Overview

Oxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, including some general anthologies relating to Shakespeare. Richard III, Romeo, Prince Harry, Malvolio, Hamlet, Lear, Antony, Coriolanus, Prospero: Shakespeare's roster of male protagonists is astonishingly various. Shakespeare and Masculinity juxtaposes these memorable characters with the medical beliefs, ethical ideals, and social realities that shaped masculine identity for Shakespeare, as for his fellow actors and their audiences. At the same time it explores the process of male self-definition against various sorts of 'others' - women, foreigners, social inferiors, sodomites. Reflecting the truth that the plays' principal existence is in the live theatre, the book finishes with a transhistorical, multicultural survey of how masculinity has been performed in productions of Shakespeare's plays - in France, Germany, Hungary, Iraq, Japan, and elsewhere - and with a challenge to imagine masculinity in fuller and more satisfying ways.

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9780198711889

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Reviews

Smith puts forward a wide variety of thought-provoking approaches ... Smith makes the study of Shakespeare's masculinities accessible for the modern student Notes and Queries This is a brilliant, brave, scholarly book with innumerable insights into Shakespearean texts. Modern Language Review The jewel of this collection is Bruce R. Smith's Shakespeare and Masculinity, which is not only a model of what such an introduction to Shakespeare should be, but an outstanding study of the problems of gender analysis. This is a very good book. Ruth Morse, Times Literary Supplement Oxford University Press offer a mix of engagingly written introductions to a variety of Topics intended largely for undergraduates. Each author has clearly been reading and listening to the most recent scholarship, but they wear their learning lightly. Ruth Morse, Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

Bruce R. Smith is Professor of English at Georgetown University.

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