The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare aims to replicate the expansive reach of Shakespeare's global reputation. In pursuit of that vision, this work is transhistorical, international, and interdisciplinary. "The World's Shakespeare," volume two of the two volume set, presents a four-century survey of how Shakespeare and his works have circulated in the world's cultures. Fourteen sections introduce readers to changes in technologies of performance, popular culture, media history, criticism, and ten other subject areas. For each of the volume's broad subject areas, an overview article is followed by a series of shorter essays taking up particular aspects of the subject at hand. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, this book brings the world, life, and afterlife of Shakespeare to readers, from nonacademic Shakespeare fans and students to theater professionals and Shakespeare scholars.

An indispensable reference tool for Shakespeare students and enthusiasts, this compact guide provides authoritative summaries of each of Shakespeare's works.

This Companion explores the remarkable variety of forms that Shakespeare's life and works have taken over the course of four centuries, ranging from the early modern theatrical marketplace to the age of mass media, and including stage and screen performance, music and the visual arts, the television serial and popular prose fiction. The book asks what happens when Shakespeare is popularized, and when the popular is Shakespeareanized; it queries the factors that determine the definitions of and boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate, the canonical and the authorized and the subversive, the oppositional, the scandalous and the inane. Leading scholars discuss the ways in which the plays and poems of Shakespeare, as well as Shakespeare himself, have been interpreted and reinvented, adapted and parodied, transposed into other media, and act as a source of inspiration for writers, performers, artists and film-makers worldwide.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories. Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that focus on the concepts of sexuality, lineage, nationality, and globalization. The collection helps students to grapple with the unique role performance plays in constructions of race by Shakespeare (and in Shakespearean performances), considering both historical and contemporary actors and directors. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race will be the first book that truly frames Shakespeare studies and early modern race studies for a non-specialist, student audience.

This lively and innovative introduction to Shakespeare promotes active engagement with the plays, rather than recycling factual information. Covering a range of texts, it is divided into seven subject-based chapters: Character; Performance; Texts; Language; Structure; Sources and History, and it does not assume any prior knowledge. Instead, it develops ways of thinking and provides the reader with resources for independent research through the 'Where next?' sections at the end of each chapter. The book draws on scholarship without being overwhelmed by it, and unlike other introductory guides to Shakespeare it emphasizes that there is space for new and fresh thinking by students and readers, even on the most-studied and familiar plays.

Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.