WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
William Shakespeare by Rodrio22, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Dates: 1564-1616
Nationality: British/English
Literary Periods:
Elizabethan Period, 1558-1603
Jacobean and Caroline Period, 1603-1660
Renaissance Period, 1500-1660
Tudor Period, 1500-1603
BOOKS ON SHAKESPEARE
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Broken Harmony by Call Number: PR3034 .O78 2011ISBN: 0801449316Publication Date: 2011-02-14Also Online
Music was a subject of considerable debate during the Renaissance. The notion that music could be interpreted in a meaningful way clashed regularly with evidence that music was in fact profoundly promiscuous in its application and effects. Subsequently, much writing in the period reflects a desire to ward off music's illegibility rather than come to terms with its actual effects. In Broken Harmony, Joseph M. Ortiz revises our understanding of music's relationship to language in Renaissance England. In the process he shows the degree to which discussions of music were ideologically and politically charged. Offering a historically nuanced account of the early modern debate over music, along with close readings of several of Shakespeare's plays (including Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale) and Milton's A Maske, Ortiz challenges the consensus that music's affinity with poetry was widely accepted, or even desired, by Renaissance poets. Shakespeare more than any other early modern poet exposed the fault lines in the debate about music's function in art, repeatedly staging disruptive scenes of music that expose an underlying struggle between textual and sensuous authorities. Such musical interventions in textual experiences highlight the significance of sound as an aesthetic and sensory experience independent of any narrative function.
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At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Oceanby Steve Mentz
Call Number: PR3069.O32 M46 2009
ISBN: 1847064922
Publication Date: 2009-12-10
We need a poetic history of the ocean, and Shakespeare can help us find one. There's more real salt in the plays than we might expect. Shakespeare's dramatic ocean spans the God-sea of the ancient world and the immense blue vistas that early modern mariners navigated. Throughout his career, from the opening shipwrecks of The Comedy of Errors through The Tempest, Shakespeare's plays figure the ocean as shocking physical reality and mind-twisting symbol of change and instability. To fathom Shakespeare's ocean - to go down to its bottom - this book's chapters focus on different things that humans do with and in and near the sea: fathoming, keeping watch, swimming, beachcombing, fishing, and drowning. Mentz also sets Shakespeare's sea-poetry against modern literary sea-scapes, including the vast Pacific of Moby-Dick, the rocky coast of Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, and the lyrical waters of the postcolonial Caribbean. Uncovering the depths of Shakespeare's maritime world, this book draws out the centrality of the sea in our literary culture. -
The Devil's PartyCall Number: PR2976 .H39 1985
ISBN: 0198128142
Publication Date: 1985-07-18
This survey of past and present controversies about Shakespearian drama asks about the question: Do the plays hold a mirror up to nature? If so, what is the nature of the "nature" reflected in plays as different asHamletandAs You Like It?KIs the poet on the side of the angels or, in fact, "of the devil's party" in a play likeRichard III?Are Hamlet and Cleopatra more to be morally censured than pitied or admired? How seriously should we take the comedies? Rather than attempting to answer these questions, the author here explains why it is that the plays remain open to critical debate. She concludes that Shakespearian drama provides us with the most artistic challenges toanyone-sided account of the ways of the wold it reflects and for this reason, for students and teachers, and for actors and audiences alike, its impact is ultimately liberating. -
The Tempest and new world-Utopian politicsby Frank W. Brevik
Call Number: PR2833.B66 2012 New Books section
ISBN: 9781137021793
Publication Date: 2012-08-21
This study on New World-utopian politics in The Tempest traces paradigm shifts in literary criticism over the past six decades that have all but re-inscribed the text into a political document. This book challenges the view that the play has a dominant New World dimension and demonstrates through close textual readings how an unstable setting at the same time enables and effaces discursively over-invested New World interpretations. Almost no critical attention has been paid to the play's vacuum of power, and this work interprets pastoral, utopian, and 'American' tensions in light of the play's forever-ambiguous setting. Through a 'presentist' post-1989 lens, an oft-neglected historical and political paradigm shift in Shakespeare criticism comes to light.
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William Shakespeare by William Blake, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
This guide is a work continually in progress! I hope it offers a useful starting point for Shakespeare research, and I invite you to contact me with any questions or recommendations for the site (kjgillum).
NEWS: Was Marlowe co-author to the Henry 6 plays?
REFERENCE & BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
The unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of words from across the English-speaking world
Extensive biography on the life and works of William Shakespeare
You'll also want to check out...
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A Dictionary of Shakespeare [E-BOOK]Stanley Wells with the assistance of James Shaw (1998)
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Literature Online (LION) [DATABASE]Biographical overview, complete bibliography, journal articles, audio & video recordings, and recommended Web sites
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A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of ShakespeareMarvin Spevack | Miller Library REF PR2892 .S6 v.1-6
RESEARCH & CRITICISM
Find books, essays and journal articles in MLA International Bibliography
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative scholarship on William Shakespeare from books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers.
World Shakespeare Bibliography Online
The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online is a searchable electronic database consisting of the most comprehensive record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide between 1960 and 2011. Contains over 126,900 annotated entries
You'll also want to check out...
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Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide [BOOK]Edited by Stanley Wells | Miller Library REF Z8811 .S5 1990
More bibliographies of Shakespeare scholarship -
Shakespeare Survey [DATABASE]Yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production, publishing the best international scholarship in English since 1947
More periodicals and journals devoted to Shakespeare studies
PRIMARY SOURCES
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The Booke of Sir Thomas More (a play probably written principally by Anthony Munday, with revisions by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, William Shakespeare, and possibly Thomas Heywood) is preserved in a manuscript at the British Library (Harleian Ms. 7368). Most scholars now concur that two brief passages were written by Shakespeare circa 1594-1595, and that one of them represents the only surviving example of a literary or dramatic manuscript in Shakespeare's hand. Shakespeare's autograph signature occurs in three places in his will, dated 25 March 1616, located in the Public Records Office (PROB 1/4). His signature is also on a deposition given to the Court of Requests in 1612 (Public Records Office, REQ 4/1), and in two documents relating to the mortgage purchase of a property in Blackfriars (one in the Guildhall Library, the other in the British Library, Egerton Ms. 1787). --DLB 3/18/11 |
Hamlet's Vision by Pedro Américo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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Full-text works on Literature Online (LION) [DATABASE]Poetry: 389 entries
Drama: 109 entries
Plays on e-Book
WWW
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Internet Shakespeare Editions [WEB]On this website, you will find one of the web's widest varieties of Shakespeare-related resources, including fully annotated texts of his plays and poems, exciting multimedia materials and records of his plays in performance, and thousands of searchable pages devoted to the history, arts, politics, society, and stage of Shakespeare's world, as well as biographical details of his life.
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Open Source Shakespeare [WEB]Built on the 1864 Globe Edition of Shakespeare's complete works, Open Source Shakespeare attempts to be the best free Web site containing all of Shakespeare's work. It is intended for scholars, thespians, and Shakespeare lovers of every kind. You can use the advanced search function, read the plays, and look up words in the concordance
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The Shakespeare Quartos Archive [WEB]The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a digital collection of pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare's plays. A cross-Atlantic collaboration has also produced an interactive interface for the detailed study of these geographically distant quartos, with full functionality for all thirty-two quarto copies of Hamlet held by participating institutions.
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Shakespeare's Study [WEB]Explore highlights from the books that Shakespeare might have kept in his own study.
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The Sonnets (1609 edition) [WEB]A project of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia
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Finding Shakespeare [WEB]Curating digital stories from Shakespeare's work, life and times
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Blogging Shakespeare [WEB]"This blog is a digital experiment of the Education Team at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Our desire is to incite through provoking conversation and foster community around the greatest writer in human history." -from the blog description
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Shakespeare's World [WEB]Transcribe handwritten documents by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and help us understand his life and times.
Also of interest! MIT's Global Shakespeare site gives access to video of hundreds of performances in many languages all over the world.
On the lighter side: The Reduced Shakespeare Company on YouTube.
MULTIMEDIA
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William Shakespeare: A Concise BiographyThis introduction to William Shakespeare's life and works from the Famous Authors series begins at the author's childhood home in Stratford and tours the institutions of the town and country that would have been part of Shakespeare's life. The film follows the 23-year-old writer to London, providing a picture of the city in Elizabethan and Jacobean England when Shakespeare went to make his success in the theater. Tension between the Catholics and Protestants marked the time, and the film explores these conditions and the world of the theater, with all its major players, patrons, and buildings of the era. (45 minutes)
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Shakespeare's SonnetsFifteen sonnets selected for what they tell us about Shakespeare—because of the individual addressed, or references to people or events, or because of their metaphors. The sonnets (numbers 8, 18, 25, 35, 53, 64, 65, 66, 87, 91, 94, 107, 127, 128, and 144) are read by Ben Kingsley, Roger Rees, Claire Bloom, and Jane Lapotaire, then analyzed by a noted critic or writer (analysts include A. L. Rowse, Leslie Fiedler, Stephen Spender, and Arnold Wesker). (147 minutes)
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For All TimeIn this program, Michael Wood uncovers the story of Shakespeare's life in the “new age” of King James I. It is a riveting exploration of the circumstances that led to the penning of Macbeth and The Tempest—a play often seen as his farewell to the stage. However, we discover his true final play, King Henry VIII, is inspired by his own times, the story of the split that shook up his parents' lives and shaped his own. Even in his death, Shakespeare remains mysterious as his will is riddled with a strange bequest to his wife. Part of the series In Search of Shakespeare, with Michael Wood. Distributed by PBS Distribution. (60 minutes)