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. Shakespeare's Reading explores Shakespeare's marvellous reshaping of sources into new creations. Beginning with a discussion of how and what Elizabethans read - manuscripts, popular pamphlets, and books - Robert S. Miola examines Shakespeare's use of specific texts such as Holinshed's Chronicles, Plutarch's Lives, and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. As well as reshaping other writers' work, Shakespeare transformed traditions - the inherited expectations, tropes, and strategies about character, action and genre. For example, the tradition of Italian love poetry, especially Petrarch, shapes Romeo and Juliet as well as the sonnets; the Vice figure finds new life in Richard III and Falstaff. Employing a traditional understanding of sources as well as more recent developments in intertextuality, this book traces Shakespeare's reading throughout his career, as it inspires his poetry, histories comedies, tragedies, and romances. Repeated references to the plays in performance enliven and enrich the account.

Full Product Details

9780198711681

Table of Contents

Reviews

Begins with a clear and persuasive introductory chapter on the nature and status of reading in the Elizabethan period ... Miola's book offers a way into the fascinating work on histories and theories of reading being carried out by Philippe Aries, Robert Darnton, Peggy Kamuf, Kevin Sharpe, and others. Modern Language Review Students should appreciate Miola's introduction to Renaissance printing practices, as well as his discussion of the economics of the book trade. Ben Jonson Journal 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 Let us welcome Miola's smart and stylish monograph, an indispensable one-volume introduction to the vexed subject that shows exactly how Shakespeare transformed his sources - Ovid, Plutarch, Virgil, Chaucer, Gower, diverse obscure Italians et cetera - into something rich and strange. Stephen Poole, The Guardian

Author Information

Robert S. Miola is Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor of English at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available