Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts

Description

This landmark collection of newly-commissioned essays by leading international scholars, offers expert close readings of Shakespeare and other early modern authors. The book is an intervention into current critical methodology as well as an invaluable tool for all students of the literature of the period, exemplifying the possibilities of close reading in the hands of a range of gifted practitioners. Chapters cover a range of key texts from Shakespeare and other major writers of the period such as Milton, Donne, Jonson and Sidney. This is a unique collection as no other book offers such a rich variety of self-contained, short-form close readings. As such it can be used in the undergraduate classroom as well as by scholars and post-graduates and will also appeal to literary readers with an enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Contributors include leading Shakespeareans Stanley Wells, Stanley Fish, Coppelia Kahn and Lukas Erne.

Russ McDonald is Professor of English Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Nicholas D Nace is Assistant Professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton. Travis D Williams is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Rhode Island.

Shakespeare up Close is a collection of scholarly essays by experts who examine Shakespeare and other early modern texts from a range of perspectives. Spot on, I think, for drama students wanting to gather as much information and as many insights as possible into writing that really does respond to close reading. * The Stage * Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts warmly convey the authors' faith that close textual readings unlock greater pleasure in his work...Shakespeare Up Close is a more scholarly collection, clearly meant for the classroom use, with the majority of essays by academics engaged in detailed textual analysis. But this sort of analysis can be extremely useful in performing Shakespeare... It's a brilliant example of how close reading can inspire staging that reinforces Shakespeare's themes...A number of these academic essays suggest stimulating possibilities for performance...Highly intellectual. -- Wendy Smith * American Theatre * The quality of the close reading throughout the volume is extremely high...very few people who buy this book will be disappointed. -- Professor Neil Rhodes * Around the Globe * An outstanding UK publisher with worldwide reach, Bloomsbury is renowned for their range of Shakespeare publications with a special imprint - The Arden Shakespeare. One of the recent books of The Arden Shakespeare - Shakespeare Up Close - is a collection of short essays by esteemed and well-known researchers in Shakespeare scholarship affiliated with various (primarily) UK and USA universities ... Shakespeare Up Close targets students, researchers and scholars but can be of great interest to everyone else interested in snappy-yet-in-depth intellectual quests into Shakespeare's and other authors' well-loved and well-known creative outputs. -- Annie Martirosyan * The Huffington Post * There are a great many merits to this collection of essays - not only the focus, precision and detail of some of the essays but also the many various and sometimes conflicting approaches they present. Under the auspice of the close reading we encounter the text through the divergent perspectives of materialism, historicism, feminism, performance, formalism - to name but a few. And one of the great achievements here, I think, is not only the quality and range of many of the essays themselves but the renewed and vigorous claim that you can have your text and context, or cake and eat it. -- Charlotte Scott, Goldsmiths University of London, UK * Shakespeare Survey * Like the portrait miniatures and brief lyrics so popular in the period, the essays in Shakespeare Up Close are small gems: practical, valuable, and, in some cases, quite lovely. At often fewer than ten pages each, they will make convenient readings for instructors keen to help students develop the vocabulary and techniques of reading closely, but they will also delight more experienced readers. Effective close reading requires skill as well as patience and focus, and there is a great deal of erudition, dexterity, and thoughtfulness to show in this volume. ... [The] essays collected in Shakespeare Up Close are important not only as participants in a timely reinvigoration of close reading, but also as concise models of good academic writing. The historically alert and culturally sophisticated versions of close reading in the volume offer valuable new perceptions about familiar texts, and they do so in pleasing ways. These tightly focused essays contain some wonderfully intense writing about literature, as though their precision lent them an urgency and a decisiveness sometimes missing from scholarly prose. ... Maybe getting up close to literature again will encourage not only a healthy attention to detail but also more experimentation, speculation, and productive uncertainty in early modern studies. -- Jessica Slights * Shakespeare Quarterly *