William Shakespeare Criticism
- Sir John Oldcastle and the Construction of Shakespeare's Authorship
- Selected Studies of Shakespearean Production
- Mixed Verse and Prose in Shakespearean Comedy
- Peter Quince's Ballad: Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis, History
- Shakespeare's Bed-Tricks
- Knowing aforehand: Audience Preparation and the Comedies of Shakespeare
- The Adoption of Abominable Terms: The Insults That Shape Windsor's Middle Class
- Hydra and Rhizome
- Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare's Histories
- Word Itself against the Word: Close Reading After Voloshinov
- Shakespeare at Work: 'Attributed Dialogue'
- The Open Worlde: The Exotic in Shakespeare
- Mixing Memory and Desire: Notes for a Psychodynamic Exploration of Shakespeare
- Racial Discourse: Black and White
- The Scandal of Shakespeare's Sonnets
- Theatrical Italics
- Rethinking Gender and Genre in the History Play
- Shakespeare's Historicism: Visions and Revisions
- Marxist Criticism: Cultural Materialism, and the History of the Subject
- Food for Words: Hotspur and the Discourse of Honor
- Errors and Labors: Feminism and Early Shakespearean Comedy
- Breaking the Illusion of Being: Shakespeare and the Performance of Self
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Appearance vs. Reality
- Introduction
- Overviews
- Seeing / (Dis)Believing
- Theatrical Deception
- Further Reading
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Beginnings and Endings
- Introduction
- The Opening of All's Well That Ends Well: A Performance Approach
- The Beginnings of Pericles, Henry VIII, and Two Noble Kinsmen
- Tragic Death and Dull Survival
- Hamlet: The Duel Within
- That's she that was myself: Not-so-famous Last Words and Some Ends of Othello
- ‘We were born to die’: Romeo and Juliet
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Beginnings: Overviews
- Criticism: Endings: Overviews
- Criticism: Endings: Comedies
- Criticism: Endings: King Lear
- Compounding Errors
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Death
- Introduction
- I Know When One Is Dead, and When One Lives
- Dualism and the Hope of Reunion in The Winter's Tale
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Comedies
- Criticism: Histories
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Criticism: Tragedies
- An Art of Dying
- King Lear and the Psychology of Dying
- ‘To what base uses we may return’: Class and Mortality in Hamlet (5.1)
- The Passing of King Lear
- Last Words in Shakespeare's Plays: The Challenge to the Ars Moriendi Tradition
- Shakespeare, Hypnos, and Thanatos: Romeo and Juliet in the Space of Myth
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Deception in Shakespeare's Plays
- Introduction
- The Language Of Deception
- Male Fear Of Deception
- Self-Deception
- Shakespeare's Deception Of His Audience
- Further Reading
-
Desire
- Introduction
- Unfulfilled Desire
- Obsessive Desire: Jealousy And Lust
- Desire As Metaphor
- Further Reading
-
Dreams in Shakespeare
- Introduction
- Overviews: Dreams And Psychoanalysis
- Dreams And Imagination
- Dreams And Violence: Macbeth
- Posthumus's Dream: Cymbeline
- Further Reading
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Family
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Criticism: Shakespeare's Tragic Families
- Criticism: The Family In Shakespearean History And Romance
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Fate and Fortune
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Criticism: Fortune In The Comedies
- Criticism: Fortune In The Tragedies
- Criticism: Fortune In The Roman Plays
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Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare
- Introduction
- Overviews
- Comedies And Romances
- Lear And Cordelia
- Role Of Marriage
- Further Reading
- Fearful Simile: Stealing the Breech in Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays
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Feminist Criticism
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Criticism: Trends In Feminist Criticism Of Shakespeare's Characters
- Criticism: Trends In Feminist Criticism Of Shakespeare's Plays
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Friendship
- Introduction
- Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies
- Further Reading
-
Criticism: Friendship In The Comedies
- Two Gentlemen and the Cult of Friendship
- The Two Noble Kinsmen, the Friendship Tradition, and the Flight from Eros
- Innocent Arrows and Sexy Sticks: The Rival Economies of Male Friendship and Heterosexual Love in The Merchant of Venice
- Same-Sex Erotic Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen
- ‘Near Akin’: The Trials of Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen
- Criticism: Friendship In The Tragedies
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Gender Identity
- Introduction
- Overviews: Gender In Shakespeare's Plays
- Feminine Identity
- Masculine Identity
- Androgyny: Crossdressing And Disguise
- Gender And Genre
- Further Reading
- Homosexuality
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Iconography
- Introduction
- Iconography and Some Problems of Terminology in the Study of the Drama and Theater of the Renaissance
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Iconography In The History Plays
-
Criticism: Iconography In The Tragedies
- Othello's Angels: The Ars Morendi.
- The Iconography of Melancholy in the Graveyard Scene of Hamlet
- The Iconography of Ophelia
- Emblem and Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece and Titus Andronicus
- The Iconography of Wisdom and Folly in King Lear
- Emblems of the Polity: The Wounds of Rhetoric and of the Body Politic in Shakespeare's Rome
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Criticism: Iconography In The Romances
- The Iconography of Illusion and Truth in The Winter's Tale
- The Iconography of Primitivism in Cymbeline
- Christian Vision and Iconography in Pericles
- ‘Sweet Power of Music’: The Political Magic of ‘the Miraculous Harp’ in Shakespeare's The Tempest
- A Room Not One's Own: Feminine Geography in Cymbeline
- The Iconography of Time in The Winter's Tale
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Incest
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Criticism: The Motif Of Incest In The Late Romances
- Criticism: Incest And Tragedy
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Jealousy
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Criticism: Jealousy In Othello
- Criticism: The Winter's Tale: The Jealousy Of Leontes
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Kingship
- Introduction
- The Legitimacy Of Rule And The Ideal King
- Monarchy And Ceremony
- Abdication And Absolutism
- Further Reading
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Law and Justice
- Introduction
- Overview
- Law In Comedy And Romance: Trials, Marriage, And Merciful Justice
- Law In The Histories: Property And Succession
- King Lear: Divine Judgment And Natural Law
- Further Reading
- Losing the Map: Topographical Understanding in the Henriad
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Love and Romance
- Introduction
- Romantic Comedy
- Love Tragedy
- Courtship And Marriage
- Further Reading
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Madness
- Introduction
- Overviews
- Relation To Elizabethan Culture
- The Language Of Madness
- Gender And Madness
- Madness And Politics
- Further Reading
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Magic and the Supernatural
- Introduction
- Renaissance Occult Thought
- Witches, Ghosts, And Fairies
- Staging The Supernatural
- Further Reading
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Marriage
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Criticism: Marriage In The Comedies
- Criticism: Marriage In The Romances
- Criticism: Marriage In The Tragedies
- Marriage as Comic Closure
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Morality
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Criticism: Moral Corruption: Macbeth And Hamlet
- Criticism: Morality And Society: Comedies And Romances
- Criticism: Evil And Vice
- Criticism: Morality And Theology
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Music
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
-
Criticism: Themes
- Music and The Tempest
- Pericles: Shakespeare's Divine Musical Comedy
- Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest
- Twelfth Night: The Music of Time
- ‘Then Murder's out of Tune’: The Music and Structure of Othello
- Ophelia's Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine
- The Lady Sings in Welsh: Women's Song as Marginal Discourse on the Shakespearean Stage
- Other Voices: The Sweet, Dangerous Air(s) of Shakespeare's Tempest.
- ‘My Music for Nothing’: Musical Negotiations in The Tempest
- Shakespeare and the ‘Sweet Power of Music.’
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Myth
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Criticism: Mythic Patterns In The Tragedies
- Criticism: Mythological Structure And Allusion: Romances And Comedies
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Criticism: Ovid's Metamorphoses: Shakespeare'S
Adaptation Of Myth
- Twelfth Night and the Myth of Echo and Narcissus
- Ovid's Metamorphoses and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
- Lavinia's Message: Shakespeare and Myth
- From ‘Speechless Dialect’ to ‘Prosperous Art’: Shakespeare's Recasting of the Pygmalion Image
- Shakespeare Rewriting Ovid: Olivia's Interview with Viola and the Narcissus Myth
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Pastoral in Shakespeare's Works
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Criticism: Pastoral Elements In The Comedies
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Criticism: Pastoral Elements In The Romances
- The Winter's Tale and the Pastoral Tradition
- An Interpretation of Pastoral in The Winter's Tale
- So Rare a Wondered Father: The Tempest and the Vision of Paradise
- Labour, Ease, and The Tempest as Pastoral Romance
- Shakespeare's Bohemia Revisited: A Caveat
- The Pastoral Reckoning in Cymbeline
- Prospero's Counter-Pastoral
- Criticism: Pastoral Elements In The Tragedies
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Politics and Power
- Introduction
- Overviews
- Politics And The Tudor Theater
- Elizabethan England
- Rome
- Further Reading
-
Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Shakespeare's Works
- Introduction
- Overviews
- Patriarchy, Gender, And Family
- Jealousy: Othello And The Winter's Tale
- Internal Conflict: Coriolanus And Measure For Measure
- Further Reading
-
Race
- Introduction
- Out of the Matrix: Shakespeare and Race-Writing
- Further Reading
-
Criticism: Race And Colonialism
- Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest
- The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery
- ‘Obscured by Dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Caliban Versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest
- Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest
- Criticism: Race And Gender
- Criticism: Titus Andronicus: Aaron
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Religion and Theology
- Introduction
- Introduction: An Overview of Christian Interpretation
- Further Reading
-
Criticism: Themes
- Shakespeare's Comic Sense as It Strikes Us Today: Falstaff and the Protestant Ethic
- Hermeneutical Circularity and Christian Interpretations of King Lear
- Hamlet's Special Province
- Shakespeare's Use of Religious Controversy in King John
- Henry V in the Light of Erasmus
- Last Words and Last Things: St. John, Apocalypse, and Eschatology in Richard III
- Religion and the Limits of Community in The Merchant of Venice
- The ‘Heavenly Comforts of Despair’ and Measure for Measure
- Hamlet: Christian or Humanist?
- The Religion of Twelfth Night.
- Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations
- ‘Can you make no use of nothing?’: Nihilism and Meaning in King Lear and The Madness of King George
- ‘Inspirèd Merit’: Shakespeare's Theology of Grace in All's Well that Ends Well
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Revenge
- Introduction
- Further Reading
-
Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Hamlet and the Shape of Revenge
- Shakespeare and Revenge
- The Device of Wonder: Titus Andronicus and Revenge Tragedies
- Hamlet: Revenge and the Critical Mirror
- Hamlet
- Hieronimo, Hamlet and Remembrance
- Remembrance and Revenge: Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest
- Shakespeare and the Comedy of Revenge
- ‘His semblable is his mirror’: Hamlet and the Imitation of Revenge
- Interpreting ‘her martyr'd signs’: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus
- The Blood that Fury Breathed: The Shape of Justice in Aeschylus and Shakespeare
- A Revenging Feminine Hand in Twelfth Night
- Putting out the Light: A ‘Snuff’ Variant?
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Ritual and Ceremony in Shakespeare's Plays
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Ritual And Ceremony In The Comedies
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Criticism: Ritual And Ceremony In The History Plays
- ‘I Am but Shadow of Myself’: Ceremony and Design in 1 Henry VI.
- Royal Procession in Henry IV.
- The Rite of Violence in 1 Henry IV.
- The Interlude of the Beggar and the King in Richard II.
- ‘Ciphers to This Great Accompt’: Civic Pageantry in the Second Tetralogy
- Ceremony and Politics in Richard II.
- The Ritual Groundwork
- Criticism: Ritual And Ceremony In The Tragedies
- Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism
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Sexuality in Shakespeare
- Introduction
- The Language Of Sexuality
- Sexual Identity
- Female Sexuality And Misogyny
- Further Reading
- Shakespeare and Clarissa: 'General Nature', Genre and Sexuality
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Shakespeare And Classical Civilization
- Introduction
- Overviews
- Rome
- Vergil And Ovid
- Greece
- Further Reading
- Shakespeare and the End of History
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Shakespeare's Bawdy
- Introduction
- Further Reading
-
Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- Introductory and Non-sexual Bawdy
- ‘The Safety of a Pure Blush’: Shakespeare's Bawdy Clusters
- Of Sex and the Shrew
- The Context of Erotica: Marston, Donne, Shakespeare, and Spenser
- ‘Her C's, Her U's, and Her T's: Why That?’: A New Reply for Sir Andrew Aguecheek
- Bawdy Puns and Lustful Virgins: The Legacy of Juliet's Desire in Comedies of the Early 1600s
- ‘By two-headed Janus’: Double Discourse in The Merchant of Venice
- ‘Pining Their Maws’: Female Readers and the Erotic Ontology of the Text in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis
- Explorations in Shakespeare's Language
- Teaching Shakespeare's Bawdry: Orality, Literacy, and Censorship in Romeo and Juliet
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Shakespeare's Clowns and Fools
- Introduction
- Overviews
- Fools In The Histories And Historical Fools
- Fools In The Comedies
- Fools In The Tragedies
- Further Reading
-
Shakespeare's Representation of History
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Shakespeare And Historiography
- Criticism: The History Plays And Structural Issues
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Shakespeare's Representation of Women
- Introduction
- Overviews
-
Types Of Shakespearean Women Characters
- Shakespeare's Ladies-in-Waiting
- Women's Fantasy of Manhood: A Shakespearean Theme
- As We Like It: How a Girl Can Be Smart and Still Popular
- Images of Women in Shakespeare's Plays
- 'Slander's Venom'd Spear': The Tradition
- 'Nay, Faith, Let Me Not Play a Woman, I Have a Beard Coming': Women in Shakespeare's Plays
- Gender Issues
- Performance Issues
- Further Reading
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Silence
- Introduction
- Further Reading
-
Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- What the Silence Said: Still Points in King Lear
- Silence in the Henry VI Plays
- ‘Fingers on Your Lips, I Pray’: On Silence in Hamlet.
- Excellent Dumb Discourse: Silence and Grace in Shakespeare's Tempest
- ‘The Rest Is Silence’: Ineffability and the ‘Unscene’ in Shakespeare's Plays
- The Final Silences of Measure for Measure
- Women and Silence
- Silence as Confrontation
- Silent Women and Shrews: Eroticism and Convention in Epicoene and Measure for Measure
- Presence and Absence in Much Ado about Nothing
- Volumnia's Silence
- ‘I Can Interpret All Her Martyr'd Signs’: Titus Andronicus, Feminism, and the Limits of Interpretation
- Isabella's Silence: The Consolidation of Power in Measure for Measure
- ‘A Moving Rhetoricke’: Women's Silences and Renaissance Texts
- ‘My Poor Fool Is Hanged’: Cordelia, the Fool, Silence and Irresolution in King Lear.
- Shakespeare's Silences
- Dying to Live in Much Ado about Nothing.
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Succession
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Succession In The History Plays
- Criticism: Succession In The Tragedies: Hamlet And Macbeth
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Time
- Introduction
- Further Reading
- Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
-
Criticism: Themes
- ‘No Clock in the Forest’: Time in As You Like It.
- ‘In War with Time’: Temporal Perspectives in Shakespeare's Sonnets
- Time and The Tempest
- The Time Sense of Antony and Cleopatra
- Time the ‘Destroyer’ in the Sonnets
- The Way to Arden: Attitudes toward Time in As You Like It.
- Time and the Trojans
- Disintegration of Time in Macbeth's Soliloquy: ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.’
- Political Time: The Vanity of History
- ‘Tempus’ in The Tempest.
- Macbeth's War on Time
- Orson Welles's Othello: A Study of Time in Shakespeare's Tragedy
- The Dialogic Imagination: The European Discovery of Time and Shakespeare's Mature Comedies
- The Present Tense: Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Menaces of Time
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Violence in Shakespeare's Works
- Introduction
- Overview
- The Politics Of Violence
- Domestic Violence
- Further Reading
-
War in Shakespeare's Plays
- Introduction
- Further Reading
-
Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
- War and Sex in All's Well That Ends Well
- Military Oratory in Richard III.
- ‘Still Wars and Lechery’: Shakespeare and the Last Trojan Woman
- War, Civil War, and Bruderkrieg in Shakespeare
- The Ambiguities of Love and War in The Two Noble Kinsmen
- Agincourt: Prisoners of War, Reprisals, and Necessity
- ‘Women and Horses and Power and War’: Worship of Mars from 1 Henry IV to Coriolanus.
- Updating Agincourt: The Battle Scenes in Two Film Versions of Henry V
- Princes, Pirates, and Pigs: Criminalizing Wars of Conquest in Henry V.
- ‘The Norwegians Are Coming!’: Shakespearean Misleadings
- War and Peace
- Henry V: Shakespeare's Just Warrior
- The Hundred Years' War and National Identity
- King John, König Johann: War and Peace
- Sport, War, and Contest in Shakespeare's Henry VI
- Would Not the Beggar Then Forget Himself?: Christopher Sly and Autolycus