Shakespeare's characters are thought to be his greatest achievement--imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality, while his plots are said to be second-hand and careless of details of time and place. This view has survived the assaults of various literary theories and has even, surprisingly, been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare's characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. lCircumstantial Shakespeare explodes these venerable critical commonplaces. Drawing on sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (of Time, Place, and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images. 'Circumstances'--which we now think of as incalculable contingencies--were originally topics of forensic inquiry into human intention or passion. In drawing on the Roman forensic tradition of circumstantial proof, Shakespeare did not ignore time and place. His brilliant innovation was to use the topics of circumstance to imply offstage actions, times and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. His plays thus create both their own vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them. lCircumstantial Shakespeare offers new readings of lRomeo and Juliet, King Lear, Lucrece, Two Gentlemen of Verona and lMacbeth, as well as new interpretations of Sackville and Norton's lGorboduc and Beaumont and Fletcher's lThe Maid's Tragedy. It engages with eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism, contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, Roman forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of modern probability, psychoanalytic criticism and sixteenth-century constitutional thought.

Being and Having in Shakespeare is a revised and expanded version of the 2010 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures exploring the politics of authority and ownership in Shakespeare's plays.

Focusing on a period (c.1577-1594) that is often neglected in Elizabethan theater histories, this study considers Shakespeare's involvement with the various London acting companies before his membership in the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594. Locating Shakespeare in the confusing records of the early London theater scene has long been one of the many unresolved problems in Shakespeare studies and is a key issue in theatre history, Shakespeare biography, and historiography. The aim in this book is to explain, analyze, and assess the competing claims about Shakespeare's pre-1594 acting company affiliations. Schoone-Jongen does not demonstrate that one particular claim is correct but provides a possible framework for Shakespeare's activities in the 1570s and 1580s, an overview of both London and provincial playing, and then offers a detailed analysis of the historical plausibility and probability of the warring claims made by biographers, ranging from the earliest sixteenth-century references to contemporary arguments. Full chapters are devoted to four specific acting companies, their activities, and a summary and critique of the arguments for Shakespeare's involvement in them (The Queen's Men, Strange's Men, Pembroke's Men, and Sussex's Men), a further chapter is dedicated to the proposition Shakespeare's first theatrical involvement was in a recusant Lancashire household, and a final chapter focuses on arguments for Shakespeare's membership in a half dozen other companies (most prominently Leicester's Men). Shakespeare's Companies simultaneously opens up twenty years of theatrical activity to inquiry and investigation while providing a critique of Shakespearean biographers and their historical methodologies.

Geoffrey Bullough’s The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957-75) established a vocabulary and a method for linking Shakespeare’s plays with a series of texts on which they were thought to be based. Shakespeare’s Resources revisits and interrogates the methodology that has prevailed since then and proposes a number of radical departures from Bullough’s model. The tacitly accepted linear model of ‘source’ and ‘influence’ that critics and scholars have wrestled with is here reconceptualised as a dynamic process in which texts interact and generate meanings that domesticated versions of intertextuality do not adequately account for. The investigation uncovers questions of exactly how Shakespeare ‘read’, what he read, the practical conditions in which narratives were encountered, and how he re-deployed earlier versions that he had used in his later work.

Perry reveals Shakespeare derived modes of tragic characterization, previously seen as presciently modern, via engagement with Rome and Senecan tragedy.

M. Guizot, in his History of England, states the Shakespearean problem in a few words, when he says: "Let us finally mention the great comedian, the great tragedian, the great philosopher, the great poet, who was in his lifetime butcher's apprentice, poacher, actor, theatrical manager, and whose name is William Shakespeare. In twenty years, amid the duties of his profession, the care of mounting his pieces, of instructing his actors, he composed the thirty-two tragedies and comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an incomparable knowledge of human nature, and an unequaled power of imagination, terrible and comic by turns, profound and delicate, homely and touching, responding to every emotion of the soul, divining all that was beyond the range of his experience and for ever remaining the treasure of the age—all this being accomplished, Shakespeare left the theater and the busy world, at the age of forty-five, to return to Stratford-on-Avon, where lived peacefully in the most modest retirement, writing nothing and never returning to the stage—ignored and unknown if his works had not forever marked out his place in the world—a strange example of an imagination so powerful, suddenly ceasing to produce, and closing, once for all, the door to the efforts of genius."