Shakespeare | Sense explores the intersection of Shakespeare and sensory studies, asking what sensation can tell us about early modern drama and poetry, and, conversely, how Shakespeare explores the senses in his literary craft, his fictional worlds, and his stagecraft. 15 substantial new essays by leading Shakespeareans working in sensory studies and related disciplines interrogate every aspect of Shakespeare and sense, from the place of hearing, smell, sight, touch, and taste in early modern life, literature, and performance culture, through to the significance of sensation in 21st century engagements with Shakespeare on stage, screen and page. The volume explores and develops current methods for studying Shakespeare and sensation, reflecting upon the opportunities and challenges created by this emergent and influential area of scholarly enquiry. Many chapters develop fresh readings of particular plays and poems, from Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, and The Tempest to less-studied works such as The Comedy of Errors, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, and Cymbeline.

Shakespeare and the Senses explores how audiences of Shakespeare's time would have understood the sensual world of his work. Could something as seemingly natural as a smell, taste, sight, or sound be socially constructed and change over time? Shakespeare and the Senses argues that understanding the original conditions in which Shakespeare's plays were performed allows us to explore the senses as both visceral, bodily experience and constructed, social phenomena. As Ben Jonson famously wrote in the First Folio of 1623, Shakespeare can seem to be "not of an age, but for all time." While this is clever marketing, Shakespeare did write his plays in a particular time and place far removed from our own. Many of his most powerful metaphors rely on sensory details--Aaron's black hue; Cleopatra's strange, invisible perfumes; Fluellen's Welsh accent; Lady Macbeth's overly scrubbed hands; Malvolio's yellow stockings--which Elizabethan-era audiences may have understood very differently from us. Shakespeare and the Senses draws on interdisciplinary research methods in the new field of sensory studies to expand our understanding of what Shakespeare meant to his first audiences.

Published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this is an original and accessible synthesis of the author's conviction that many of Shakespeare's plays are powerfully shaped by their sense of place.

Introduction. Shakespeare/Text / by Claire M.L. Bourne -- I. Inclusive/Exclusive. 1. Fair/Foul / by B.K. Adams (Arizona State University, USA) ; 2. Text/Paratext / by Hannah August (Massey University, New Zealand) ; 3. Public/Privae / by Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (Ohio State University, USA) ; 4. Edition/Translation / by Régis Augustus Barts Closel / (Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil) ; 5. Canon/Apocrypha / by Aleida Auld (University of Geneva, Switzerland) -- II. Before/After. 6. Now/Then / by Andy Kesson (Independent Scholar, UK) ; 7. Miscellany/Sequence / by Megan Heffernan (DePaul University, USA) ; 8. Original/Copy / by Dianne Mitchell (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA) ; 9. Source/Adaptation / by Sujata Iyengar (University of Georgia, USA) ; 10. Life/Afterlife / by Margaret Jane Kidnie (University of Western Ontario, Canada) -- III. Authorized/Unauthorized. 11. Book/Theatre / by Holger Schott Syme (University of Toronto, Canada) ; 12. Text-based/Concept-driven / by Katherine Steele Brokaw (University of California, Merced USA) ; 13. Sense/Nonsense / by Rebecca L. Fall (Independent Scholar, USA) ; 14. Fact/Fiction / by Adam G. Hooks (University of Iowa, USA) ; 15. Part/Whole / by Paul Salzman (La Trobe University, Australia) -- IV. Present/Absent. 16. Black/White / by Miles P. Grier (Queens College, City University of New York, USA) ; 17. Extant/Ephermeral / by Scott A. Trudell (University of Maryland, USA) ; 18. Lost/Found / by Misha Teramura (University of Toronto, Canada) ; 19. Paper/Ink / by Emma Depledge (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland) ; 20. Material/Digital / by Zachary Lesser & Whitney Trettien (University of Pennsylvania, USA).

Originally performed by its creators, this 1987 Edinburgh Fringe hit remains the second longest-running West End comedy in history and has been translated into over thirty languages. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) is not so much a play as it is a vaudeville show in which three charismatic, wildly ambitious actors attempt to present all thirty-seven of Shakespeare's plays in a single performance. They have a rudimentary concept of the stories and have imperfectly memorized a smattering of famous lines. Backstage there's a meager assortment of costumes and props. Thus armed, the three brazenly launch into their task with an earnest focus and breakneck enthusiasm.

Etymologically speaking, the words “know” and “narrate” share a common ancestry.Making Sense in Shakespeare examines some of the ways in which this distant kinship comes into play in Shakespearean drama. The argument of the book is that at a time in European cultural history in which the problem of knowledge was a matter of intensifying philosophical concern, Shakespeare too was in his own way exploring the possibilities and shortcomings of the various interpretative models that can be applied to experience so as to make it intelligible. While modes of understanding based upon such notions as those of naturalistic causality or rational human agency are shown to be inadequate in Shakespeare's plays, his characters often impart form and significance to their experience through what are essentially narrative means, projecting stories onto events in order to make sense of them and to direct their activity accordingly. Narrative thus plays a crucial role in the construction of meaning in Shakespeare's plays, although at the same time, as the author emphasizes, his works are no less concerned to illustrate the perils inherent in the narrativizing strategies deployed by their protagonists which often render them self-defeating and even destructive in the end.

Larry S. Champion examines Shakespeare's English history plays and describes the structural devices through which Shakespeare controls the audience's angle of vision and its response to the pattern of historical events. Champion observes the experimentation between stage worlds and the significance of a dramatic technique unique to the history play—one that combines the detachment of a documentary necessary for a broad intellectual view of history and the simultaneous engagement between character and spectator. Champion sees a conscious bifurcation occurring in Shakespeare's dramaturgy after Richard II. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare continues to focus on the psychological analysis and internalized protagonist which lead to his major tragic achievements. In King John and Henry IV, the playwright develops a middle ground between the polarities of Henry VI, in which the flat, onedimensional characters essentially serve the purposes of the narrative, and the tragedies, in which the spectator's consuming interest is in the developing centralfigure whose critical moments they share. Champion sees Henry V as the culmination of Shakespeare's e fforts in the English history play.