An authoritative, accessible overview of history's greatest literary figure

The great dramatist Ben Jonson wrote that William Shakespeare ""was not of an age, but for all time."" In the nearly four centuries since his death, Shakespeare's plays still have a tremendous impact on everything from the classroom to popular culture. Now you can have at your fingertips all the vital details on the most influential writer in the history of the English language--straight from one of the most trusted...

This edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream reprints the Bevington edition of the play accompanied by four sets of primary documents and illustrations thematically arranged to offer a richly textured understanding of early modern culture and Shakespeare’s work within that culture. The texts, including facsimiles of period documents, conduct literature, county records, reports of court entertainments, and Queen Elizabeth’s speeches, contextualize the play’s treatment of popular...

Men and women in early modern Europe experienced their bodies very differently from the ways in which contemporary men and women do. In this challenging and innovative book, Gail Kern Paster

examines representations of the body in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama in the light of humoral medical theory, tracing the connections between the history of the visible social body and the history of the subject's body as experienced from within.

Focusing on specific bodily functions and on changes...