived a century and more to influence the world and work of William Shakespeare. In Richard III, Shakespeare depicts an era that had only recently passed beyond the horizon of living memory. The years between Shakespeare's birth in 1564 and the composition of the play in the early 1590s would have seen the deaths of the last witnesses to Richard's reign. Yet even after the extinction of memory, traces of the Yorkist era abounded in Elizabethan England - traces in the forms of material artefacts and buildings, popular traditions, textual records, and administrative and religious institutions and practices. Other traces had notoriously disappeared, not least the bodies of the princes reputedly murdered in the Tower, and the King's own body, which remained lost until its dramatic rediscovery in the summer of 2012. Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III charts the often complex careers of these pieces of the past over the course of a century framed on one side by the historical reign of Richard III (1483-85) and on the other by Shakespeare's play. Drawing on recent work in fields including archaeology, memory studies, and material biography, this book offers a fresh approach to the cultural history of the Tudor era, as well as a fundamentally new interpretation of the wellsprings and preoccupations of Richard III. The final emphasis is not only on what Shakespeare does with the traces of Richard's reign but also on what those traces do through Shakespeare—the play, in spite of its own pessimistic assumptions about history, has become the medium whereby certain fragments and remains of a long-lost world live on into the present day.

This volume comprises a three-fold object, Book and Ocean and New York City.If this Book were Ocean, how would it feel between your fingers? Wet and slippery, just a bit warmer or colder than the air around it, since the Ocean is our planet's greatest reservoir of heat, a sloshing insulator and incubator girdling our globe. If its pages were New York City, how would they abrade your imagination? Human and teeming, endlessly humming along with that same old tune. Imagine that these three things were one thing. All together: Book and Ocean and New York City. During the long historical pause between the day the last sailing ship docked at South Street and that day in October 2012 when Hurricane Sandy brought the waves back in fury, New York turned its back on the sea. This Book remembers that the City was founded on Ocean, peopled by its currents, grew rich on its traffic. The storm taught what we should never have forgotten: under New York's asphalt lies not beach but Ocean.Oceanic New York salvages the City's salt-water past and present. It takes inspiration from Elizabeth Albert's gorgeous exhibition of historical artifacts and contemporary art, "Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City's Forgotten Waterfront," which was on display at St. John's University in Queens in Autumn 2013. Buoyed up by art, the Book plunges into the urban and oceanic. "Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon," entices our friend Ishmael. "Nothing will content [us] but the extremest limit of the land."CONTRIBUTORS include: Elizabeth Albert, Jamie "Skye" Bianco, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Vanessa Daws, Lowell Duckert, Granville Ganter, Anne Harris, Jonathan Hsy, Alison Kinney, Dean Kritikos, J. Allan Mitchell, Steve Mentz, Nancy Nowacek, Julie Orlemanski, Bailey Robertson, Karl Steel, Matt Zazzarino, and Marina Zurkow.