illustrated portrait of English playwright and poet William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

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William Shakespeare Criticism

William Shakespeare's works have long captivated audiences and scholars alike with their intricate examinations of human behavior and societal norms. Central to his literary mastery is the theme of deception, which Shakespeare weaves through character interactions and linguistic prowess. Scholars such as Shirley Nelson Garner have identified a recurring exploration of male anxieties about female fidelity in plays like Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale. These anxieties often lead male characters to retreat into male camaraderie, revealing a deeper fear of betrayal.

Contents

  • 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
  • Appearance vs. Reality
  • 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
      • Shakespeare's Tragic Prefigures
      • Toys, Prologues and the Great Amiss: Shakespeare's Tragic Openings
      • Some Shakespearean Openings: Hamlet, Twelfth Night, The Tempest
      • ‘Beginners, Please’; or, First Start Your Play
    • Criticism: Endings: Overviews
      • ‘You that way; we this way’: Shakespeare's Endings
      • Shakespeare Closing
    • Criticism: Endings: Comedies
      • Patterns of Resolution in Shakespeare's Comedies
      • The Sense of an Ending in Shakespeare's Early Comedies
      • The Difficulties of Closure: An Approach to the Problematic in Shakespearian Comedy
      • Crowning the End: The Aggrandizement of Closure in the Reading of Shakespeare's Comedies
    • Criticism: Endings: King Lear
      • ‘And that's true too’: King Lear and the Tension of Uncertainty
      • The Promised End
      • Dramatic ‘Pity’ and the Death of Lear
  • Compounding Errors
    • Introduction
    • I
    • II
    • III
    • IV
  • 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
      • Wild Laughter in the Throat of Death
      • Measure for Measure and the Art of Not Dying
    • Criticism: Histories
      • King of Tears: Mortality in Richard II
      • Falstaff and the Art of Dying
      • The Death of John Talbot
    • 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
  • Deception in Shakespeare's Plays
    • The Language Of Deception
      • Henry IV: Art's Gilded Lie
      • Truth, Lies, and Poesie in King Lear
      • Richard III and the Tropes of Treachery
    • Male Fear Of Deception
      • Male Bonding and the Myth of Women's Deception in Shakespeare's Plays
    • Self-Deception
      • Shakespeare's Henry Yea and Nay
      • Love's Labour's Lost and the Nature of Comedy
      • Macbeth: The Great Illusion
      • The Vision of Twelfth Night
    • Shakespeare's Deception Of His Audience
      • Supersubtle Shakespeare: Othello as a Rhetorical Allegory
      • Misconstruction in I Henry IV
    • Further Reading
  • Desire
    • Introduction
    • Unfulfilled Desire
    • Obsessive Desire: Jealousy And Lust
      • The Action of Lust
      • 'The Catastrophe is a Nuptial': The Space of Masculine Desire in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale
    • Desire As Metaphor
    • Further Reading
  • Dreams in Shakespeare
    • Introduction
    • Overviews: Dreams And Psychoanalysis
    • Dreams And Imagination
    • Dreams And Violence: Macbeth
      • Macbeth: Drama and Dream
      • Macbeth'. A Dream of Love
    • Posthumus's Dream: Cymbeline
    • Further Reading
  • Family
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
    • Criticism: Shakespeare's Tragic Families
    • Criticism: The Family In Shakespearean History And Romance
      • Conclusion
      • The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family
      • Multiple Parenting in Pericles
  • Fate and Fortune
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
    • Criticism: Fortune In The Comedies
    • Criticism: Fortune In The Tragedies
      • Fortune and Friendship in Timon of Athens
      • Polanski vs. Welles on Macbeth: Character or Fate?
      • Fate and Fortune in Romeo and Juliet
      • The Subversive Metaphysics of Macbeth.
      • Falling in Love: The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
    • Criticism: Fortune In The Roman Plays
  • Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare
    • Introduction
    • Overviews
      • The Lords of Duty
      • Dominated Daughters
      • Love, Death, and Patriarchy in Romeo and Juliet
    • Comedies And Romances
    • Lear And Cordelia
    • Role Of Marriage
    • Further Reading
  • Fearful Simile: Stealing the Breech in Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays
    • Introduction
    • To Be
    • To Have
    • To Seem
  • Feminist Criticism
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
  • Friendship
    • Introduction
    • Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Friendship In The Comedies
    • Criticism: Friendship In The Tragedies
  • Gender Identity
  • Homosexuality
    • Introduction
    • William Shakespeare
    • Hal's Desire, Shakespeare's Idaho
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Comedies
      • The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy
      • Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night
      • Preposterous Pleasures: Queer Theories and A Midsummer Night's Dream
  • 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
      • Profane Icon: The Throne Scene of Shakespeare's Richard III.
      • Emblems of an English Eden
      • Iconic Monsters in Paradise
    • 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
    • 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
  • Incest
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
      • Shakespeare
      • The Triangle in William Shakespeare
    • Criticism: The Motif Of Incest In The Late Romances
    • Criticism: Incest And Tragedy
      • Aspects of the Incest Problem in Hamlet.
      • King Lear, King Leir, and Incest Wishes
  • Jealousy
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
    • Criticism: Jealousy In Othello
      • Othello
      • Prudence versus Wisdom in Othello.
      • Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello
      • Iago in Othello
      • Othello's Jealousy and the ‘Gate of Hell.’
    • Criticism: The Winter's Tale: The Jealousy Of Leontes
  • Kingship
    • Introduction
    • The Legitimacy Of Rule And The Ideal King
    • Monarchy And Ceremony
    • Abdication And Absolutism
      • Kingship
    • Further Reading
  • 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
    • Introduction
    • Hotspur
    • Prince Hal
    • Henry V
    • Henry IV
    • The Border of History
  • Love and Romance
    • Introduction
    • Romantic Comedy
      • Shakespeare's Mature Romantic Comedies
      • Love and Society in Shakespearean Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Content
    • Love Tragedy
      • Human Affiliation and the Wedge of Gender
    • Courtship And Marriage
      • Happy Ever After: Some Aspects of Marriage in Shakespeare's Plays
      • Introduction: Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting
      • Secret Promises and Elopements, Broken Contracts and Divorces
    • Further Reading
  • Madness
  • Magic and the Supernatural
    • Introduction
    • Renaissance Occult Thought
      • Literary and Philosophical Background
    • Witches, Ghosts, And Fairies
      • Witchcraft
      • White Magic and Black Witches
    • Staging The Supernatural
    • Further Reading
  • 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
    • Introduction
    • As You Like It
    • A Midsummer Night's Dream
    • The Two Gentlemen Of Verona
  • 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
  • Music
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
      • Music in Shakespeare
      • Nonvocal Music: Added Dimension in Five Shakespeare Plays
      • The Function of Music in Shakespeare's Romances
      • Music as Structural Element in Shakespeare
      • Shakespeare's Fusion of the Arts
      • Worlds of Sound
    • 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.’
  • Myth
  • Pastoral in Shakespeare's Works
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
      • Shakespeare's Golden Worlds
      • Pastoral Speakers
    • Criticism: Pastoral Elements In The Comedies
      • Pastoral Instruction in As You Like It
      • Pastoral and Parody in The Merry Wives of Windsor
      • Amorous Fictions and As You Like It
    • 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
      • King Lear as Pastoral Tragedy
      • ‘This is Venice: My house is not a grange’: Othello's Landscape of the Mind
  • Politics and Power
    • Introduction
    • Overviews
    • Politics And The Tudor Theater
    • Elizabethan England
      • Making History
    • 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
  • 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
  • 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?
  • Ritual and Ceremony in Shakespeare's Plays
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Ritual And Ceremony In The Comedies
    • 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
      • ‘Maimèd Rites’: Shakespeare's Hamlet
      • Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599
      • Ritual and Identity: The Edgar-Edmund Combat in King Lear
      • The Crisis of Ritual in Titus Andronicus
      • The Hobby-Horse Is Forgot: Tradition and Transition
  • Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism
    • Introduction
    • I
    • II
    • III
  • Sexuality in Shakespeare
    • Introduction
    • The Language Of Sexuality
      • What Is Indecency?
      • Shakespeare's Bawdy Planet
    • Sexual Identity
    • Female Sexuality And Misogyny
    • Further Reading
  • Shakespeare and Clarissa: 'General Nature', Genre and Sexuality
    • Introduction
    • I. Universality and Difference
    • Il Genre: Tragedy Versus Comedy
    • III. The Uses of Quotation
    • IV. Letters and Sexuality
    • V. Rape, Writing and Morality
    • VI. Conclusions
  • Shakespeare And Classical Civilization
    • Introduction
    • Overviews
    • Rome
      • Shakespeare's Roman World
      • A Roman Thought: Renaissance Attitudes to History Exemplified in Shakespeare and Jonson
      • The Road to Rome
      • An introduction to The Wide Arch: Roman Values in Shakespeare
    • Vergil And Ovid
      • Vergil in Shakespeare: From Allusion to Imitation
      • Shakespeare and the Renaissance Ovid
    • Greece
    • Further Reading
  • Shakespeare and the End of History
    • Introduction
    • I
    • II
    • III
    • IV
    • V
  • Shakespeare's Bawdy
  • Shakespeare's Clowns and Fools
  • Shakespeare's Representation of History
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Shakespeare And Historiography
      • History for the Elizabethans
      • The Shakespearean History Play
      • Introduction 2: History
      • Shakespeare's Dramatic Historiography: I Henry IV to Henry VIII
      • Truth and Art in History Plays
    • Criticism: The History Plays And Structural Issues
      • History, Theatricality, and the ‘Structural Problem’ in the Henry IV Plays
      • Time, Space and the Instability of History in the Henry IV Sequence
  • Shakespeare's Representation of Women
    • Introduction
    • Overviews
      • Introduction: Their Infinite Variety
      • Demythologizing Shakespeare
      • New Woman, New Man
    • Types Of Shakespearean Women Characters
    • Gender Issues
    • Performance Issues
    • Further Reading
  • 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.
  • Social Class
    • Introduction
    • Overviews
    • The Poor In Shakespeare
    • Shakespearean Comedy And The Elizabethan Social Order
    • Further Reading
  • Succession
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Succession In The History Plays
      • Richard's Divided Heritage in King John
      • Ideological Conflict, Alternative Plots, and the Problem of Historical Causation
      • 'The Form of Law': Ritual and Succession in Richard III
      • ‘The Sequence of Posterity’: Shakespeare's King John and the Succession Controversy
    • Criticism: Succession In The Tragedies: Hamlet And Macbeth
      • Macbeth and the Barren Sceptre
      • Hamlet and the Scottish Succession
      • The Politics of Aloofness in Macbeth
  • The Authorship Controversy
    • Introduction
    • Overview
      • Doubts and Questions
    • The Case For Shakespeare
      • The Man and the Myth
      • Deviations
    • The Case Against Shakespeare: Anti-Stratfordian Arguments
      • Such a Deadly Life
      • Ten Arguments against Him
    • William Shakespeare Vs. Edward De Vere, Earl Of Oxford
    • Other Claimants: Bacon And Marlowe
      • The Case For Francis Bacon
      • Christopher Marlowe
    • The "New" Poems: "Shall I Die?"
      • Shakespeare's New Poem: A Scholar's Clues and Conclusions
      • 'Shall I Die' Post Mortem: Defining Shakespeare
    • The "New" Poems: "The Funeral Elegy
      • W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Funeral Elegy' and the Turn from the Theatrical
      • Who Wrote A Funerali Elegie?
    • Further Reading
  • Time
    • Introduction
    • Further Reading
    • Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
      • Shakespeare and the Abyss of Time
      • Views of Time in Shakespeare
      • Dramatic Time versus Clock Time in Shakespeare
      • Hats, Clocks and Doublets: Some Shakespearean Anachronisms
    • 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
  • Violence in Shakespeare's Works
    • Introduction
    • Overview
      • Shakespearean Violence: A Preliminary Survey
    • The Politics Of Violence
    • Domestic Violence
      • From Pedestal to Ditch: Violence Against Women in Shakespeare's Othello
      • Finding What Has Been 'Lost': Representations of Infanticide and The Winter's Tale
      • Civilizing Subordination: Domestic Violence and The Taming of the Shrew
    • 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
    • Introduction
    • The Taming of a Tinker
    • Autolycus: A "Gentleman Born"