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This is a major study of the history of Shakespeare criticism in the modern era. Every epoch recreates its classic icons — and for literary culture none is more central nor more protean than Shakespeare. Even though finding the authentic Shakespeare has been a goal of scholarship since the 18th century, he has always been constructed as a contemporary author. This book charts the construction of Shakespeare as a 20th-century Modernist text by redirecting ‘new historicist’ methods to an investigation of the social roots of contemporary Shakespeare criticism itself. Beginning with the formation of professionalism as an ideology in the Victorian age, this book describes the widespread attempts to save the values of the culturalist tradition, in reformulated ‘Modernist’ guise, from the threat of professionalist positivism in modernized universities. The tension between professionalism and culturalism gave rise to the Modernist Shakespeare of G. Wilson Knight, E. M. W. Tillyard, and American and British New Critics, and still conditions the postmodernist Shakespearean criticism of contemporary feminists, deconstructors, and ‘new historicists’.

This book examines the profound effect, on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century, of the period of English literature's greatest glory, the Renaissance. Beginning in the sixteenth century, with the poems and plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and with prose writings such as Hakluyt's Voyages, and continuing through the great lyric poets of the seventeenth century, the Renaissance influenced every aspect of Virginia Woolf's work. All her available writing – letters, diaries, reading notes, drafts of essays, novels, and feminist polemic – are explored in this study of Virginia Woolf's varied reactions to the period, and its impact on her fiction and criticism. Each of the novels, in particular, is shown to integrate some element of Renaissance literature in its language, characterization, and often structure, enriching the fiction.

The critical school of ‘new historicism’ is very much at the centre of contemporary debates on literary studies and theory. Much ‘new historicist’ writing has focused on Renaissance texts, and this book is a timely exploration of that connection and its significance for ‘English’ as a whole. This book subjects many of the most challenging claims of ‘new historicism’ to rigorous analysis, distinguishes sharply between its American and British versions, and probes the causes and consequences of its politicization of literary studies. The philosophical as well as political issues central to current debates are examined and the uses served by the canonical texts at their centre analysed within a broad cultural and historical perspective. This searching reconsideration of contemporary critical theory and practice yields fresh readings of a number of classic texts — including those of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Thomas More's Utopia, John Donne's poetry, and Robert Conrad's Heart of Darkness — as well as a deepened understanding of the complex and changing functions of the canon itself.

This book charts the influence of Seneca — both as specific text and inherited tradition — through an analysis of Shakespeare's tragedies. Discerning patterns in previously attested borrowings and discovering new indebtedness, it presents an integrated and comprehensive assessment. Familiar methods of source study and an understanding of intertextuality are employed to re-evaluate the much maligned Seneca in the light of his Greek antecedents, Renaissance translations and commentaries, and dramatic adaptations, especially those of Chapman, Jonson, Marston, Garnier, Cinthio, and Dolce. Three broad categories organize the discussion — Senecan revenge, tyranny, and furore — and each is illustrated by an earlier and later Shakespearean tragedy. The author keeps in view Shakespeare's eclecticism, his habit of combining disparate sources and conventions, as well as the rich history of literary criticism and theatrical interpretation. The book concludes by discussing Seneca's presence in Renaissance comedy and, more important, in the hybrid genre, tragicomedy.

Shakespeare's late plays – Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest – have provoked a great deal of interest in the modern theatre. In this book, the author draws upon extensive theatrical experience of the plays in rehearsal and performance, particularly in two special seasons: at Stratford, Ontario in 1986 and at the National Theatre in 1988 under the direction of Sir Peter Hall. This book describes in detail how the rehearsal process focuses the principal theatrical issues of Shakespeare's late plays.

This book is a study of the teaching and criticism of William Shakespeare in South Africa from the early nineteenth century to the present day, covering a number of key historical moments in the interpretation of Shakespeare. It contributes to the well-established debate focused on the ‘neo-colonial’ use of ‘English literature’ and to the more recent interest in the conditions of cultural assimilation. The wide range of source materials used for this book – including Cape Department of Education examination papers and exam reports, as well as newspaper articles and essays – provides detailed research into the formulation of a literary education policy in South Africa. The insights into changes in thinking about pedagogic and cultural issues in the South African colonial ‘periphery’ and into the values associated with those changes makes for a significant resource for South African cultural studies.

Is literary biography so widely read for popular, ‘prurient’ reasons, or for ‘reputable’ intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? How much can we know about a life, such as Shakespeare's, where the documentation is so scanty? In this revealing new work seventeen leading critics and professional biographers discuss a broad range of issues, including the relationships between biography and autobiography, the problems genre poses, and the literary biographer at work, together with authors, such as Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Huxley, Conrad, and Rochester.

This book challenges traditional Shakespeare scholarship through a study of its textual primacy in the late eighteenth century. The book's examination of earlier treatments demonstrates that concepts now basic to Shakespeare studies were once largely irrelevant. Only with Edmond Malone's 1790 Shakespeare edition do such criteria as authenticity, historical periodisation, factual biography, chronological development, and in-depth readings become dominant. However, their emergence then must not be seen as the overdue installation of proper scholarly and literary procedures, but rather as a specific historical response to the problem the Shakespeare corpus has posed since its definition by the 1623 Folio. The remarkable efficacy of Malone's apparatus over the past two hundred years testifies not to its ‘truth’, but rather to its endorsement of a continuing Enlightenment epistemology irreconcilable with the past linguistic and mechanical practices it purports accurately to reproduce. This challenging book has both practical and theoretical implications for Shakespeare studies in the 1990s and beyond.

William Shakespeare was neither a Royalist defender of order and hierarchy nor a consistently radical champion of social equality, but rather simultaneously radical and conservative as a critic of emerging forms of modernity. This book argues that Shakespeare's social criticism in fact often parallels that of critics of modernity from our own Postmodernist era: that the broad analysis of modernity produced by Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, and others can serve as a productive enabling representation and critique of the emerging modernity represented by the image in Troilus and Cressida of ‘an universal wolf’ of appetite, power, and will. The readings in this book demonstrate Shakespeare's keen interest in what twentieth-century theory has called ‘reification’ — a term that designates social systems created by human societies, but that confronts those societies as operating beyond human control, according to an autonomous ‘systems’ logic — in nascent mercantile capitalism, in power-oriented Machiavellian politics, and in the scientistic, value-free rationality which Horkheimer and Adorno call ‘instrumental reason’.

In this book of the poetics of influence, the indebtedness of Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake to a common source, namely the Bible, becomes a powerful tool for displaying three fundamentally different poetic options as well as three different ways of dealing with a conflict central to western culture. In fresh and original discussions of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and King Lear, the author discerns what he terms the metagon: not the struggle between the characters on the stage, but a struggle for the control of the play between biblical and non-biblical modes of imagining. Milton seems more single-minded in his reliance on biblical sources, yet from his analysis of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, the author concludes that there are unresolved contradictions, both aesthetic and theological, which threaten the coherence and balance of these poems as well. Blake in his turn perceived these contradictions in the work of his predecessors, condemning both Shakespeare and Milton for allowing their writing to be curbed by Greek and Latin models and claiming for himself a more authentic inspiration — that of ‘the Sublime of the Bible’. But Blake’s marvellous achievements in the sublime mode, as for instance in his Illustrations to Job, often reverse the direction of his biblical source, replacing dialogue with monologue.

Should Shakespeare's plays be presented in the spelling and punctuation of the early editions, or should these features of the text be modernized? What are the advantages and disadvantages of either procedure? When error is suspected in these texts, what kinds of correction can be attempted? How can Shakespeare's plays, written for the theatre and first printed with inadequate stage directions, best be presented for the reader? When texts survive in two versions, one close to the point of composition, the other reflecting performance by Shakespeare's company, which should the editor prefer? Can fresh thought about a play's staging affect its text? These are among the questions raised and discussed by this book. Welcoming the major advances in the bibliographical study of Shakespeare in recent years, the book is concerned with the practical problems of putting the result of such study into editorial effect. In a detailed investigation of the relationship between dialogue and stage action in Act One of Titus Andronicus, the book brings the reader close to Shakespeare in the act of creation; a conjectured reconstruction of Shakespeare's first draft of the Act is included.