This book provides new insights into the theatrical and philosophical foundations of Shakespeare's history plays through a dialogue with the theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricoeur. Widely regarded to be anti-historical and nihilistic, Derrida and Foucault are shown to hold as responsible an attitude toward politics, truth, and art as Ricoeur. In the author's close critique of the ten plays, the sometimes conflicting views of these theorists reveal Shakespeare's developing historical understanding. Rather than promulgating a single historical perspective, Shakespeare's «historiography» plays afford pluralistic views of myth, politics, gender, sexuality, intersubjectivity, and religion because of their profound theatricality. Shakespeare's «detour» into history and culture thus joins the skeptical dimension of critical hermeneutics.

This volume, with a foreword by Dennis Kennedy, addresses a range of attitudes to Shakespeare's English history plays in Britain and abroad from the early seventeenth century to the present day. It concentrates on the play texts as well as productions, translations and adaptations of them. The essays explore the multiple points of intersection between the English history they recount and the experience of British and other national cultures, establishing the plays as genres not only relevant to the political and cultural history of Britain but also to the history of nearly every nation worldwide. The plays have had a rich international reception tradition but critics and theatre historians abroad, those practising 'foreign' Shakespeare, have tended to ignore these plays in favour of the comedies and tragedies. By presenting the British and foreign Shakespeare traditions side by side, this volume seeks to promote a more finely integrated world Shakespeare.

Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of William Shakespeare.

This volume takes a deep dive into the philosophical hermeneutics of Shakespearean tradition, providing insight into the foundations, theories, and methodologies of hermeneutics in Shakespeare. Central to this research, this volume investigates fundamental questions including: what is philosophical hermeneutics, why philosophical hermeneutics, what do literary and cultural hermeneutics do, and in what ways can literary and cultural hermeneutics benefit the interpretation of Shakespearean plays? Hermeneutic Shakespeare guides the reader through two main discussions. Beginning with the understanding of "Philosophical Hermeneutics", and the general principles of literary and cultural hermeneutics, the volume includes philosophers such as Friedrich Ast, Daniel Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Dilthey, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and more recently, Steven Connor. Part Two of this volume applies universal principles of philosophical hermeneutics to explicate the historical, philosophical, acquired, and applied literary interpretations through the critical practices of Shakespeare’s plays or their adaptations, including Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and The Comedy of Errors. Aimed at scholars and students alike, this volume aims to contribute to contemporary understanding of Shakespeare and literature hermeneutics. Chapters 2, 5, and 6 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.

This Guide steers students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare’s history plays, enhancing their enjoyment and broadening their critical repertoire. Guides students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare’s history plays. Covers both significant early views and recent critical interventions. Substantial editorial material links the articles and places them in context. Annotated suggestions for further reading allow students to investigate further.

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare's histories contains original essays on every history play from Henry VI to Henry V as well as fourteen additional articles on such topics as censorship in Shakespeare's histories, the relation of Shakespeare's plays to other dramatic histories of the period, Shakespeare's histories on film, the homoerotics of Shakespeare's history plays, and nation formation in Shakespeare's histories.