Böcker i Shakespeare and Theory-serien

Introduces students to ecocritical approaches to Shakespeare, including key concepts, current debates and case-study readings of a wide range of the poetry and plays.

Why do Shakespeare's texts resonate so powerfully for us in the 21st century, 400 years after he wrote and produced them? Why is he more popular today than ever before? Why is that popularity now occurring in a global context, rather than a Western context? Surely, the comprehensiveness of Shakespeare's ethical vision is one of the reasons. His skill as a playwright elicits reader and audience empathy for his characters and the dramatic situations in which he situates them. Yet the political, economic, and social practices, discourses, and events of our present moment, and our inevitable 'situatedness' in them, constitute another, untheorized part of the story. Presentism views Shakespeare's texts as infinitely flexible, elastic entities. It empowers readers, directors, actors, and audience members alike as endlessly capable of opening up new meanings in Shakespeare's texts - meanings that are inflected both temporally, in different periods of time, and spatially, in different cultures around the globe. This new study defines, explains, and analyses the significance of presentism as a 21st century theoretical and critical approach to Shakespeare's texts.

"There is no Shakespeare without text. Yet readers often do not realize that the words in the book they hold, like the dialogue they hear from the stage, has been revised, augmented and emended since Shakespeare's lifetime. An essential resource for the history of Shakespeare on the page, Shakespeare and Textual Theory traces the explanatory underpinnings of these changes through the centuries. After providing an introduction to early modern printing practices, Suzanne Gossett describes the original quartos and folios as well as the first collected editions. Subsequent sections summarize the work of the 'New Bibliographers' and the radical challenge to their technical analysis posed by poststructuralist theory, which undermined the presumed stability of author and text. Shakespeare and Textual Theory presents a balanced view of the current theoretical debates, which include the nature of the surviving texts we call Shakespeare's; the relationship of the author 'Shakespeare' and of authorial intentions to any of these texts; the extent and nature of Shakespeare's collaboration with others; and the best or most desirable way to present the texts - in editions or performances. The book is illustrated throughout with examples showing how theoretical decisions affect the text of Shakespeare's plays, and case studies of Hamlet and Pericles demonstrate how different theories complicate both text and meaning, whether a play survives in one version or several. The conclusion summarizes the many ways in which beliefs about Shakespeare's texts have changed over the centuries"--