* Contains a fascinating array of manuscript and printed materials documenting not only what people ate but where the food came from, how it was grown, preserved, seasoned, and served, and what people believed about various foods' benefits to their health

* Contains a fascinating array of manuscript and printed materials documenting not only what people ate but where the food came from, how it was grown, preserved, seasoned, and served, and what people believed about various foods' benefits to their health

An annual volume containing essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from around the world. Also includes two review articles and thirteen books reviews.

Shakespeare and Asia brings together innovative scholars from Asia or with Asian connections to explore these matters of East-West and global contexts then and now. The collection ranges from interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays and his relations with other authors like Marlowe and Dickens through Shakespeare and history and ecology to studies of film, opera or scholarship in Japan, Russia, India, Pakistan, Singapore, Taiwan and mainland China. The adaptations of Kozintsev and Kurosawa; Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays; different Shakespearean dramas and how they are interpreted, adapted and represented for the local Pakistani audience; the Peking-opera adaptation of Hamlet ; Féng Xiǎogāng’s The Banquet as an adaptation of Hamlet; the ideology of the film, Shakespeare Wallah. Asian adaptations of Hamlet will be at the heart of this volume. Hamlet is also analyzed in light of Oedipus and the Sphinx. Shakespeare is also considered as a historicist and in terms of what influence he has on Chinese writers and historical television. Lear is Here and Cleopatra and Her Fools, two adapted Shakespearean plays on the contemporary Taiwanese stage, are also discussed. This collection also examines in Shakespeare the patriarchal prerogative and notion of violence; carnival and space in the comedies; the exotic and strange; and ecology. The book is rich, ranging and innovative and will contribute to Shakespeare studies, Shakespeare and media and film, Shakespeare and Asia and global Shakespeare.

Tasting Difference examines early modern discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference that emerged in the wake of contact with foreign peoples and foreign foods from across the globe. Gitanjali Shahani reimagines the contact zone between Western Europe and the global South in culinary terms, emphasizing the gut rather than the gaze in colonial encounters. From household manuals that instructed English housewives how to use newly imported foodstuffs to "the spicèd Indian air" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from the repurposing of Othello as an early modern pitchman for coffee in ballads to the performance of disgust in travel narratives, Shahani shows how early modern genres negotiated the allure and danger of foreign tastes. Turning maxims such as "We are what we eat" on their head, Shahani asks how did we (the colonized subjects) become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat? How did we become alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Shahani takes us back several centuries to the process by which food came to be inscribed with racial character and the racial other came to be marked as edible, showing how the racializing of food began in an era well before chicken tikka masala and Balti cuisine. Bringing into conversation critical paradigms in early modern studies, food studies, and postcolonial studies, she argues that it is in the writing on food and eating that we see among the earliest configurations of racial difference, and it is experienced both as a different taste and as a taste of difference.

Eating and drinking—vital to all human beings—were of central importance to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Culinary Shakespeare, the first collection devoted solely to the study of food and drink in Shakespeare’s plays, reframes questions about cuisine, eating, and meals in early modern drama. As a result, Shakespearean scenes that have long been identified as important and influential by scholars can now be considered in terms of another revealing cultural marker—that of culinary dynamics. Renaissance scholars, as David Goldstein and Amy Tigner point out, have only begun to grapple with the importance of cuisine in literature. An earlier generation of criticism concerned itself principally with cataloguing the foodstuffs in the plays. Recent analyses have operated largely within debates about humoralism and dietary literature, consumption, and interiority, working to historicize food in relation to the early modern body. The essays in Culinary Shakespeare build upon that prior focus on individual bodily experience but also transcend it, emphasizing the aesthetic, communal, and philosophical aspects of food, while also presenting valuable theoretical background. As various essays demonstrate, many of the central issues in Shakespeare studies can be elucidated by turning our attention to the study of food and drink. The societal and religious associations of drink, for example, or the economic implications of ingredients gathered from other lands, have meaningful implications for our understanding of both early modern and contemporary periods—including aspects of community, politics, local and global food production, biopower and the state, addiction, performativity, posthumanism, and the relationship between art and food. Culinary Shakespeare seeks to open new interpretive possibilities and will be of interest to scholars and students of Shakespeare and the early modern period as well as to those in food studies, food history, ecology, gender and domesticity, and critical theory.

William Shakespeare has undergone psychological analyses ever since Freud diagnosed Hamlet with an Oedipus complex. But now, two psychologists propose to turn the tables by telling how Shakespeare himself understood human behavior and the innermost workings of the human mind. Psychology According to Shakespeare: What You Can Learn About Human Nature From Shakespeare's Great Plays, is an interdisciplinary project that bridges psychological science and literature, bringing together for the first time in one volume, the breadth and depth of The Bard’s knowledge of love, jealousy, dreams, betrayal, revenge, and the lust for power and position. Even today, there is no better depiction of a psychopath than Richard III, no more poignant portrayal of dementia than King Lear, nor a more unforgettable illustration of obsessive-compulsive disorder than Lady Macbeth’s attempts to wash away the damned blood spot. What has not been revealed before, however, are the many different forms of mental illness The Bard described in terms that are now identifiable in the modern manual of disorders known as the DSM-5. But, as the book shows, the playwright’s fascination with human nature extended far beyond mental disorders, ranging across the psychological spectrum, from brain anatomy to personality, cognition, emotion, perception, lifespan development, and states of consciousness. To illustrate, we have stories to tell involving astrology, potions, poisons, the four fluids called “humors,” anatomical dissections of freshly hanged criminals, and a mental hospital called Bedlam—all showing how his perspective was grounded in the medicine and culture of his time. Yet, Will Shakespeare’s intellect, curiosity, and temperament allowed him to see other ideas and issues that would become important in psychological science centuries later. Many of these connections between Shakespeare and psychology lie scattered in books, articles, and web pages across the public domain, but they have never been brought together into a single volume. So, here the authors retell of his fashioning the felicitous phrase, nature-nurture for Prospero to utter in frustration with Caliban and of how the nature-nurture dichotomy would become central in psychology’s quest to understand the tension between heredity and environment. But that was still far from all, for they discovered that his work anticipated multiple other psychological tensions. For example, in Measure for Measure, he made audiences puzzle over which exerts the greater influence on human behavior: internal traits or the external situation. And in Hamlet, he explored the equally enigmatic push-pull between reason and emotion in the mind of the dithering prince. Aside from bringing together The Bard’s known psychology, the book is unique in several other respects. It reveals how his interest in mind and behavior ranged across the full spectrum of psychology, including topics that we now call biopsychology and neuroscience, social psychology, thinking and intelligence, motivation and emotion, and reason vs intuition. Further, we show how the psychological concepts he used have evolved over the intervening centuries—for example, the Elizabethan notion of sensus communis eventually became “consciousness” and the old idea of the humors morphed into our current understanding of hormones and neurotransmitters. We also note that some of Mr. Shakespeare’s concerns seem especially timely today, as in the subplot of queer vs straight issues complicating the story of Troilus and Cressida and in Shylock’s telling of prejudices inflicted on ethnic minorities.