The Rough Guide to Shakespeare 2 (Rough Guide Reference)

610 Pages·2009·14.91 MB·English

by  Rough Guides, Andrew Dickson

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Shakespeare's middle-period comedies fizz with energy and quizzical wit, and repeatedly
send up the folly of desire. In this scene from As You Like It, the heroine Rosalind (Juliet
Stevenson, left) is testing the devotion of her lover Orlando (Hilton McRae) by pretending to
be someone else entirely; Shakespeare will have a great deal of fun with mistaken identity
before he allows the inevitable happy ending to arrive (see p.23).
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Contents
Introduction ix
How to use this book xii
Q&As xiv
Part I 쑺 The plays
All’s Well That Ends Well 3
Antony and Cleopatra 12
As You Like It 23
The Comedy of Errors 35
Coriolanus 44
Cymbeline 54
Edward III 64
Hamlet 74
Henry IV Part I 92
Henry IV Part II 102
Henry V 111
Henry VI Part I 122
Henry VI Part II 133
Henry VI Part III 142
Henry VIII 151
Julius Caesar 162
King John 173
King Lear 184
Love’s Labour’s Lost 198
Macbeth 208
Measure for Measure 222
The Merchant of Venice 232
The Merry Wives of Windsor 244
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 253
Much Ado About Nothing 265
Othello 276
Pericles 292
Richard II 302
Richard III 313
Romeo and Juliet 325
The Taming of the Shrew 335
The Tempest 346
Timon of Athens 360
Titus Andronicus 370
Troilus and Cressida 382
Twelfth Night 393
The Two Gentlemen of Verona 405
The Two Noble Kinsmen 415
The Winter’s Tale 425
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Contents
Part II 쑺 The poems
A Lover’s Complaint 439
The Rape of Lucrece 446
The Sonnets 454
Venus and Adonis 464
Part III 쑺 Contexts
Shakespeare’s life 475
Shakespeare’s stages 494
Shakespeare’s language 510
Shakespeare’s canon 526
Colleagues and rivals 530
Shakespeare for kids 544
Books 548
Websites 59
Glossary of useful terms 571
Author’s acknowledgements 578
Picture credits 579
Index 580
Though often neglected, Shakespeare’s late plays are experimental masterpieces, often touched with semi-mythical overtones, and
deliver some of his most disarming emotional climaxes. In Cymbeline, captured here in 2007 by the Cheek By Jowl troupe, a pair of
lovers is torn apart and will only be reunited when they both cheat death (see p.54).
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Contents
Key topics
Shakespeare’s sources and reading
Key source: Boccaccio’s Decameron 5
Key source: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene 28
Key source: Plutarch’s Lives 47
Key source: Holinshed’s Chronicles 113
Key source: Ovid’s Metamorphoses 256
Key source: Montaigne 351
Key source: Chaucer 386
Key source: Petrarch and Renaissance sonneteers 456
Key source: The Bible 514
Texts and authorship
Arden or Ardenne? Where is As You Like set? 27
Playwriting by committee Did Shakespeare really write Edward III? 68
Many hands Shakespeare’s handwriting and Sir Thomas More 154
Lear or Lears? Why are there two texts of King Lear? 186
Lost en route Love’s Labour’s Won and Shakespeare’s lost plays 201
Mr Who He? Who inspired Shakespeare’s sonnets? 460
So bold with his name The Passionate Pilgrim and a publishing scandal 467
Who wrote Shakespeare? Oxford, Bacon and the authorship debate 481
Let’s pretend Two centuries of Shakespearian forgery 527
Shakespeare’s life and context
Mything the point Historiography and the Tudor myth 125
Shakespeare’s “Moors” Aaron, Othello and the question of ethnicity 279
Rough magic Renaissance magicians and The Tempest 353
Unwillingly to school William Shakespeare’s schooldays 477
Look here upon this picture What did Shakespeare look like? 488
Performance history
The Scottish play The curse of Macbeth 217
A veritable negro Othello’s many faces 282
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Key topics
My Shakespeare
Actors and directors in their own words
Based on a National Theatre production,
Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1995)
showed that there was more to British-
made Shakespeare movies than Laurence
Olivier or Kenneth Branagh – and
propelled Ian McKellen towards wizarding
superstardom (see p.323).
Harriet Walter 20
Adrian Lester 32
Michael Pennington 86
Nicholas Hytner 118
Michael Boyd 130
Josie Rourke 180
Christopher Plummer 194
Zoë Wanamaker 272
Ian McKellen 288
Simon Russell Beale 320
Deborah Warner 378
Declan Donnellan 434
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Key topics
About clowning Shakespeare’s fools and comedians 400
Staging old and new Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe 501
Royal Shakespeare The RSC, past and present 506
At war Satire and the war of the theatres 538
Literary forms and genres
Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral Comedies, histories, tragedies – and the rest 295
O, vengeance! Aeschylus, Seneca and Elizabethan revenge tragedy 374
Lovers make moan Shakespeare and the poetry of complaint 442
Rhyming it royal Rhyme royal, Lucrece and A Lover’s Complaint 450
Behind the masque Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones and court drama 535
Adaptations and alterations
Remember me! (Mis-)remembering Hamlet 80
Zounds! Censorship and swearing in Shakespeare 95
New and improved Restoration rewrites and King Lear’s happy ending 190
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Key topics
With artistic director Michael Boyd at the helm, the RSC’s 2006–08 cycle of the complete English history plays was
acclvaiimi ed as a landmark of modern Shakespeare staging (see p.130). This is a scene from Richard II, with Jonathan
Slinger as the King parting from his wife (Hannah Barrie) for the last time.
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Introduction
here are many different Shakespeares. As the years pass, they mul-
tiply: theatre is a restless, inquisitive and unpredictable medium,
and Shakespeare, the world’s most revived playwright, keeps
T mutating and evolving. Close to four centuries after his death, his
plays continue to be seen by millions of people in thousands of locations
across the globe. His words enrich the English language, rippling through
casual, day-to-day speech and at the same time sustaining the very notion
of “high” culture. His works have generated a major publishing industry
and been translated into hundreds of different languages. His name has
been pressed into the service of convictions and ideologies he could never
have dreamed about, and he has become an icon in countries that didn’t
even exist when he was alive. His image decorates banknotes, tea towels,
police badges; it appears on road signs, exam scripts and beer mats. The
Rough Guide to Shakespeare tries to get beneath the surface of that image,
asking what it is that makes the man and his works so continually com-
pelling.
Just as there are many Shakespeares, there is no single way of explaining what makes
his work so appealing. His plays and poems aren’t just astonishing works of art, but
gripping pieces of drama. They’re remarkable social documents, but often touched
with magic and fantasy. They’re full of optimism and comedy about the human
condition, yet also shot through with pain, anger and despair. And although they’re
of their historical moment, they touch something universal. The completeness of
Shakespeare’s vision remains unmatched, whether he’s writing about large-scale
politics or the most intimate of love affairs. He is the most exciting, challenging and
awe-inspiring writer in the language.
For all that, approaching Shakespeare can be a bewildering and intimidating experi-
ence. Partly this is because of his reputation as a cornerstone of the academic canon. It is
also to do with sheer volume – an effect of the global Shakespeare industry, in which
his name possesses significant cultural capital. At least twenty major editions of the
Complete Works are currently in print, hundreds more academic articles and mono-
graphs pile up each year, and more films than ever take their cue from his work.
Many of these interpretations offer something different, something new, and in all
likelihood something worth pondering. Looking at things from contrasting angles
is entirely Shakespearian; as critics long ago realized, no other playwright makes us
think so hard about what it is like to experience life from radically different points
of view. But you can’t read or see everything: few people will want to watch the
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Introduction