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REA's MAXnotes for William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice The MAXnotes offers a comprehensive summary and analysis of The Merchant of Venice and a biography of William Shakespeare. Places the events of the play in historical context and discusses each act in detail. Includes study questions and answers along with topics for papers and sample outlines.

This is the drama of a king too fine and dandy to be an effective ruler. Faulted with incompetence and hoodwinked by his court, he loses his kingdom as the result of following his pleasure's course.

This book is about the search for a lost play. Celebrating the quatercentenary of publication of the first translation of Don Quixote, it is the first collection of essays entirely devoted to The History of Cardenio, a play based on Cervantes and probably written in that same year. It was said to be written by Shakespeare and the young man who was taking his place, John Fletcher, the most successful English playwright of the seventeenth century. The book brings together leading scholars, critics...

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Complementing David Scott Kastan's A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), which focused on Shakespeare as an author in his historical context, these volumes examine each of his plays and major poems using all the resources of contemporary criticism from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analyses. Scholars from all over the...

Shakespeare's Women and the Fin de Siecle illuminates the most iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare's heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and wider careers of the actresses who played them. By bringing together fin-de-siecle performances of Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian drama for the first time, this book illuminates the vital ways in which fin-de-siecle Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other. Actresses' mov...

These thirty essays reflect contemporary interest in poetic language, the aesthetics of drama, the Elizabethan theater, and Renaissance modes of thought. The selections provide an excellent sampling of both contrasting and complementary viewpoints and have been drawn from the work of such distinguished modern critics as H. Granville-Barker, Northrop Frye, L.L. Barber, Robert Ornstein, Mark Van Doren, and Reuben Brower.

‘Give me the daggers and I’ll pin the blame/ On Duncan’s grooms who both are also slain. /A little water clears us of this deed /Though a large scotch might also do the trick...’ To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this is the first of a new collection of the Bard's greatest plays, digested to a few thousand words with invaluable side notes from John Sutherland. Funny and incredibly clever, these parodies are a joy for those who know their Shakespeare, perfect for the th...

This original study explores a vital aspect of early modern cultural history: the way that warfare is represented in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The book contrasts the Tudor and Stuart prose that called for the establishment of a standing army in the name of nation, discipline and subjectivity, and the drama of the period that invited critique of this imperative. Barker examines contemporary dramatic texts both for their radical position on war and, in the case of the late...

Criticism of Shakespeare's comedies has shifted from stressing their light-hearted and festive qualities to giving a stronger sense of their dark aspects and their social resonances. This volume introduces the key critical debates under five headings: genre, history and politics, gender and sexuality, language, and performance. The Guide serves students of Shakespeare in two ways. Firstly, by presenting ten recent critical interventions in the field of Shakespeare studies, it provides an up-to-d...

We know William Shakespeare matters but we cannot pinpoint, precisely, why he matters. Lacking reasons why, we do our best to involve him in others, or involve others in him. He has been branded many times over-as Catholic, Protestant, Materialist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Postcolonial, Popular, Cultural, and, even, Popular-Cultural. In many ways, Shakespeare is overwrought. Why one more `approach' to Shakespeare? One reason is because whatever these approaches say about tragedy in par...