Overview

This book aims to increase the pleasure of studying Shakespeare, working with the plays as the craftsman-dramatist himself worked by concentrating on poetic detail and dramatic moments. The book offers an accessible nuts-and-bolts approach in steadily broadening focus: from the way lines and speeches are put together to such large concerns as genre distinctions and the representation of gender. Eleven plays are introduced in chronological order, nine of them reappearing in later chapters in order to illustrate further topics. Comparisons draw on alternative texts, subsequent adaptations and excerpts on the same subjects from works in other literary genres. Appendices to each chapter provide materials for further exercises. A linked aim is to help students form an independent relation to existing commentary. Running through the book is an evaluative history, with generous quotations, of both traditional criticism and the revolutionary approaches of recent years. Contents: Preface and acknowledgements; Introduction; Voices; Words; Speeches; Scenes; Gender, Genre and Grabbing; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

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9780389210092

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Reviews

This book will be found useful by students of Shakespeare who refuse to forego the pleasures of the...texture of the plays in pursuit of the bigger picture; by teachers of Shakespeare interested in strategies for leading their students beyond ideoligical cristicism to an aesthetic experience of the words themselves and by critics who are willing to witness a rebuttal of many latter-twentieth century critical trends that is carried out on a practical, rather than a theoretical, level. ...witty, reminiscent of A. P. Rossiter's prose, the scope daring but well defined, and the writing necessarily dense. -- Louis Burdhardt, University of Colorado at Boulder. This book will be found useful by students of Shakespeare who refuse to forego the pleasures of the...texture of the plays in pursuit of the bigger picture; by teachers of Shakespeare interested in strategies for leading their students beyond ideoligical cristicism to an aesthetic experience of the words themselves and by critics who are willing to witness a rebuttal of many latter-twentieth century critical trends that is carried out on a practical, rather than a theoretical, level. ...witty, reminiscent of A. P. Rossiter's prose, the scope daring but well defined, and the writing necessarily dense. -- Louis Burdhardt, University of Colorado at Boulder.

Author Information

Howard Mills is Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent at Canterbury, England.

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